Switched on Pop - When Pop and Classical Collide (with James Bennett II)

Episode Date: November 12, 2019

Once upon a time, classical music was pop, so today it's worth stepping back and asking: where does one genre stop and the other begin? Can classical ever be popular again? And why do only some classical tracks makes for good samples? Luckily James Bennett II of classical station WQXR is on hand to break down these and other musical conundrums, including but not limited to: killer opera clowns, Bach hip hop hybrids, and the namesake album of this very podcast. Songs discussed: Dessa and the Minnesota Orchestra - Chaconne Enrico Caruso - Vesti la Giubbia Mario Lanza - Because You’re Mine Wendy Carlos - Prelude and Fugue in C Minor Jackie Evancho - Nessun Dorma Jackie Evancho - Burn Lindsay Stirling - Underground Vitamin String Quartet - Shallow Florence Price - Symphony 1 Nas - I Can Black Eyed Peas - Back 2 Hip Hop Victoria - Impropreia Kanye West - Gone Check out more of James's writing here: https://www.wqxr.org/people/james-bennett-ii/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switch on Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan and with my co-host Charlie Harding out on paternity leave. I have shown the proverbial bat signal. And today I am very pleased to welcome James Bennett the second into the studio. James, thank you so much for being here. Yeah, thank you for having me. Appreciate it, man.

So tell us a little about yourself, James. I write about classical music, specifically lately the intersection between classical music and race and classical music and society. And those are things that I generally like to think about and turn over. I'm so excited you could be here, James, with the show's dad, Charlie Harding, both kind of literally and metaphorically the show's dad away. The kids get to indulge in some of their more scurrilous music. pursuits. And for me, that means jazz with our friend Natalie Weiner. Hi, Nat. And now Classical with you, one of my favorite writers on the subject. And you've taken some of the thoughts you've been having about classical and pop crossover. And you're going to take us on a wild journey

through the past, present, and future of pop classical crossover. So where do we start this wild tale, James? Well, I have long been apprehensive of the fusion of classical music for classical music's sake with popular forms like hip-hop. Because, you know, I've listened to some tracks before that do that, and it can come off as kind of corny almost. But about a year ago, I was assigned to interview the rapper Dessa. And for those who don't know who she is, just a quick rundown, she is a Minneapolis-based rapper, poet, writer, essayist. I mean, she has like a couple features, I think, in The New York Times Magazine. I'm out here arms wide heighten nothing.

I've done it all in broad daylight, and I left the cameras running. I connected with her for a pretty, you know, pretty solid interview ahead of a tour with the Minnesota Orchestra. And I had asked her, I had said, you know, you are so fully immersed in the pop and hip-hop worlds. But your dad was a lutenist. That's interesting that her father was a lutenist, the lute being a precursor to the guitar,

a plucked string instrument. So I was just trying to figure out what it was like growing up in a baroque-ish, to be a rapper. And I just asked her flat out. I was like, if you had never listened to anything besides hip hop or pop, what would you like someone to listen to you for their first classical track? And she told me that she had asked her dad the same question. And her dad, Lutonist's dad, threw on the box Partita number two in D minor. And one of the movements from that is styled chaconne. Right. The chaconne, which is a popular baroque musical style. It's actually originally a dance and all kinds of composers, including Bach, wrote these during the 1700s. My ears definitely perked up when I saw the title of this Desotrack, the Chaconne, because that's pretty exciting to get a Baroque reference in a, you know, 2019 track.

You know, when she explained her process to me with, you know, how she writes and how she collaborates with a full orchestra, it made me think that there's a way to do it. Coincidentally, a year later, you native, asked me to come hang out with you in studio, and she is preparing to drop her studio album with that same orchestra. And there's a piece on that album called Chacon. The Dessa and Minnesota Orchestra crossover version of the Chacon. Yeah, okay, wow. So, you know,

At first, when I was listening to this album, I was like, you know what? I'm sure there's plenty of examples about the way that the orchestra can interact with the solo artists, without it competing or being a bit too superfluous in its, I guess, orchestral mannerisms. But this track stood out to me. It's cool, too, because the chicone might be one of those 18th century genres that is particularly suited for a 21st century reinterpretation. And it's one of maybe the rare styles of Western music that is based on a repeating bass line, like a melodic bass theme that repeats over and over and there's melodic variations on top of that. That seems, you know, very analogous to a lot of contemporary pop music, which often has

some repeating bass figure on top of which you have changing lyrics and melodies. Yeah, I mean, that's super interesting. You brought that up because she told me when she told me out of this track and what it meant to her, so there's a part in it where she was just so fully immersed and was looping it over and over and over again. She was like, I want to, you know, figure out how to either incorporate this into a piece or write a piece using that form. And so the chacon was, you know, literally named in honor of this, of the Spock piece.

