Two Great Tastes (but Not Great Together)

By JOE QUEENAN
ON Sept. 12 Trey Anastasio, the lead guitarist of the jam band Phish, will give the New York premiere of his concerto “Time Turns Elastic” with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. If earlier versions available online are any indication, Mr. Anastasio will be bringing New Yorkers not some gaseous reimagining of Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” or Gustav Holst’s “Planets” — the route pop classicists usually take — but a recognizably Anastasian composition rooted in the style that made Phish so successful. As such, it is bound to be an improvement on what these escapades in cultural alchemy usually turn into. Classical ensembles have been slumming with rock stars since the days of Frank Zappa. This year alone the Decemberists have performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and with a pickup orchestra in Chicago; the classical pianist Christopher O’Riley is offering tarted-up versions of songs by Radiohead and Nick Drake; and, most ominously, Sting is giving onstage readings of the letters Schumann wrote to his wife, Clara; meanwhile a pianist in the background plays Schumann.

No matter how much of this cross-fertilization goes on, there is no evidence that it takes root with the target audience. Young people are not drawn to the classics by listening to rock stars moonlighting on their day off, or by hearing Béla Fleck jack up Scarlatti on the banjo. And classical audiences tend to loathe intruders: this is a genre whose enthusiasts initially turned up their noses at George Gershwin. So they’re not likely to welcome the guy from Phish with open arms. And in any case, reading David Baldacci doesn’t lead anyone to “David Copperfield”; it leads to Dan Brown.

Rock music has flirted with the classics for decades, mostly in an ornamental fashion. Procol Harum dug into Bach’s catalog for its 1967 hit “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” The Moody Blues channeled Ravel in their dreamy LP “Days of Future Passed.” The Who played at opera writing with “Tommy.” Michael Kamen took a stab at fusing rock and the classics with the intensely precious New York Rock & Roll Ensemble. And Randy Newman has long used strings to give his music a lush neo-antebellum atmosphere.

In all these cases no harm was meant and none taken. Things turned dark in 1971 when Emerson, Lake & Palmer recorded a clamorous version of “Pictures at an Exhibition.” This was the moment when rock cut its ancestral moorings with Elvis Presley and Little Richard and started to take on airs. As was once said of the obscure yet seminal East Village proto-punk band the Fugs, the more rock stars learned about music, the less fun the music was. Despite the hybrid genre’s dismal record, every few years some rock star decides he has outgrown the form that made him famous and moseys uptown. Zappa, who seemingly came to despise pop music, churned out “classical” bagatelles that sounded like Varèse and Webern with a pop twist. The public neither liked nor required them. Some years later Elvis Costello recorded “The Juliet Letters” with a string quartet. It was energetic and quirky, but not really classical.

Paul McCartney threw his hat into the ring with the “Liverpool Oratorio” in 1991 and since then has recorded a tone poem called “Standing Stone” (orchestrated by a “real” composer) and an album of slurpy light classical pieces. One must also take note of Roger Waters’s Robespierre-era extravaganza “Ça Ira,” a work so turgid it makes Pink Floyd sound down to earth. And in 2001 Billy Joel weighed in with “Fantasies & Delusions,” an album of derivative piano pieces flowing from his own pen via Chopin’s. So far Maurizio Pollini and Mitsuko Uchida have resisted the urge to record them.

The big problem with rock-classical fusion is that with the exception of “The Juliet Letters” and a few short items by Zappa, it doesn’t sound especially original. But it’s not just that it sounds like something a lot of us have heard before. It sounds like something Verdi might have heard before. It’s rooted in a blustery, highfalutin 19th-century concept of compositions: lots of strings, lots of male choristers braying like dyspeptic monks, lots of kettle drums, lots of church bells forecasting doom. It’s music that acts as if the 20th century never happened.

In recent times it has become fashionable in some quarters to refrain from making fun of this kind of music. Such criticism falls into two categories: congratulating the dancing bear not because he dances well, but because he can dance at all, or rationalizing along the lines of, “anything Sting or Billy Joel does is worth paying attention to.” No it isn’t. It wasn’t worth paying attention when Michael Jordan deserted a sport he was good at and started playing baseball. It wasn’t worth paying attention when Madonna tried directing. The harsh truth is, when even the most gifted pop musicians take a crack at the classics, the work rarely goes much deeper than Mason Williams’s lovely old Top 40 hit “Classical Gas.” This is because Mr. Williams didn’t play it safe; he had the guts to write something ebulliently silly.

And this is why Mr. Anastasio is to be congratulated. If the Carnegie Hall premiere of his concerto sounds anything like the previous version he recorded with Orchestra Nashville, one must tip one’s hat to the composer. Unlike other rock stars dabbling in the classical realm, Mr. Anastasio has composed something that sounds like it was actually written by Mr. Anastasio. It might be vapid. It might be meandering. It might even be ridiculous. But at least it won’t sound like the soundtrack from “Gladiator.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/arts/music/06quee.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss