Mashing Up Classical Music and Pop: The Do’s and Don'ts

Infusing pop songs with chunks of classical music requires knowledge of music theory as well as knowledge about certain do’s and don’ts. For example, did you know that just three notes carefully picked from a concerto are enough to successfully mash up pop and classical music? Of course, you can also use an existing composition or integrate other elements into your pop songs, like the four movements that make up a symphony. Read on and get inspired!

The 21st Century

In his book ‘The Rest is Noise’, music critic for The New Yorker Alex Ross suggests that 21st century music is heading towards a big fusion of classical music with pop. So far, Ross doesn’t seem to be wrong. The combination of DJ-based music and classical orchestras is cool. Back in 2011, the BBC Proms played Gabriel Prokofjev’s ‘Concerto for Turntable and Orchestra’, while the Heritage Orchestra has recorded a full album of remixes of that same concerto and has been playing renditions of mainstream music for close to two decades now. As more and more classically trained musicians try their hand at crossover music, the tension between classical music and pop slowly disappears. Take BOND, an all-female Australian/British electric string quartet known for their futuristic-looking instruments and synth-pop tunes — another great example. The violin actually crossed over into pop ages ago. Frenchman Jean Luc Ponty and Jerry Goodman (The Flock), who had both studied at a conservatory, inaugurated the electric violin into pop music back in the sixties. A few years later, ELO (The Electric Light Orchestra) took on cellists, while Apocalyptica started rocking out with cellos in the nineties. So, if you thought classical music was boring as beans, then seriously, think again!

O Sole Mio

You really don’t need to be a classically trained musician to turn classical music and pop into a combustible mix of styles. Rock-and-roll pioneer Chuck Berry struck a chord with ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, even if the influence of the legendary virtuoso himself was limited to the lyrics and the name of the song. Soon after, Elvis Presley (1935-1977) would really set the tone. With ‘It’s Now or Never’, he turned ‘O Sole Mio’ into a downright mega-hit with the help of a little sensual hip movement, and there was even follow-up legal action taken by the original composer’s offspring. After that, it didn’t take long before classical music seriously permeated pop. With classically-trained producer George Martin at the controls, The Beatles recorded timeless bangers like ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’ with the help of a string quartet, while ‘All You Need is Love’ is prefaced by La Marseillaise (the French national anthem) and ‘Penny Lane’ is spruced up with a baroque-style solo played on a piccolo trumpet. According to the story, Paul McCartney had heard one of those ‘little trumpets’ on Bach’s Brandenburg concertos. British composer and BBC’s How Music Works presenter, Howard Goodall, has even said that he sees the Fab Four as the saviours of classical music after the avant-garde composers of the 1950s and 1960s threw the style’s hard rules overboard — a trend that was started by developer of the twelve-tone technique, Arnold Schönberg. Thanks to Schönberg, music became more a matter of reason than of feeling, which was a dead-end development according to Goodall, who illustrates the decline with performances of creaking sandpaper and pelting piano strings with tennis balls.

The Dorian Scale

The Beatles to the rescue. Goodall is excited by the cadence that ushers in the final part of Eleanor Rigby. As well as an instrumentation made up entirely of strings, ‘Eleanor Rigby’ is partly composed in the Dorian mode, which is one of the Gregorian modes from medieval times and features the major (Doric) sixth. Traditional tunes like ‘What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor’, ‘Greensleeves’ and ‘Scarborough Fair’ are also composed in the Dorian mode, and Sting has used the scale to write ‘We Work the Black Sea’. Analysts have noticed that John Lennon’s vocals on ‘Not a Second Time’ (from With the Beatles) have an aeolian cadence to them that’s completely identical to the last part of Mahler’s ‘Der Lied der Erde’. When asked about this, Lennon answered laconically, saying he thought that aeolian cadence was some kind of exotic bird species. For the most part, The Beatles catalogue transcends the average three-chord pop song. McCartney played four chords on ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, while ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, released just five years later, features no less than sixteen chords and an exciting chord progression. ‘Penny Lane’ proves that the band also understood the classical concept of modulation. The song features seven key changes and the vocals have an upward progression with downward modulation. As far as experiments go, The Beatles are on par with seriously quirky composers like Cage and Stockhausen. They would use looping – in this case playing a tape in reverse – as a musical effect. On ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ (from Revolver), looping creates part of the whole psychedelic sound collage. It’s a trend that The Beatles started, and bands like Procol Harum and The Zombies followed suit. Influenced by classical music and partly voiced by classical instruments, the pop music of the 1960s would go down in history as ‘baroque pop’. ‘Lady Jane’ by The Rolling Stones is a textbook example of this style.