And she had told me when she was first doing it with the Minnesota Orchestra, they were able to put in a bit, which you just heard, where a solo violinist stands up and, uh, plays a bit of the original Bach track. So we've got the contemporary hip-hop artist Dessa re-incorporating these Bach violin partitas into her track, the Chaconne with the Minnesota Orchestra. You brought this to me, and I was like, to me this feels like, whoa, this seems so new and bold.

But James, you're like, actually, there's a long history of these pop classical crossovers. So I'm curious if you could give us some of the backstory and for a way that we might listen to Dessa, not as something new, but something that's part of a longer tradition. Yeah, man. So if you think about what crossover means, you have a piece of work of, I guess, any kind of stripe that can transition from appeal to one audience to a completely different audience, right? Right. And if you think about classical music and its connotations, which we will definitely get into later, you have a completely different audience, you have. this moment in the early history of recording technology where classical music is kind of dominant.

That wasn't, I think, a mistake. Early discs couldn't hold that much sound. So what was prioritized would be classical pieces or opera pieces instead of more popular forms of music that were emerging, especially in the United States, like specifically jazzed by black artists or what would be come to known as hillbilly music, later country music, by southern white artists. It was very highbrow. So you have that setup. You have this guy, Enrico Caruso. He's an Italian.

He's a tenor. And it's really hard to talk about early recording history without bringing him up. If I were to tell you that, you know, we could go out and listen to, like, a superstar. opera singer. And I'm not talking about just at the Met or the LA Opera or any major opera house in the country or in the world. I mean like I want to come over to like your place and kick it. Yo, throw on some tunes. Boom. Here's this opera singer that everyone knows, right? To me, that's kind of hard to imagine right now in 2019. But back in the early 1900s, the student Rinko Caruso, like he had one of what I would imagine to be,

one of the earliest recording contracts. He got a record contract with Victor in 1904. He dropped, I think, around like over 250 recordings in a 20-year period. He died fairly young. So it kind of makes sense, right? Because if you have this recording technology that's meant to bring, quote-unquote,

upper-class high-taste music into the living rooms of people that have the money to afford these early records, and those early records can only hold so much. audio on it what makes sense like an opera aria does you know we're going to listen to this thing um vesti le jubia damn vesti la juba wow we are i apologies to all our italian speaking listeners out there because we are just butchering this uh aria it's by uh lean cavallo and this is from an opera called paliachi which is the italian plural for clowns the elevator pitch is I want to make an opera that incorporates a play with him a play,

and it's about lustful murderous clowns. And that's my pitch. Oh, my God. So this is like the operatic version of It, maybe. And so you have this clown, Kanye, and basically he finds out that his, wife or girlfriend, I can't quite remember. She's in an affair with someone else in the same troop of clowns. And so his suspicions are confirmed.

He's heartbroken. And the end of the first act, it concludes with this aria that you may recognize. It's pretty famous. And Caruso really kind of killed this role. Like, this was kind of his thing. Let's give it a listen. Wow. What a voice.

I can't believe that's from 1902. I mean, the quality of that entirely acoustic recording is kind of extraordinary. I see why this guy was the first big recording star. His voice just, you're able to capture it on this early recording technology in a way that I think not a lot of other singers would have been able to do. What's personally kind of interesting to me is this idea of the crossover, right? Like, he sold so, so, so many records and recorded so many. But in a weird way, it's like that's all the listening public kind of had to listen to. Do you know what I mean?

You could have the same poll today. I don't know. But it's kind of crossover by de facto. You know, if you're trying to market this phonograph or all this early recording playback technology to, you know, wealthy white people, you're going to pick, you know, I guess music that can kind of have that. connotation. I think it's a testament to how prolific he was, as you say, that today if you go, I mean, I don't know, maybe I would maybe encourage our listeners to test this out. I would, I would hazard that if you went to your local Goodwill or Salvation Army and dug through the

record bin and tried to find the oldest 78 RPM records they had there, I would put a very high probability on the chance that you would find an Enrico Caruso record in there. I mean, they are just, like you said, they're so ubiquitous. And they've been repressed, too. It's not like these are like lost after he died. I mean, companies have come back and remastered them. They've released them as box sets and, you know, super editions or whatever. So even if you're not into opera or classical music or pop music, just from a historical perspective of the trajectory of recording an artist for consumption by the masses, that is a person with a big shoe in that cap. I don't I don't know if even that's a phrase, but it is now.

