Remix

To my readers:  Apologies for the extended hiatus.  As it turns out, finishing and defending a dissertation drains one's energy for composition more than I anticipated.  After my momentum was lost, it was hard to pick up the pencil, as it were, through travels, moves, job searching and so on.  But I can only go so long without exercising my creative muscle, and so I am back.  And today my topic is the remix.


Or is the term "covers"?  "Edits"?  "Reworks"?  I won't attempt to differentiate.  What I am calling a remix is any piece of music that draws heavily from an existing piece.  I think we are all familiar with these in popular music.  Some of these can be earnest tributes to the original music; others are just lazy thefts of creativity.  But they are not symptoms of the decline in the industry of modern man.

The earliest example of which I am aware is the organum of medieval music.  In this style, the church took liturgical Gregorian plainchant and added a harmonic vocal line.  This evolved into the motet where vocal lines of different, often secular text were overlaid on, again, Gregorian chant.  Since then, there has been a rich tradition of composers writing variations on admired works of other composers.

As in the linked examples of Mussorgsky, it can be quite interesting to see what different arrangements can bring to a familiar melody.  Ravel's orchestration has been criticized as too French, i.e. too soft and mellifluous compared to the more discordant and percussive tone of the original.  And yet the textural range accessible to an orchestra far surpasses a single piano, so for many, Ravel's is the only version they have heard.

In my very first post, I mentioned Schubert's Der Erlkönig and the transcription by Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst.  It is one of the most popular lieder, and for good reason.  The original combines drama, narrative, poetry, and word painting for a profoundly moving four minutes.  Compare the baritone's performance to that of a soprano.  Very different performances, yes, but does the drama persist when sung by a woman?  After all, three of the four characters are explicitly male.

Now focus for a moment on the triplet ostinato on the right hand of the accompaniment.  (Try emulating that on your desk to get a feel for how difficult it is.)  This motive evokes the urgent galloping of the horse on which the father is riding with the son.  Berlioz orchestrated the accompaniment, but is this an improvement?  Maybe the percussive timbre of a piano better evokes the horse's hoofs.

Going the other way, listen now to Liszt's transcription for solo piano and Ernst's transcription for violin linked earlier.  Once your head stops spinning, consider whether anything is lost by condensing the lied into the limitations of one instrument.  Does the melodic line get too broken because of the need to maintain the triplet motive?  Does the loss of explicit words lose much of the drama, even if you know what words are supposed to be there?  Perhaps for you the exhilaration of seeing such virtuosity offsets the lost elegance from the original composition?  (For the brave....)

Even more fun is when a substantial remix of a piece is itself substantially remixed.

So the remix is nothing new in music.  They serve the same purposes and are as contentious now as back then.  Some final thoughts to ponder:  What are these purposes and who may benefit from them?  Are we prone to favoring our first exposures to a piece?  Which version of 'Pictures' did you first hear, and is it the one you prefer?  What are some of your favorite remixes?  They needn't lean towards virtuosic.  Or towards trance, for that matter.  Let's have a discussion!