Westminster Choir

The Westminster Choir is a staple of the Spoleto Festival USA.

Western classical music is the most wide-reaching music genre of them all. It includes works, ancient and new, for solo voice and compositions for enormous orchestras and choirs. It provides material for saxophone or percussion ensembles as well as producers of grand opera.

Composers such as Bach and Beethoven have inspired pop music makers. Remember Billy Joel’s 1984 song “This Night”? It was based on the second movement of Beethoven’s Pathetique piano sonata.

For the song “It’s a Hard Life,” the band Queen borrowed the aria “Vesti La Giubba” from Leoncavallo’s opera “I Pagliacci.”

The borrowing goes both ways. Ravel was infatuated with American jazz and worked a lot of it into his compositions. Dvorak, Mahler and Bartok were obsessed with folk songs and incorporated many of them (or bits and pieces of them) into their works.

What’s more, some compositions we assume to be part of the classical repertoire were, at the time of their creation, considered pop music. Troubadours of the Middle Ages went around singing tunes that used lyric poetry as texts. Haydn and Mozart churned out lots and lots of dance music to be played at big parties. Operas of the 18th and 19th centuries were often meant for the masses.

Once in a while, contemporary audiences are fooled into thinking that the stage productions they enjoy so much are employing “popular” rather than “classical” music, or the other way around.

Kurt Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera” is really musical theater. “Sweeney Todd” by Stephen Sondheim is really an opera. Ha!

The examples are many. The point is that audiences and performers today are too quick to categorize music, to embrace or dismiss it according to a label. But the label is a 20th-century construct, an often misleading shortcut that causes problems for musical practitioners everywhere.

Why do we think of symphony concerts as “high art” and rock concerts as “low art”? Anyone who is familiar with the music of Jeff Beck, Frank Zappa, Stevie Wonder, Steve Morse or XTC knows that the compositional devices and complexities match or exceed what can be found in, say, a Mendelssohn symphony or Monteverdi opera. And anyone who has heard a Tchaikovsky ballet score or Bach violin partita knows how the melodies can trigger the most basic, universal emotional response.

Yet too many of us avoid certain kinds of concerts, especially “classical music” programs. We think the music is too difficult to understand, too esoteric, too sophisticated. This is nonsense. It’s all just music: melody, harmony, rhythm. Some of it you will like, some of it you won’t.

Spoleto Festival USA provides ample opportunity to sample music of all kinds. You might think that chamber music doesn’t turn you on. Probably that’s because you are unfamiliar with it. So challenge youself and go to the Dock Street Theatre. You will likely discover something you love.

Or try Brahms’ German Requiem, a big piece of supple beauty. Close your eyes and allow the sound to engulf you. Or go to “Tree of Codes,” a new conceptual work that features a soundscape by composer Liza Lim and staging by Ong Keng Sen. Or listen to the bel canto voices of Donizetti’s “Pia de’ Tolomei” — marvel at the singers’ range and control. Or attend a Westminster Choir concert, whose programs include a wide range of music from across the centuries.

There is much to discover. All it takes is an open mind.

Contact Adam Parker at aparker@postandcourier.com or 843-937-5902.

Reporter

Adam Parker has covered many beats and topics for The Post and Courier, including race and history, religion, and the arts. He is the author of "Outside Agitator: The Civil Rights Struggle of Cleveland Sellers Jr.," published by Hub City Press, and "Us: A Journalist's Look at the Culture, Conflict and Creativity of the South," published by Evening Post Books.

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