So now we're going to fast a word real quick. Crucissid dies in 1921, which incidentally, I guess, is a time when recording explodes, right? You know, you get some of the earliest jazz records. I think the Dixieland jazz band records, I think, their first record in like 1919. 1917, but... 1917, thank you. But the point is, yeah, he dies at a point where companies are beginning to... to expand beyond bringing the concert hall

or the opera house to the living room. If we just kind of jump forward in time to the 40s, we find this guy that I find really, really fascinating with respect to crossover Mario Lanza. Every time I've read something about him, it's always framed as a tragedy. And super popular died very young. And I feel that his tragedy is kind of the crossover

conundrum in Micro. So his career, like, is kind of in fits and starts, right? He gets some really good exposure. Everyone is like, this Mario Lanzigai is the truth. But then he gets conscripted into the Army for World War II. And he spends some time in the armed forces. And he comes back and kind of resumes this pursuit of an opera career. But he's so good that someone kind of, you know,

pull some connections, and it's like, you kid are going to be a star kind of thing. And this guy gets into the world of movies. Like, he signs a contract with MGM, Metro Golden Mayor. And it's Mayor himself. That's like, I think it's Mayor himself. It's like, yo, like, let's make this happen. So he becomes this movie star with this huge voice. He has such great knowledge of the operatic repertoire,

but he is put into these very popular film roles. Kind of like Caruso, it's really hard to overstate how big of a deal Lanzo was. He was RCA's best-selling artist until Elvis Presley. Like that's... What? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is insane. What's really crazy about that is he was so lauded on the opera stage as an operatic singer

that when he moved into the world of film, a lot of opera elites and critics were like, you know, you're a sellout. Like, this isn't real opera. This isn't real art music. It's kind of watered down and it's made for the masses. And what's really funny about that is he started in a movie called The Great Caruso about Enrico Caruso.

Like, again, the dude knew his opera. But there was something about that crossover appeal to mass audiences that I guess the cultural gatekeepers are just like, we don't like that. And that really, really messed him up. I mean, he just wished he could be taken seriously, like on an opera stage. And for so long he couldn't.

And that just led to, you know, some insane self-destructive cycles. I mean, he would gain a bunch of weight, lose it all for a film role, started drinking, like, very excessively, just had a slate of health problems that really stem from this kind of despair about being a popular and beloved film singer

with a desire to be on the opera stage. It's just really interesting to me as the artist versus critic conversation. Well, critics may have found him hack and not legit opera. Other opera stars thought he was great. Even if everyone else in the artistic community is like, no, you're legit and you have chops

and, you know, I like your pipes, that somehow just gets drowned out by this chorus of you've kind of ruined and watered down music. To give you an example, I guess, of what he sounded like, I decided not to go with a quote-unquote aria from the opera rep.

I wanted to do a piece from one of his movies, because you're mine, and this is a track named after that film. I think this broke a million in sales. This is also a really big track. Wow. Because you're my is the right.

I see looks down my love and envies me because you're mine. Because. I am digging this a lot more than I thought I would. Mario Lonza, that is cool. I'm stunned that he was the best selling artists until Elvis on RCA. That's very interesting. And you can hear from Caruso to Lonza, it's like you can still hear that operatic influence, but he's doing a pop song here.

and yet there's this kind of tragedy that you're talking about, that he wasn't quite pop enough and wasn't quite opera enough. He was like caught in between, and it sounds like it kind of ruined his life in a way. Yeah, man. I mean, it's not new. Oh, this crossover appeal, it's too popular. Bring it back a little bit.

You know, close the gates a bit more. Yeah, interesting. Okay, cool. So Caruso to Lonza, fast forward. Where are we going next, James? So I kind of want to get to like the late 60s. at this time, right? Post-50s world, I guess.

You start seeing classical music pieces that become crossover hits on their own right. You think, you know, Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Yeah. You think Pacoble's Canon in D. So you have this moment where it's like relaxing classics, I feel, are kind of coming. But I wanted to point real quick to Wendy Carlos. She did this album in 68 called Wait for It. Switched-on-Bach, which is...

Ah, oh. Fascinating. This sounds familiar somehow. So, Switch-on-Bach was, again, a massive album. It went platinum. Yeah. Let's take a listen real quick to one of these pieces. This is the prelude and fugue number two in C minor from Bach's well-tempered clavier. Is that how I say that?

Clavier? Yeah, clavier. Clavier. I don't know. Clavier. It's a snobbish thing to correct that hard on classical music anyway. Yeah. No, we need to run the full game.

We need to butcher Italian, German, French. We've got to butcher all the romance languages on this show. Please add me. Man, 61 years later, that track still bangs. Oh, absolutely. I was listening to it on the way over here, actually. It is like headbanging music. It's really good.

