From Classical Music Came Classic Rock

Billy Joel was well aware that Ludwig Beethoven couldn’t collect royalties when he listed him as a co-writer for “This Night,” with Joel acknowledging that he used Beethoven’s 1798 “Pathétique’ Sonata” for the 1983 tune.  But Emerson, Lake and Palmer had no qualms about paying royalties to a classical music artist—because that composer was still alive.

After ELP recorded Aaron Copland’s “Hoedown,” they decided to tackle Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.” Copland’s publishing company didn’t think much of the proposed musical mashups and refused to even contact the composer.  Stewart Young, ELP’s manager, got Copland’s phone number and called him, as did Keith Emerson, who notified him that ELP had recorded the piece.

Keith recalled: “Aaron was very friendly. He said, ‘Send it to me; let me listen.’ And he loved it. He called me back and said, ‘This is brilliant! This is fantastic! This is doing something to my music!’”  In a BBC interview, Aaron said of ELP’s rock rendition: “Of course, I always prefer my own version best, but (laughs) what they do is really around the piece, you might say, rather than a literal transposition of the piece, and they’re a gifted group. What they do in the middle, I’m not sure exactly how they connect that with my music, but they do it some way!”

The band chose to film a video for “Fanfare” in the freezing cold of Montreal.  Greg Lake said of the February shoot at Olympic Stadium: “We didn’t plan for it to be way below zero. My fingers would literally slip through the strings.”

Rock music videos weren’t around when classical music composers were, but one 19th-century pianist was treated like a rock star. Franz Liszt had female fans fighting over his broken piano strings in what the European press called “Lisztomonia.”  In 1975, the bizarre film Lisztomania was a box office flop despite Roger Daltrey starring. And who doesn’t want to see Ringo Starr playing Pope Pius IX?

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky didn’t live long enough to see a bizarre cover of his 1892 composition become a #23 hit in 1962.  His “March of the Toy Soldiers” was turned into a goofy novelty song, thanks to the tune’s title (“Nut Rocker”) and the name of the band (B. Bumble and The Stingers).

Tchaikovsky also wasn’t around to see some of his own history repeat itself.  In 1878, his “Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom” was published even though the Imperial Chapel of Russia had a monopoly on the performance/publishing of sacred music.  Its publication set off a series of lawsuits which resulted in the piece being banned in Russia.

Eighty-five years later, the Cougars notched a #33 UK hit with “Saturday Nite at the Duck-Pond,” a guitar-laden version of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.”  Like Bach’s “Liturgy,” it too was banned by the BBC. The reason? Because it was “a travesty of a major classical work.”

Of all the classical composers, Johann Sebastian Bach’s work may have been used (and possibly abused) the most. The most memorable cover of a Bach piece is Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale,” which is basically Bach’s “Air on the G String” with surrealistic words.

Paul Simon pinched the melody for “An American Tune” from a chorale in Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion.”  But the strangest version of a Bach piece was by Apollo 100, a group consisting of British session players who had one monstrous hit.  Their punchy take on Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Men’s Desiring” went to #6 in 1972.

These days, the odds of classical composition appearing on the pop chart are worse than those of Frankie Valli appearing on Dancing with the Stars.  Still, Beethoven’s work (“Für Elise”) gained a much larger audience thanks to Nas using a piece of it in 2003’s “I Can”. Igor Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite” was sampled by the late Afrika Bambaataa in 1982’s “Planet Rock,”   Eminem and Tupac Shakur have also used bits of classical music in their musical stylings.

Maybe one day, Sir Mix-a-Lot will release “Baby got Bach.”

-Mark Daponte

Photo: Beethoven (public domain)