Mixing classical and hip-hop might seem odd, but that's exactly what a new concerto aims to do -- deconstruct classical music through two turntables and a laptop.
Tonight on "Tech Live," see portions of the composition as it was performed by New York's renowned
DJ Spooky and Northern California's
Oakland East Bay Symphony. Filmed in Oakland's historic
Paramount Theatre, the composition is intriguingly beautiful in more ways than one.
"This piece really is my best attempt at creating a synergy between present classical music culture and present popular music culture," said
Anthony Paul De Ritis, the composer of a cutting-edge composition called "Devolution."
The show premiered in Richmond and Oakland, Calif., on March 18 and 19, with De Ritis composing the piece specifically for the odd duet of symphony and DJ.
"It's basically broken up into five sections," De Ritis said of the piece. "The orchestra basically has a minute to kind of state its idea, the musical material that I first present, then there's a transition where the orchestra starts to loop and have its own remix. And then the DJ comes in with his own response to the musical material."
DJ difficulties
But tying the two together onstage isn't easy, according to DJ Spooky.
"I read files, I don't read normal music notation," said the artist, DJ, and writer. "They're all reading the page and turning the page and it's all scripted, so to speak. Whereas, I'm making it up and deciding what I want to do and editing it right then and there."
De Ritis, though, says there's historical precedent for using DJ techniques in the composition process.
"Ravel's Bolero was essentially an idea that's looped over and over again," he said. "Ravel, if he had these materials available to him, might very well compose like a DJ."
A musical convergence
Performing "Devolution" is an interesting audio experiment that Spooky speculates may become commonplace.
"When people come to see this, I just want them to think this music is a reflection of a changing world," he said. "It doesn't have to be just deejaying, or just classical music, or just digital, or just acoustic [music], but the fact that we're having a conversation between different styles."
"Devolution" took more than four months to compose and runs about 28 minutes (with a DJ "solo" toward the end). And just like a DJ, De Ritis actually samples old-school artists. "Devolution" includes references to Beethoven's Seventh Symphony and Ravel's Bolero.
Remixing racist film next
Spooky, who has worked with everyone from Yoko Ono and Wu-Tang Clan to Ryuichi Sakamoto, is now working on an update of another kind of classic -- an audio "remix" of D.W. Griffith's 1915 film
Birth of a Nation.
In the piece, he'll use hip-hop music and digital editing to give a 21st century perspective to a racist and controversial yet classic Hollywood film that was used for decades as a recruiting tool for the Ku Klux Klan.