So, wow. And also just, so, I'm just. Everyone knows. Go Google Switch on Bach. It's one of the great album covers of all time. Yeah, and it's really hard to find on streaming platforms, but if you can, you know, hunt down a copy of it somewhere or just really, I scoured YouTube and found a link for it to listen to. It's so cool. And you're right. It bumps. I do think that it is a bump of an album. What really set this apart was its embrace of the Moog synthesizer. And Carlos worked directly with MoG on making this album.

So you have this sound engineered inventor who is working with this composer to really bring out the sheer strength of this synthesizer instruments that's been created. It would be kind of like, I guess, having a piano and you want to make an album of piano and the adventure of the piano is right there with you, you know, kind of collaborating. Very cool. Wendy Carlos takes a lot of different, like, Bach pieces and puts them through the Mode Ringer in her own very, very special way. One funny thing about that, too, is critics didn't like that either. They thought it was some kind of, I guess, like, Bachian bastardization.

It wasn't treating this music that we've assigned a kind of sanctity to with enough reverence and respect. Again, it was just appealing to way, way too many people. Wow. When I just listened to this again that Wendy Carlos We used to listen to, it reminded me a bit of Giorgio Moroder. And it turns out that Maroder was a fan of the album as well. It gave me like heavy Marauder vibes. Giorgio Moroda, the producer of Donna Summer and more recently Daff Punk's Random Access Memories.

Yeah, cool. So you're saying he was a fan of Switch on Bach? Yeah, I thought it was cool. You know, he was like, this is not bad. This is awesome. To recap. So we've gone Caruso to Lanza to Wendy Carlos and switched on Bach. Let's do the biggest fast forward yet, I think, and jump to classical crossovers of the present.

Who would we turn to today to find the modern Caruso, Lanzah, Carlos? Who occupies that role? So, I mean, the thing is it's a big space now, and there's a couple of people that we can bring up. But I think one person that has been emblematic of what classical crossover is, what it isn't, who it appeals to and why it appeals to them is one singer by the name of Jackie Ivanko. If you recall about nine years ago on America's Got Talent, a 10-year-old Jackie came on and she sang Omia Bimino Caro and Arias, from an opera by Puccini. And she wowed the judges,

and America was like, this girl is great. Whoa! That kind of put her in this light as a squarely classical kind of like opera artist and musician. She was back on the radar again

two and a half years ago at the inauguration of one Donald J. Trump. That's why her name sounds familiar. I couldn't, yeah. I couldn't, Yeah, I couldn't place it. Okay, okay. Yeah.

The plot thickens. Yeah. And, you know, there's a lot of different ways to read into Trump's, let's say, embrace of opera throughout his 2016 campaign from, you know, saying that he's great friends with Pavarotti. Pavarotti, a friend of mine. Great friend of mine. Who I should mention is incredibly not alive right now, at least that I know of, to using a friend of. to using opera in this very triumphant, quote-unquote, classy, gilded way. I was reading an article about Ivanko at the inauguration.

What that choice from, I guess, that administration or transition team or whatever, what that signified to the rest of America. And it kind of puts the social aspects of classical crossover in micro. And if I can just kind of distill her argument in a sentence, What stands out is you have this thing, opera, which, you know, conjures images of suits and ties and champagne and velvet and just a gilded lifestyle. And those little binoculars that you hold up to your face with a little stick. Yeah. Right, right.

And there's been enough of those pieces from the opera repertoire that have crossed over to the masses that the public can own that without feeling. super divorced from the opera world. And you can go back, like, you know, the Caruso, the Lanza Records, Pavarotti is a great example of someone who kind of brought these well-known arias to the public. And there's this weird accessible, and it's not, I don't think that it's necessarily or inherently bad that is accessible. What's interesting, she's arguing, is the way that it's used. And so you have this gilded piece of art that's meant to appeal and be construed.

by everybody as a backlash against what is wealthy and elite. And that mirrors kind of the Trump style of politics in itself. This is a man that casts himself as a champion of the common people, but he is a billionaire. And it's like, what is this billionaire accessibility that's going on? And she was arguing that Jackie Ivanka really kind of encapsulates that campaign into one person. And given the backlash that she got, again, from critics that are like, this is too accessible, this isn't great. Inadvertently or, you know, calculatively, I don't know, it kind of put a young white girl into the lens of victimhood from, I guess, musical critics commenting from a critical perspective on her voice. And so you have, I think your quote was that you have Donald Trump now ironically as the savior of white womanhood by giving her,

this platform to share opera with the, I don't know, apparently billions of people that were present at the inauguration. What's interesting to me about her now, though, is that, you know, she's still charting and Billboard still tends to classify her as a classical artist. I listened to one of her albums from this year, and the first track just kind of struck me because it didn't necessarily sound operatic at all. Yeah, this is Burn. Burn, from the album debut. Would it be fair to call this the 2019 version? version of Mario Lanza, like another pop song, but sung in this very operatic kind of high grand drama style? Yeah, you know, I don't think that's unfair to make that placement.