Switched-On Bach

The ‘classical’ breakthrough happened in 1968, fuelled by the launch of the original Moog synthesizer and the release of Wendy Carlos’s ‘Switched-On Bach’ record: a collection of pieces by Bach performed by Carlos on – you guessed it – a Moog synthesizer. The album was a revolutionary experiment in the sense that Bach’s polyphonic pieces were played on a monophonic instrument. Inspired by Carlos’s work, Keith Emerson and his band, The Nice, went all classical, marking the onset of a symphonic progressive rock movement spearheaded by bands like Emerson Lake & Palmer, Colosseum, Yes, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull and many other bands that played long, drawn-out tunes full of tempo shifts, thematic changes and classical composition lay-outs. In 1969, Brit-rock-based keyboardist Jon Lord (1941-2012) of Deep Purple surprised friend and foe with the Concerto for Group and Orchestra. Later, Lord composed the solo project Gemini Suite, which was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra with soloists pulled from the rock scene. In 1970, Frank Zappa (1940-1993) recorded ‘200 Motels in London’ with his band and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Zappa, who was inspired by Varèse, Webern and Stravinsky, ended up writing four albums full of self-penned classical pieces.

Bohemian Rhapsody

Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is in a completely different league. Written as a mini-opera, with Freddie Mercury (1946-1991) accounting for the lion’s share of the work, the song is structured like a traditional rhapsody, meaning it’s a loosely structured piece that incorporates opera, group vocals, lyrics that refer to the classical era, and tons of contrasts in terms of tuning, timbre and tonality. While initially blasted as being pastiche, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ ultimately became the biggest classic among all classic pop tunes. Going from a mini-opera to rock-opera is but a small step — enter The Who. Largely penned by Pete Townshend, ‘Tommy’ (1969) is one of two rock operas by The Who. It’s a collection of rock songs with a coherent narrative and lots of lyrics that are backed up by a rock group interspersed with the odd classical orchestra, choir and narrator. David Bowie’s ‘Ziggy Stardust’ and Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ are other examples of rock operas, but rock musicians aren’t the only ones who infuse their sound with classical elements. Metal musicians also like to use classical music to showcase their virtuosity. Swedish guitarist Ywngie Malmsteen is a prime example, just have a listen to his ‘Arpeggios from Hell.’ Malmsteen’s motto seems to be ‘the faster the better’, since he clearly goes full throttle on his custom Fender Stratocaster loaded with signature Seymour Duncan YJM Fury pickups there. Instead of turning classical music into rock, some prefer to turn rock into classical music. Dutch flamenco guitarist Thomas Zwijsen is the living proof. Zwijsen converts Iron Maiden’s hard-rock into classical guitar music (Nylon Maiden) and does it so successfully that he’s already had the honour of touring the world with former Iron Maiden lead singer, Blaze Bayley. Maiden fans have welcomed the sound with open arms, passionately singing along to every tune. The rhythmic support? Just a single acoustic guitar amplified to eleven.

Subtle and Less Subtle Mash-Ups

The simplest and most obvious way to infuse pop with classical music is to integrate a classical theme, which can be simply done using samples. In 1998, the Beastie Boys dropped ‘Intergalactic’, which not-so-subtly starts out with roughly forty seconds of Mussorgsky’s ‘Night on a Bald Mountain’. Janet Jackson certainly took a more indirect approach by overlaying ‘Someone Call My Lover’ with Erik Satie’s ‘Gymnopedie no.1’ in 4/4 time, while Robin Thicke’s 2003 banger ‘When I Get You Alone’ is based on a sample of Walter Murphy’s ‘A Fifth of Beethoven’, which is in turn is based on Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. Then there’s Nas, who blended classical music with rap when he had his daughter play that one part of Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’ that every novice pianist is taught on ‘I Can’ back in 2002. The hidden message? If you want to achieve something, you’ll have to work hard for it. Working hard is also exactly what Dutch DJ, Von Rosenthal de la Vegaz does, coupling legendary composers with pop icons. As a result, you can be listening to his ‘Baby Brahms Mashup’ and suddenly hear Jane Birkin whisper the words: “je t’aime, oh oui, je t’aime…”.

