Having our Cross-over to Bear: Concert Snapshot – Chris O’Riley

A funny thing happened on the way to the Dakota: a new magazine came across my path.  It’s called “Listen – Life With Classical Music.” Actually I don’t know if it’s new but it’s definitely new to me.  What caught my eye was an article on Erich Korngold and his travails for having the …… audacity? …… idiocy? ……… intelligence? ……… to write music for Hollywood, and the negative effect this had on his career.  Boy does that sound familiar……

This subject was  very topical because we were off to see our buddy Chris O’Riley, pianist extraordinaire, at the famous Dakota Bar & Grill in downtown Minneapolis.  Usually the haunt of folks dedicated more towards Jazz, the DBG has in recent years expanded it’s outlook.  Concerts coming up include the Average White Band, Ben Vereen, and flautist James Galway, unfortunately not at the same time.  Chris has been making waves with his piano transcriptions of music by Radiohead, Portishead, Elliot Smith, and the like.  These have proven to be wildly popular and have landed Chris in situations that a “normal” classical pianist wouldn’t dare tread.

And, I think, that’s the point.  When an artist makes a concerted and intelligent effort to translate one genre to another he/she is following in the footsteps of Mozart, Beethoven, Gershwin, Bernstein, etc. We expand our literature while at the same time we reach out to people who wouldn’t normally be caught dead in a classical concert. The crowd @ the Dakota was almost more interesting than the music: conductor Andrew Litton and family; composer Randall Davidson; Manny Laureano, principal trumpet of the M.O.; various other luminaries of the classical music scene in the Twin Cities interspersed with people who where there solely to hear “Let Down” or “No Surprises.”  What was great was how intent everyone listened to everything that Chris played, whether it was Ravel or Radiohead.  The crowd was there to enjoy music, enjoy his artistry, and not to pass judgment on what music was “serious” and what wasn’t.  My only suggestion to Chris would be to play more Ravel/Debussy in his sets.  He plays them so bloody well, and the contrast between them and the Radiohead stuff is just wonderful.

A few days ago one of my neighbors, an amateur musician, mentioned that when Scott Joplin was writing his music he thought that he was writing “classical” music. He was, of course, even though it has taken us nigh unto a century to recognize that.  Chris’ set @ the Dakota was more proof that in order to take Ravel or Debussy seriously you have to take other music just as seriously, Britney Spears being the obvious exception.  Korngold was a serious composer of excellent music, despite what much of the classical establishment had, or has, to say about him.  He and his contemporaries – Rota, Rosza, Herrmann – have been unfairly “ghetto-ized” across the years, partly because they wrote for Hollywood, and also because they wrote music that one could listen to.  This enraged the Dodecaphonists stuck wandering in the desert of 12-tone, and since it was these folk who controlled the music schools the Hollywood brigade became easy targets.  Sorry, but I’ll throw in my lot with the Hollywood writers any day of the week.

Which leads to another thought – much of the conservative approach to “what is classical music and how should we be teaching it?” has been institutionalized in our music conservatories.  Lately, though, I have detected a sea change in the atmosphere at most major schools of music.  Gone are the days when you would be mercilessly mocked for having an interest in writing “accessible” music, or scoring for films.  There also seems to be a re-assessment of the artificial boundaries we put around our music.  Classical music, in all its glory, must learn to adapt to survive.  Turns out Darwin was right.

On a tangential note – I had my own personal run-in with the Über-conservatives more than 20 years ago when I made the mistake of attending Northwestern University.  This was a bad idea on a lot of levels, most of them personal, but at that time the N.U. music program was about as laced-up as one could get, and I had spent six crazy years experimenting in the petri dish which was the Eastman School of Music, a veritable loony bin if there ever was one.  I did NOT fit in to the scene at Northwestern.

I knew this wasn’t going to work out after I made my presentation to my Doctoral board for my first recital.  I was playing the 1st piano sonata of the Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera at the time, a personal favorite of mine, as well as some Debussy and the Opus 110 sonata of Beethoven.  The plan was to do my paper on Ginastera’s sonata, and also explore his approach to piano music.  He was, after all, a rather major composer of the 20th Century and recognition of the South American movement was really picking up steam in the music world.  I could break some new ground here.  The panel’s response was: “why don’t you do your paper on Beethoven?”

Gee!  I’m sure I could really add something new to field on that topic!!!  I dropped out shortly thereafter.

2 thoughts on “Having our Cross-over to Bear: Concert Snapshot – Chris O’Riley”

  1. Deja vu! When I proposed a bibliography project on the early years of Stevie Ray Vaughn and a couple of Texas musicians who influenced his development,it was “suggested” that SRV/Texas rock and blues was a poor choice for a serious musicologist. So I switched to the creative relationship of Diaghilev and Stravinsky, which was happily accepted. However I was accused of having a sarcastic tone to my writing once the project was turned in for grades.

  2. Y’know, any commentary that posits an exception immediately draws my attention. Therefore, I offer the following:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgDcC2LOJhQ
    and on guitar,
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmawiduf3Jg
    and then, just for fun,
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1isQlg6VGU

    I must also compliment your use and categorization of those followers of dodecaphonism. I will make an effort to use the phrase “Dodecaphonists stuck wandering in the desert of 12-tone” at least once at each party I go to for the next several months.

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