Okay, James, at this point, I feel like we are right on the verge of a massive question of, like, what is classical music anyway? And in order to prepare to answer that, let's take a quick ad break, recoup, and come back refreshed and ready to tackle this classical conundrum. All right. Let's do it. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough.

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I really dislike the term classical music in general because it's so broad, but I have no idea what else to call it because I think classical music and really all that it stands for in the popular mind and the way we're taught to consume it with its rules. Like you go to a concert, you don't, clap. You imagine you have to like dress up to go and enjoy it. You can't fall asleep, whereas if

you were at a pop concert and you got tired, you could go home and no one would think anything of it. It's a socialized kind of music. And just to say, I mean, I don't think that's an accident. I feel a lot of, you know, historically white supremacist forces at play that have tried to keep that music exclusive and separated from a wider place of popular consumption. But for me, the best way to think about what classical music is and isn't is to compare it with crossover, right? Because that addition of that word crossover implies that classical is there, but it implies there's something unclassical about it enough to bring it to a completely different audience. I just want to ask you, Nate, if you know what the number one, at time of recording,

the number one classical album right now is on the Billboard charts. I'm going to say it's a recording of Chopin Blod's by Simone Dinerstein. I don't know. I don't know. Please enlighten me. It's interesting you take

that guess because there's a couple of different Billboard classical charts. I think there's like classical traditional and there's classical crossover and maybe I think there's a holiday classical. But you can also find data for it all aggregated together. It's just like

the classical chart. And number one right now is singer and violinist Lindsay Sterling, who I would say is immensely popular. I'm not going to, I'm not going to say otherwise. I do think she's a very popular artist as the view count on some of her YouTube videos show. But let's take a listen to the first track from her most recent album, Artemis. This is called Underground. Mind you, this is the opening track of the, the number one classical album, according to Billboard. And as we listen to it, I think it's good to keep in mind again. Classical crossover explicitly states this is classical,

and it implies there's something fundamentally unclassical about it that can appeal to a wider audience. So let's take a listen. Wow. James, James. Whoa. Thank you for playing this from me. This is an artist I've heard of, and I don't think I've ever actually listened to properly before. What to make of this.

Classical crossover, yeah. I mean, that works for me. It raises some questions, though. Like, what is classical about this exactly? Because I get the crossover because I hear these techno beats and synth swells, and that all feels firmly within the world of pop music. But then the classic. part, she's playing the violin, and what else?

I'm not... So I think the classical part, right? Like, maybe it's that intro. It's a very, there's a very extended violin introduction. There's also that idea of instrument identity, right? Like, if you see a saxophone, I will bet the money in my pocket right now. I think I have a single dollar bill, so I'm very comfortable doing this. But if you see a sax, you're like, oh, sweet, like jazz is going to come up.

Or like, something jazz-y, which should be. is admittedly a term that I hate. If you see a banjo, whoa, this is going to be something country. Before you even knew what old time wrote was about, when you heard that banjo hit, you're like, okay, Lil Nas X, like, we're getting some country stuff.

And I feel, on electric guitar, right? Rock and roll. Rock signifier. I feel that violin, even though it transcends these boxes of genre that we've created for it, there's still a pull where it's like, you're going to get an orchestra

when you see a violin. And it's just, again, a socialized response, I think, to the instruments themselves. So when we listen to classical crossover, it's worth stepping back and thinking about, okay, is this actually a really synthetic merging of these two genres, core musical attributes? Or is it more that we take certain perhaps more superficial associations with one genre and sort of graft them onto another? Again, not to say to pass any judgment or the song, but to understand what we mean by this category and this phenomenon. This is a really interesting example to locate that current iteration of it. Cool. Lindsay Sterling. All right.

Nate, I'm going to say that that is probably the best way to describe this that I've heard, taking the most superficial aspects and something and grafting it onto something else. And again, like, if you like it, that's awesome. Like I think that is like totally fine and incredibly valid. And one thing that I don't like listening to is a lot of people like in any kind of, you know, critical blog or whatever on the street or at a party with classical music heads, this eternal ragging on crossover. And it's like, oh, like it's thin or like, you know, it's just so repetitive. And it's like, okay. But so is like a two and a half minute pop song on Spotify.