Pachelbel and O Fortuna

Pachbel’s ‘Canon in D’ is the most commonly used classical element in pop, and fittingly so. Simply put, the piece is all about improvising around a bass theme. ‘Canon in D’ is a baroque piece written for three violins and a bass instrument, where the latter repeats an eight-note pattern across two bars (the ostinato). The first violin chimes in after two bars, the second violin after four bars, and the third violin after six bars. Each violin plays the same part. It’s a popular piece of music at weddings and can be played in countless different pop-based configurations. “O Fortuna’ is another popularly copied chunk of classical music. It’s part of German composer Carl Orff’s cantata called ‘Carmina Burana’ (1935-1936), which was inspired by an eponymous collection of medieval poems. Referencing the Roman goddess of luck and fate, the piece has a dramatic build-up. The percussion gradually crescendos, supported by short notes played by strings and brass. The whole thing lasts two minutes and thirty seconds and abruptly ends with a powerful, drawn out note. Ozzy Osbourne has frequently used ‘O Fortuna’ to kick off live shows, and Epica recorded a live version with a large orchestra for their album, ‘The Classical Conspiracy’. Even rappers and hip-hop artists constantly sample Orff’s famed composition — so often in fact that Orff’s heirs can barely keep up. That being said, they did shut down a dance version of the ‘song’ sometime back in the nineties.

Making Your Own Symphonic Composition

Already feeling inspired to come up with your own blend of classical music and pop? You could go all-out and go with something rooted in symphonic rock. The required ingredients? A good idea and a few solid musicians. Or you might have a few unfinished songs lying around that you can mix together and underpin with lyrics based on a unique experience or one of your favourite books. Then, hit the old information superhighway to study symphonic rock-style chord progressions and compose an instrumental intro that ends in a crescendo. Come up with four parts that are roughly five minutes long each and make sure that the third part is the complete opposite of the other parts in terms of content and structure. You can’t let things get boring, so be sure to pit the keyboards and guitars against each other. You’ll also want to include tons of tempo shifts and thematic shifts while avoiding too much repetition. And remember that contrast is incredibly important when it comes to creating interesting musical narratives. After all, there’s no bitter without sweet and no dark without light. Have a listen to ‘Close to the Edge’ by Yes to get a better understanding. Inspired by Herman Hesse’s book ‘Siddhartha’, the song lasts over eighteen minutes and can be seen as one of the flag-bearers of symphonic rock. The story takes place in the day of Buddha and is about the spiritual journey of a young man. Translated literally, Siddhartha means ‘he who has attained his goals’. If the band’s goal was to write a symphonic rock composition, then Yes definitely succeeded. ‘Close to the Edge’ is structured like a classical symphony and consists of four parts. Part one and two lay out the narrative, while part three embodies a development and contrasts greatly with the other parts. The final part is a recap of sorts that ties everything together again. Towards the end of the second part, Yes plays a (pseudo) baroque figure in C major, where a pipe organ plays a transformed version of the Close to the Edge theme. In part three, you can hear a church organ play two interludes before a marching band wraps things up. As well as a polyrhythm where the electric guitar plays in 12/8 timing and the bass and drums play in 4/2 timing, the epic piece features a large number of key changes and time signature shifts. While certain lyrical elements are repeated throughout the piece, there’s always a significant little twist. Also, in case you were wondering, guitarist Steve Howe plays a Coral electric guitar on ‘Close to the Edge’.

Interview with Composer Gertjan Eldering

At first, composer Gertjan Eldering believed that Epica’s live performance of ‘Presto’ features samples of Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’. When applause fills the room at the end of the piece, it becomes clear to him that he’s just heard a flesh-and-blood classical orchestra play. “It’s unreal how tight that orchestra sounds,” he says. “The musicians must’ve been wearing headphones and listening to a click track.” He does a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation and figures that the orchestra was maintaining 140 beats per minute without ever dropping the ball. It certainly suits Epica’s metal version, but most performances of classical pieces aren’t that tight. Funnily enough, the original version is played at 170 BPM, so even faster than Epica’s rendition. The slightly slower tempo is needed to accommodate that classical metal sound. The band and orchestra are also playing the piece in G-sharp major, so half a step higher than the original. According to Eldering, it’s a gesture towards the band’s guitarists. Epica has opted to cover the most intense part in Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ and pick it up at the hailstorm bit in part two, Summer. The orchestra plays the original score in 3/4 timing at, as mentioned, a lower tempo and in a higher key. The band plays over it and makes the hail sound like a ton of icy bricks, metaphorically speaking. As a classical composer, Eldering can’t help but conclude that Vivaldi’s piece, restrained by a strict metal regime, has been ‘squashed’, claiming there’s a complete lack of necessity to integrate the famous concerti the way they’ve been integrated here. Incorporating elements of classical music into non-classical music should always create added value, which is why he believes that injecting short passages is a more creative approach. “It’s an effective method for bands to use to write their own compositions,” Eldering concludes.

