A New Face for Classical Music
by Max Vinetz
For the past several decades, the orchestra has been in decline around the world. Orchestras are struggling to meet their budgets and the concert-attending classical connoisseurs are slowly dwindling in number. Music, in the past decade, has become increasingly easy to obtain via internet, taking away even more revenue from classical music sales. However, classical music is far from dead: it is simply adapting, finding new ways to exist and thrive in a modern world.
When describing St. Vincent’s self-titled 2014 release, St. Vincent, Pitchfork was spot on. “St. Vincent does not sound like it was recorded here on Earth. Its songs sprout with their own strange, squiggly lifeforms and are governed by unfamiliar laws of gravity.” And once you listen to “Digital Witness” or “Rattlesnake,” you begin to develop an affinity towards these little squiggly things. You start to realize that this foreign gravity is refreshing. A saturated staccato baritone sax, a tight brass section, a dry electric bass, a crackling synth bass, and a tight four-on-the-floor beat sound almost exotic when paired with St. Vincent’s ethereal, yet bold voice. Enchanted by her unique sound world, Pitchfork hailed St. Vincent as Best New Music. But the recognition doesn’t stop there. At the 57th Grammy Awards in 2015, St. Vincent won Best Alternative Music Album. St. Vincent entered the Billboard 200 rankings at #12 and the UK Albums chart at #21 for good reason. Her music is fresh and colorful. Her rhythms are bouncy and danceable. Her detailed orchestration emphasizes the originality in her music. At times, she fluctuates between ambient, balladic, and hard rock textures. At other moments, her playfulness and energy borders on madness. Her music is dynamic and expressive. And I think it’s catchy as hell.
In 2011, St. Vincent, under her real name Annie Clark, wrote a seven-minute work for a six-piece contemporary chamber ensemble called yMusic. Consisting of graduates from Julliard and the Curtis Institute of Music, yMusic exists in somewhat of a transitional state between a classical chamber aesthetic and modern pop, acoustic, and indie music. The sextet—violin/guitar, viola, cello, flute, clarinet, trumpet—regularly collaborates with artists such as Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens, Ben Folds, and Dirty Projectors. Yet, while collaborating with influential indie and alternative artists, yMusic has also commissioned pieces from Sarah Kirkland Snider, Judd Greenstein, and Andrew Norman amongst numerous other high-profile contemporary composers. And, amidst these composers, Annie Clark is featured on yMusic’s debut album, entitled Beautiful Mechanical.
Throughout her piece, “Proven Badlands,” Clarks displays her adept orchestration skills and knowledge of her tools, delicately and carefully coloring each melodic gesture and contour with great detail. The piece begins with a harmonically ambiguous bass clarinet that carefully floats above an ascending cello line. As the cello lands on a high note, violin, viola, and flute fade in from different directions, slowly moving at a quarter note pace. Octaved flute and bass clarinet drive the piece towards a sustained and fingerpicked guitar ostinato. Winds and strings fade in from beneath the guitar as a trumpet sings overhead, dancing chromatically around Clark’s elaborate pan-diatonic texture. Instrumental lines are beginning to diverge—the flute sways in gentle harmony with the trumpet while the cello lays down a pizzicato ostinato and the other strings alternate between driving pizzicato and calm, sustained pitches. “Proven Badlands” resides comfortably among Steve Reich, Bon Iver, and Lady Gaga, carrying essences of minimalism, folk, and pop. Annie Clark’s compositional voice traverses genre boundaries, resulting in a highly idiosyncratic sound world that isn’t far off from her work as St. Vincent.
St. Vincent/Annie Clark’s genre-bending success begs two questions. Firstly: is there a missing link between Clark’s success in pop and classical music? From the surface, it may seem that Clark’s creative activities across genres aren’t entirely connected, that she composes classical music and pop music independently. There may not initially appear to be any connection between her chamber music and her success as a popular alternative artist. But there is, and that leads to the second question: what is that missing link? The answer: New Amsterdam.
New Amsterdam Records, commonly known as “New Am,” fights against the impression that classical music is dead. Hosting a roster of innovative, successful and collaborative artists such as Sufjan Stevens, yMusic, and DEERHOOF, New Am fervently supports unique forms of musical expression and emphasizes the importance and adaptability of classical aesthetics into contemporary music. Punk, avant-garde, minimalist, pop, a cappella, noise, acoustic, folk, classical—New Am has it all. New Am was founded as a “service organization that supports the public’s engagement with new music by highly skilled composers and performers whose work does not adhere to traditional genre boundaries.” They value “artistic quality and emotional directness over adherence to current stylistic trends.” Accordingly, Annie Clark/St. Vincent’s music doesn’t entirely adhere to those trends. Some of her music is absolutely nuts (“Bring Me Your Loves”). But her songs are delectable and her orchestration is filled with crackling wit and brilliance. She’s a key example of an immensely successful artist who doesn’t adhere to music’s current tendencies, as her work straddles the fence between minimalist classical and indie/alternative. And likewise with Caroline Shaw.
A New Am violinist, singer, and composer, Caroline Shaw has earned tremendous fame within the last 3 years. In 2013 at age 30, Shaw became the youngest composer to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music for her composition Partita for 8 Voices, which she wrote for her vocal octet, Roomful of Teeth. Shaw started her Ph.D. in composition at Princeton in 2010 and received degrees in violin performance from Yale School of Music (M.M. 2007) and Rice University (2004). She also performs as a violinist with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, and has performed as a featured artist at the Bang On A Can Marathon.
Shaw also works with Kanye West. She recently appeared on West’s single “Say You Will” and “Wolves” on West’s new release, The Life of Pablo. On these two tracks, Shaw creates a dimension of sonic intimacy and immediacy. “Say You Will” opens with a looped vocal ostinato that eventually crescendoes into a grand pad-like choral texture which envelopes you in an ocean of oohs and ahs. Deeper into the bridge, Shaw begins to fragment, layer, and canonize West’s lyrics, and vocal processing echoes “I wish this song would really come true/I admit I.../Say you will.” Shaw’s contributions add an organic and human quality to West’s tracks, crafting an otherwise unattainable blend of production quality and textural intimacy.
Today, classical music continues to thrive by manifesting itself in popular music. Through New Am, Annie Clark composed “Proven Badlands” for yMusic while maintaining a successful and edgy pop career as St. Vincent. Caroline Shaw makes an understated vocal and instrumental presence within the context of Kanye West’s hip-hop productions while maintaining an active career as a composer, violinist, and singer. Classical music is no longer limited to the concert hall. It also lives in jam-packed stadiums, Kanye West’s SoundCloud, St. Vincent’s Spotify channel with over 20 million plays. The conservatory has changed, churning out classically trained pop collaborators, chamber, and orchestral musicians. The days where Beethovenian orchestras reigned over music are over. But the day that classical music dies out hasn’t come just yet.