I get it. but it doesn't always hold up. Because it's implying then that you need to have music that's constantly transforming not only melodically but harmonically as well. And once you fall into a pattern of a loop, then you've lost on musical integrity. And we just know for a fact that's not true. So it can just come down to like, yo, it's not my thing and you can keep it moving. I think Bach, at the very beginning of this episode, listening to that Bach Shikone,

you know, that's to say that repetition or, some Austin Auto Motiv makes something not classical would be a kind of historical amnesia at best. There's another artist out there, and I put artists kind of in quotes because it's multiple people, but it's not really a band. It's a vitamin string quartet. And again, they are also wildly popular. I think I was first introduced to them, I want to say in college by a couple of college friends that were like, I love listening to this music. while I study. And the thing about VSQ that's interesting to me is, A, just to put it out there, it's not a

quartet in the traditional sense, it's a project from a label group. So it's an ever-changing cast of musicians and, you know, producers and creative people working on this one vitamin string quartet project. So they have a ton of releases because of that model. I've heard Portugal The Man covers. I've heard Kanye West covers. Vitamin String Quartet plays ACDC. Like any pop artists that I can imagine right now,

there might be a VSQ cover of it of some sort. But let's just take a listen to this bit and see if, you know, you can recognize it without me saying the name of it because they're so good at just explicitly stating musically what they're doing. And there's no obfuscation to make it seem, you know, a bit more complicated than it really is.

So let's give this a listen. Okay, it took it took me a second, but when the ARCO came in, it was immediately clear. The little pizicado intro, I was like, uh-oh, I'm not sure I'm going to get this. And then the ARCO, the bowed strings came in and I feel pretty certain saying this is shallow by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, I guess. The Star is born. You know, like, again, like, there's no confusion about what it is. And, you know, I've come across criticism of this group for the same thing.

But I'm like, if I like a song enough, another version kind of, like, what's wrong with that in a way? Like, again, if you like, if you like, that's up to you. And it's actually really funny to me about that. In earlier episode that, you know, you all did, I think it was Charlie talking about Baby Shark. If you have an earworm, just get another version of that song. that's close enough that won't keep the original stuck in your head. And I kind of thought of that, like, listening to this cover of shallow. Well, that's the other thing, too.

Can we call it a cover? Is it a classical chamber arrangement? I think that VSQ falls into that classical crossover distinction as well. I'm very interested in your interpretation because it makes me think of how this, again, to me sometimes not like, oh, wow, this feels like such a new phenomenon, a string quartet covering shallow. But then I think, you know, composers going all the way back to the 1500s, you would have sacred Catholic church composers reworking popular songs of their day into their polyphonic vocal masses. So the idea of that something from the popular sphere couldn't then turn into a sort of classical arrangement, to think that would be to, again, to ignore the actual history of classical music. So I like where you're coming from here. I'm down with VSQ.

D with VSQ. All right. D with VSQ, exactly. I just want to get your quick thoughts on just comparing that was something that we would consider traditionally classical and getting your thoughts on what makes this different from the Sterling we've heard, from the VSQ we've heard, and I guess even going back to, you know, Ivanko and Wendy Carlos and, you know, Enrico Caruso in them. This is Florence Price's Symphony Number One. For those who are unfamiliar with this composer, this was written in 1932, and it is the first symphony not only by the composer Florence Price, but the first symphony by a black woman to be performed by a major American orchestra,

in this case, Chicago. So let's just listen to the opening bits of that first symphony. Yeah, I just want to know what makes that not classical crossover. It sounds listenable to me. I like it. It sounds very American, kind of almost Wild Westy, a little bit. What makes this distinctly a quote-unquote classical piece? Yeah, that's a deep cue.

I mean, the first thing is there's no vocals. I think that's maybe the thing that jumps out the most. but otherwise I'm with you. This is heart-pounding stuff. I'm really feeling this. And it makes me think that going back to something you said earlier, what makes this classical and not crossover is as much about the way we perceive the music as the music itself

and all these associations that we have with it as something high-class, as something sophisticated, is something, you know, baby Mozart, listening to classical music will make you smarter. Not true. No, thank you for the record. true. Not true. Listening to Mozart will not make you smarter. Sorry, Mozart. Sorry, Wolfgang. It's like you hear what you want to hear. And why do people want to hear all those attributes we just

listed? Going back to something you said, it probably has a lot to do with preserving the sort of racial, the sort of economic sanctity of this music. And that's something that we don't really need. That's something that's dragging this music down. So, man, Florence Price, I would. want to hear her on the classical crossover charts. That would be awesome. So then I was thinking, Nate, you know, we have examples of both classical music and classical crossover, music that has been originally, I guess, either composed or arranged to kind of take elements from one and graph them on to the other. But what about like the lift, like the art of the sample is something that I've been thinking about. And there is no shortage of classical

music in hip-hop. That's not the thing that we're lacking, really. And I love hip-hop for the record. Sometimes it works well. Sometimes, like any other kind of music, be it classical crossover or anything, sometimes it's kind of

corny. Or sometimes it just ages interestingly, to put it nicely. One of the first ones that come to mind is Nas' I Can from the album, God's son.