Back to Pachelbel

Going back to Pachelbel, there’s no shortage of examples of songs that have been infused with ‘Canon in D’ to a lesser or greater extent. In fact, it’s the most cited piece of all classical music. Aerosmith borrowed it for their hit single, ‘Crying’. Eldering doesn’t beat around the bush. “They’ve turned it into a tearjerker,” he says. The original 3/4 time signature has been changed to 6/8 timing to boost the sing-along potential and the song starts with the line “There was a time, when I was so broken-hearted…”, which says it all. Aerosmith have also slightly simplified the basic chord progression, playing repeating arpeggios (broken chords) on guitar. Pachelbel’s ‘Canon in D’ is like a perpetual motion machine. The original composition features a basso ostinato (a continuously repeating bass line made up of chords) and three violins that play the same melody back to back — a structure that perfectly lends itself to pop music and has been used time and time again in completely different arrangements.

Time to go from hard-rock ballads to hip-hop. Mike Skinner (The Streets) turned to Bartok’s ‘Concerto for Orchestra’ (1943) for the tune ‘Same Old Thing’. The concerto has a dark-and-grim undercurrent which has everything to do with its composer’s life in the lead up to the Second World War. Wanting to get away from the political developments in Europe during the 1930s, Bartok left Hungary and moved to the United States in 1940. Skinner picked three essential notes from the forty-minute piece — three notes that have a very atmospheric effect in both the original and ‘Same Old Thing’: D, E-flat and A. Here, the dissonant interval (three whole tone steps) between E-flat and A is special. This interval, called a tritone, has what Eldering calls a “gloomy” feel to it. Chances are that Skinner never even listened to Bartok’s piece and simply downloaded a sample of the three notes that he then put to creative use. It’s a great example of using a classical element to create the added value that Eldering referred to earlier. “Even if it doesn’t have anything to do with classical music anymore,” he says.

Figurations

“It’s very hard to explain,” Yngwie Malmsteen says when he’s asked to explain the complexity in his instrumental work, ‘Arpeggios from Hell’, in which he fires off one classical-style riff after the other. According to the fast-fingered Swedish guitarist, it has to do with a lot of different modes and octaves. Eldering isn’t overly impressed. “Don’t get me wrong, Malmsteem showcases great skill. But those aren’t arpeggios, they’re figurations. He’s playing musical figures in E-flat and F-minor.” The most remarkable thing about Malmsteen’s playing is the speed at which he slings his riffs. He’s actually harking back to a composer that influenced him when he was young: Paganini. Eldering: “Paganini and also Liszt represent the Late Romantic period, a time when individual expression and virtuosity played an important role. Speaking of virtuosity, the late Dutch keyboardist and arranger Rick van der Linden made his debut in 1969 with a band named Ekseption. Their hit ‘The Fifth’ included elements of Beethoven’s 5th symphony (intro and outro) as well as the first part of Beethoven’s Mondscheinsonate. The tune also features a rhythm & blues riff in 5/4 timing, which is quite unusual for a pop song, and in addition, there’s a brass section that plays a jazzy interpretation of the 5th symphony’s motif backed up by repeating C-minor/B-flat/A-flat/G chords. The Ekseption tune was nothing short of revolutionary back in the day and garnered international acclaim. Eldering feels that the brass section maybe should’ve been a bit more pointed. “I personally find the ‘tut-tut-tut-tu-tuuu’ part a bit crude,” he decides.

Crude Strings

Sounding crude is one of the biggest lurking dangers when you infuse pop with classical music. Eldering noticed this with the Epica, Aerosmith and Ekseption examples and brings up another example: ‘Russians’ by Sting. Sting borrows from Prokofiev’s ‘Lieutenant Kijé’ but pulls the strings out of a synthesizer. “Crude, eighties-style samples of strings,” Eldering says before adding that today’s technology is a significant improvement. “But still, strings generated by a computer or synthesizer lack the natural sound and feel that only a flesh-and-blood musician can produce. When you bow the strings, it sounds slightly different every time. Other parameters, like the vibrato intensity, bow technique and dynamic differences, also contribute to the uniqueness of every note.” Computer-composed-or-generated music depends on post-editing to make the virtual instruments sound more natural, which also means that the maker/editor has to know exactly how the real thing sounds and works. It’s quite the undertaking for anyone who wants to write a classical piece. Using ready-made samples downloaded from the internet is a much simpler solution.