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Just Another Jim

Just Another Essay



Once Again, It’s Not About the Weather

Essay Posted March 13, 2007 by James E. Nelson

I received an email from a reader last week expressing great surprise that I didn’t write about the weather. Well, it snowed, it blowed, the weather man stood in the middle of the street, the trucks got stuck, the kiddies in Chicago didn’t get their corn dogs because the corn dogs were on the stuck truck, the plows plowed, the snow melted, and the corn dogs finally made it to Chicago. I guess I just didn’t find the story all that compelling.

On the other hand, I was listening to the local NPR station and they played Lennon and McCartney during their “Morning Classics” segment the other day. Now that was interesting!

It wasn’t actually Lennon and McCartney playing, but rather a selection of Beatles and John Lennon tunes arranged for guitar and orchestra. The orchestration was superb and the chord progressions were even more complex and intricate than Lennon at his best, which is a bit remarkable because Lennon’s harmonizations and complex chord progressions were often pure genius.

Of course this sort of thing is nothing new. Aaron Copeland was well known for adapting American folk music to the symphony, and Charles Ives did it in a much more experimental manner. Both were following a grand tradition of bringing folk music to the symphony stage by European composers such as Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky, Edvard Grieg, and Béla Bartók.

But bringing popular music to the symphony is often a bit more challenging. I do not have a great deal of experience nor expertise in the field, simply what I have heard on NPR and at a couple of symphony performances here in Sioux City, but in that limited experience, moving popular music onto the symphony stage typically results in a sort of bland Muzak™ style sound in the tradition of Kenny G and Mannheim Steamroller, both of which are fine to listen to when purchasing groceries at the local Piggly Wiggly, but not the sort of music one wants to sit down and carefully listen to.

In that tradition the melody, harmonies, and chord progressions are simply transcribed to the symphony sheet music, with an occasional violin flourish added here and there, the pounding bass guitar line replaced by the much more sonorous bass viol, and the timpani and occasional horn blast added to keep the listener from falling asleep due to the sheer boredom.

But this music that I heard the other day was fundamentally different than that. In general the melody was played in its original form by the guitar, but the harmonies, rather than simply being transcribed to the other instruments, were reconceptualized so that each section of the symphony was allowed to do what it does best. It sounded like you were listening to a first class symphony, not just a strings version of Lennon and McCartney on the elevator.

I suppose this would have been unremarkable in and of itself but for McCartney’s disastrous attempt at writing symphonic music. I watched a recording, on NPR, of the debut of “Standing Stone” (McCartney’s first Symphonic attempt) by the London Symphonic Orchestra. Reading about it later, I gathered that it received polite and not particularly critical reviews. He is Sir Paul McCartney, after all, and he was a member of the Beatles, and I suppose it’s not good form to be too hard on a Knight. But in the end it had a lot more in common with the 1969 rock opera, “Tommy,” by The Who, than it did with true symphonic music. Sir Paul was clearly writing with guitars and drums in his ear rather than cellos and violas. Or possibly that’s the sort of music he heard in his head rather than a symphony. With it’s 1-2-3-4 beat (in contrast to flowing sounds) and its straight chords, the whole orchestra moving together from an A chord to an E chord, back to a C# chord with possible a G7 chord thrown in on occasion, I was reminded of the sort of piano variations that some of my classmates at Big Sky Bible College composed for performance in chapel—it was the sort of music one endured rather than enjoyed.

McCartney is a fabulous niche musician (if one can call rock ‘n roll “niche music”), but his instrument is electric bass guitar and his expertise is rock ‘n roll. He was clearly out of his depth in the symphony hall.

And I suppose it’s precisely that which I found so arresting in the Lennon and McCartney tunes properly arranged for guitar and orchestra. Good music tends to be specific to its genre. The Beatles’ “Yesterday” sounds good when played by a guitar ensemble. It even sounds good in the “Wall of Sound” sort of instrumentals for which Phil Spector had such an ear. (In fact, if memory serves me right, it was Phil Spector who resurrected that particular Beatles album from disaster and turned it into another mega-hit.) But “Yesterday” is the blandest of bland elevator music when instrumentalized by a Muzak™ sort of arranger. But whoever arranged the collection I heard on NPR understood their instrument (the orchestra) very well and arranged to its strengths, both stylistically and in its instrumentation.

I discovered this same sort of thing when I started playing the Scottish psalter on my guitar. Those tunes are much more closely related to Celtic folk music than German cathedral music. As a result, when they are forced into four part harmony and played on a soaring organ they sound painfully stuffy and boring—it’s probably why modern Presbyterians so rarely sing the psalter—but when played on guitar, as in my O Gladsome Light collection, their lilting character is emphasized. Songs that are nearly impossible to sing in church become lyrical and pleasant to the ear.

Sir Paul, I’m guessing you have a state of the art studio in your English country estate. My advice to you is to stick with composing and arranging pop music and let the people who understand the symphony do that. You’re musical reputation will then remain untarnished and the rest of us will not have to be tortured by your attempts at symphonic music. You’re a fabulous musician; just stick to your niche.