I know this one. That's Fier-Elis. Yeah, by Mr. Beethoven himself. Ludwig von, the one and only. I loved this song when I was a kid when this album came out. Listening to it now, it's not my favorite beat. It doesn't really do it for me like it did like fifth grade James, right? But what I find interesting about it is that you have this

children's hook, Nas, effectively, if you don't know the song, he's rapping about how you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up, if you want to be like a doctor or a lawyer or whatever. It's almost a subversion, as we're talking about, earlier, about how you have this music

for the white elite. And the producer, Stallone Remy, he's just going to take him this and, like, you know, giving it to an incredibly popular form of music hip-hop. It's not lost on me that these children are singing, the hook that Fear Elise is a, I guess, a popular, maybe not beginner piano piece, but it's not like Moonlight Sonata, for instance, right? Like, it's a piece you can learn fairly early on. So it's like this innocent, this artistic yearning, reaching for something that has historically

been said, it's not for you, Black America, and taking that music and then, like, slapping it on to a hip-hop beat that has been an art form that has just been guided by Black America and it's like, no, we're going to use this to further our own music. I don't know. I found it all very interesting. Wow, yeah. That's deep, James. I wouldn't have heard it in that way, so I appreciate that reading.

What are some other classical samples in pop that we should check out? People that have talked to me about this know how I feel about this because I made it very, very clear. I was blown away when I heard this. The Black-Eyed Peas, who I have not really thought about since maybe 20, 2011, dropped an album last year, 2018. I didn't even think it was a single. I just dropped like a pretty long music video for this song, and I put it on, and the structure of this song to me is incredibly interesting.

There are some incredible samples in there. You have Soul to Souls, Back to Life. I think there's a Lee Morgan sample in there. Oh, lovely. Yeah. This track is called Back to Hip Hop, clearly riffing on the extensive Back to Life sample. I'm gonna throw this on

and we won't get the whole scope of it, but I'm gonna pull out one part that made me just go like what the hell? In like the best possible way. Bring it back. It's a res a rat. Wreck shim. Bring it back.

It's a res a rat. Wreck shit. Bring it back. It's a res a rat. Wreck shit. Bring it back. Bring it back. Uh, Whoa. I was just talking about sacred

acopella vocal music of the 1500s. Is that what we're hearing here? Dude, this might be one of the top five deepest cut samples I have heard in my relatively few years on this planet. So, and I listened to it, that one section, maybe like eight times to make sure I was not crazy. Yeah. This is a sample from, and it's not credited either.

It's not on the liners. It's not on Wikipedia. It's not on who sampled or any database. I've Googled the name of this piece together with the Black Eyed piece song. I have to turn it up nothing. So this is a Switch on Pop exclusive. This is a scoop. Yeah.

We are breaking news here. Okay. Great. So this is the Improparia from Thomas Sliz de Victoria, who is, a Spanish composer in the 16th century, I believe. I guess you could, if you got to lump them in with any air, it might be counter-reformation, right? Like, the reformation has already happened and the Catholic Church is doing its own, like kind of cleaning up its acts, relatively speaking, incredibly relatively speaking, given that it's Spain. I know this piece

because I personally really enjoy exploring and listening to sacred music, and I have heard this before. This was a piece that it's a series of antiphons sung by two different choirs and traditionally it would be sung on Good Friday. It's in Latin as you just heard, but it veers into the anti-Semitic. Whoa, okay. The bit you just heard if you were to translate it basically is the figure of God chiding the Israelites for rejecting his, and And by the Israelites, I do mean the Jewish people for rejecting Jesus. You know, I led you through the land of Egypt and this is how you repay me, basically. And that was the tell when I heard the Egypti in that sample.

