Pop music and classical music are supposed to be different worlds. Yet, in the last few years, the two have begun bleeding together again. On “Colouring of Pigeons,” from Swedish pop duo the Knife’s just-released album Tomorrow, In a Year
Since that’s far from the only high-brow stuff whizzing around overhead, we thought we’d give you a look at five composers whose works influence some of the indie pop you know and love. Listen to their music, and the work they’ve inspired, after the jump.
Though he experimented with and pushed Western art music in many different directions, Stockhausen is most remembered for Gesang der Jünglinge, a piece of musique concrète comprised of a sequence of recorded children’s voices, sine waves, and synthesizer tones. It was one of the first widely praised pieces of electronic music, and its influence, both from a theoretical and a musical standpoint, can still be heard in everything from the stitched-together passages of Dirty Projectors’ fractured, musique concrète-inflected 2005 album The Getty Address
Listen:
Stockhausen — Gesang der Jünglinge
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2. John Adams
A Pulitzer Prize-winning composer with strong roots in academia, Adams’s work is often explicitly tied to modern political events (sample works: Nixon in China; Dr. Atomic, an opera about the Manhattan Project; On the Transmigration of Souls, a piece commemorating the victims of 9/11). Though he’s often identified as a minimalist composer, Adams’s work features an epic, cinematic quality often absent from most other minimal work, whose flourishes can be heard in Owen Pallett and Nico Muhly‘s most dramatic passages.
Listen:
John Adams — On the Transmigration of Souls (excerpt)
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Though his music was considered passé when he died in Venice in 1643, Monteverdi is remembered today as one of the finest vocal arrangers of all time and is generally considered one of the fathers of baroque music. His madrigals, secular songs which were popular during his lifetime, and, in Monteverdi’s case, part of the foundation of opera, manage to be both aching and complex all at once. There are tons of them (Monteverdi wrote nine books of them over the course of his lifetime), but you can bet that Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth has digested his fair share.
Listen:
Monteverdi — “Lamento della Ninfa”
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4. Steve Reich
Arguably the most recognizable American minimalist after Philip Glass, Reich’s hypnotic, cycling music has explored repetition from many different angles, from Javanese music (Drumming) to mechanical rhythms set out of phase (Come Out). Some of Reich’s works are notoriously unpleasant to perform (Music for 18 Musicians, for example, requires pianists to take over for one another in the middle of the piece), but thanks to sequencers and sampling technology, Reich’s ideas live on in everything from tunneling techno to harmonically shifting chamber pop.
Listen:
Steve Reich — Drumming (pt. 1)
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5. Arvo Pärt
This Estonian composer is best known for works informed by tintinnabuli, or the ringing of bells, a compositional idea Pärt himself came up with after almost a decade of creative paralysis. Mystical, austere pieces like Tabula Rasa
Listen:
Arvo Pärt — Tabula Rasa
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Comments (17)
really interesting post! thanks :)
[...] off the discussion going on here a few days ago, Flavorwire came out with a list of “Indie Rock’s 5 Favorite Classical Composers.” And the winners [...]
[...] Indie rock and classical composers: the list. [...]
Pop music and classical music aren’t supposed to be different worlds. Classical music is the pop music of its time, and if you listen with an open mind, you will start to pick out the similarities between music from 250 years ago and music from today. It’s the process of putting it on an ivory pedestal that has led to its lessening popularity, and thankfully, people have been taking it off that pedestal and bringing it back into our world.
Wait – you have Steve Reich AND John Adams but no Olivier Messiaen??
Radiohead quotes Morton Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon in Idioteque
Rather – Radiohead uses Paul Lansky’s Mild und Leise
You listed 5 composers, none of whom are really classical composers. Monteverdi, on the other hand, is a pre-classical (Renaissance/Baroque) composer, and Stockhausen is a post-classical modernist. The other three, John Adams, Steve Reich, and Arvo Pärt, write music that has almost nothing to do with actual classical music,
Your article just proves how little you know about serious music. The term “Classical” in your article seems to mean something like: “Music that Best Buy employees stick into the Classical bin.” The fact that it uses orchestral instruments and is notated in no way makes music classical.
Even worse, your article is completely Euro-centric, since you assume that “classical” automatically means “European classical.” It does not. There are many other forms of classical music besides European classical, such as North Indian, Persian, and Arabic classical music.
I’m with Mr. Powers on that one (classical terminology) and I thought Dave Longstreth only listened to Mahler. So much for me thinking Guillaume Dufay inspired him to write hockets.
My buck still stops with J.S Bach, his music still sounds modern to me after all these years. They didn’t have computers back then…
All of those composers are classical, lower-case c, Mr. Powers. None are Mozartian Classical, but that is a very different thing. Adams, Reich and Part all come out of the european art music tradition and training that defines its practitioners in all circles as “classical”. I see nothing wrong with this definition.
Great article! This is a topic I can talk about for hours and hours. Love!
Ren’s on point here. Classical is, for better or worse, still useful as shorthand for Western art music. Plus, “Indie Rock’s 5 Favorite Western Art Music Composers” was too many characters :-)
uh oh, david powers, feeling threatened? how ridiculous you sound to lash out. how little they know about serious music? and really? citing the classifications within classical music to pooh-pooh calling anything say, post-beethoven, not classical? this was by far the best Flavorwire article I’ve ever come across — well-researched and fun.
By the way, classical music is differentiated from folk music. pretty simple.
[...] Read the full blog posting in Flavorwire here. Tags: Björk, The Knife, Varése [...]
[...] debate on the influence of classical music on indie rock and vice versa, originally initiated with this post in the excellent Flavorwire (cultural news from the übercool, digital cityguide Flavorpill) and later commented in The [...]
Great post, Max. I work with John Adams and Steve Reich via their publisher, Boosey & Hawkes. I was at SxSW when this posted and shared it with both of them. Neither of them listen to much indie rock, but Steve Reich has respect for and relationships with Thurston Moore and Jonny Greenwood. Actually, his latest piece is for rock band set-up and the title, 2×5, is a nod to 2+2=5. And John Adams talks a lot about what he *is* listening to on his blog (“Hellmouth”) at http://www.earbox.com, if folks want to check it out.
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[...] by wrongmogTom ServiceBefore I’m away for a week, a belated catchup with a good post over at flavorwire.com (thanks to Peter Meanwell, breakfast researcher, Ligeti and ukulele fanatic, and Radio 3 producer, [...]
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