And if you watch the music video, there's a lot of Egypt imagery. And I don't know if, you know, the producers knew what the connotations of all that were. They were clearly going for, what's the Latin-E Egypt thing we can throw on with all these pyramids? But, like, you won't even really hear that. a lot of churches anymore because I think back on the 60s, the Catholic Church was like, we should not really do this as much. So that stuck out to me because that is an unadorn sample. There's no, there's no beat under it. There's no cool production techniques that have manipulated in any way. The music cuts out completely. You have this choir come in, do this, do this really weird,

you know, choral deep cut, and then it gives a song time to switch up its own act, and then it actually, as I mentioned earlier, it goes into a really cool Lee Morgan sample, the baseline from one of his tracks.

And so that, to me, it's like, what if you use classical music as, like, a transition? It's like, don't even try to dress it up. Don't even try to make it something that it's not. Give it for what it is and just rock with that.

I don't know, that just really, that blew my mind when I heard it. I was like, what? Who found that? Whoa. Yeah, that is deep. All right. This has been such a wild ride, James.

How do we end this discussion that has now spanned centuries? I'm in your hands. How do we put a ribbon on this? You know, we started with Dessa using an orchestra to color her musical stylings. Like, these aren't samples. these aren't pieces of music, I feel at least listening to the album, that were constructed to appeal to classical listeners. I do think it was Desa's saying to herself,

I want to explore the timbers that an orchestra will afford me as an artist. Then we got into all these crossover-y pieces, and I kind of want to tie it up with what happens when you have original compositions for an instrumental group that you might refer to as classic. that have been not even grafted onto, but married with original compositions that did have an orchestra in mind to begin with. The Dessa tracks, a lot of that is the orchestra styling previously written tracks that she did. But this track is two artists coming together with hip-hop in mind, plus what if we threw in a bunch of violins and violas and cellos.

and that would be Kanye West's gone from 2005's late registration with film composer John Bryan. I will die on this hill no matter what you think about Kanye, I think of this song is awesome. It's so much fun to listen to. So that piano is a sample of it's too late by Otis Redding. Those are strings that Kanye and John collaborated on. And what I like about the strings is that they're not competing for your attention.

They're really just kind of underscoring and providing this great emphasis to the beat that's already been laid down. And it doesn't get stale either. So for everyone that's kind of like, oh, I don't like when you have these violins on loop, cool, because every time someone wraps, there are three operas on this track, Kanye, Cameron, and Consequence. And it shifts from artist to artists just morphs different string motifs. You won't let me get my ideas out and that make me want to get my advance out and move to Oklahoma and just living my hands out. Wow.

Thank you for, no ceiling, no ceiling. I don't need a roof. Act up, get out. but I don't think I've ever really thought about that interlude in this context before. And it makes me realize that you don't always need to look for the quote-unquote classical crossovers that scream, hey, I'm a classical crossover. Sometimes it's just right there in front of you and you just have to decide to open your ears and hear it. And to me, like, that instrumentation, right, doesn't need to be limited to or claimed by classical exclusively.

Like, there's no world in which anyone was thinking to that. themselves, oh yeah, this new Kanye track, this song is definitely like in that classical crossover style. I think it was a couple of people that got together and were like, you know, it'll be great on this, like a couple of, you know, some violins and violas. Interestingly enough, a Janelle Monet lyric for one of her songs. Like she, what is it, cue the violins and violas. Cue the violins and violas. We gave you life. And boom, they come right on in and you don't overthink it. It just fits. You're not, you're not trying too hard. You're not trying to make

the music, something that it's not. You just, you know, music is a spectrum, you know. You don't need to, you don't need to be confined by boxes too hard anyway, in my opinion. That is a deep note to end on, James. We can all be big-eared listeners and welcome all genres into our hearts and minds. I can't thank you enough for joining us. This has been such a deeply. researched and reported trip through, yeah, like literally centuries of classical and pop music.

So I couldn't be happier to the two people left in the world who are still listening to this. Thank you for coming along with us on this ride. But seriously, like switched on pop from switch on Bach to Enrico Caruso, like, you can't have pop music without classical music. That's just a fact. These are not distinct genres. and your work is a testament to that. We'll throw a link up to where people can find more of your brilliant writing on the classical world. And James Bennett, thank you once again for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me, man. And just to close out, right? Like, it's one of you to think about that Duke Ellington quote, you know, there's two kinds of music. There's good music, and then there's everything else. Switched on Pop is produced by Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding. thanks to James Bennett the second for joining us. We are proud members of the Vox Media Network. Brandon McFarland is our amazing editor-engineer,

Megan Lubin and Bridget Armstrong producers, Liz Kelly Nelson and Ashok Kerwa Executive Producers. You can find our podcasts anywhere that podcasts live, and we'll be back every Tuesday with striking new analyses of pop hits. Reach out to us on Twitter. We want to know what you're hearing. Until then, thanks for listening.