First, Ethan Hein has a post and video discussion about rap covers and how, although there are covers of rap songs rappers do not cover each other's work and how there is a norm against "biting" other rappers.
http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2020/adam-neely-video-on-rap-covers/#more-21425
For me one of the most memorable "Major Interpretation" covers of this century was Johnny Cash covering Trent Reznor's "Hurt". At the risk of a digression, the line between major and minor interpretation can depend a lot on reception history. Stripping down a song in terms of instrumentation is one of the patterns that shows up, such as Cash covering Reznor but his example is just of many potential case studies. Anyone remember the cover of "Mad World" by Tears for Fears at the end of Donnie Darko? I suspect that the difference between "major" and "minor" may depend on popular music being what Theodore Gracyk described as "ontologically thick", which is to say that this timbre created by playing this guitar through that amp with these settings through these pick-ups is important. I haven't played the Telecaster in a while but I know the Tele and a Gibson hollow-body have VERY different sounds and you'll want one sound for one kind of song and the other sound for another. But I've digressed pretty early into this post ... .
This is fascinating to hear about because there have been anti-rap polemics that have argued that sampling shows a lack of musical creativity (this was my stance twenty-five years ago when I was a teenager and first heard rap). I have, over the course of twenty years, come to a point where hip hop isn't exactly my favorite style of music but, you will note, I have referred to it as music, which it is. As Leonard Meyer used to put it, a democracy doesn't mean everyone will like the same thing but it means that everyone can and should be prefer to like the music that they like.
Getting back to the video and the post, it's interesting to learn that within art traditions there are norms of what you "can" and "can't" do and Hein and Neely discuss how in rap you aren't supposed to just use someone else's words. People who never pay attention to the words of songs (and I'm not the kind of person who can do that, which is why I can't really stand Led Zeppelin songs), won't likely notice what Neely and Hein discuss, how rappers have a norm of not taking each others' words whole cloth. There's room for literary reference and allusion ,which reminds me of blogging I did about George Steiner's observation on what he heard as a new musical literacy that was replacing the literacy of classical Western literature, but wholesale rip-offs are not accepted.
Something that comes up in the video is how improvisation was more prominent in classical music in the past. J. S. Bach was known as a gifted improviser in his lifetime than for his compositions which is, of course, why we know about Bach today. During Beethoven's lifetime he was retiring from concert life due to deafness and while (like Bach) Beethoven has been venerated as a composer par excellence the widely heralded and celebrated composer of Beethoven's day was someone else.
Who was bigger than Beethoven in Beethoven's day? Johann Nepomuk Hummel, who you may likely have never even heard of if you haven't made a point of digging into the works of composers who got started in the 18th and early 19th century who are not The Big Three. Hummel was known for touring and, as he went from city to city, performing an improvised fantasia at the piano on themes that he would solicit from audience members. He is one of the first composer-improvisers Dana Gooley discusses in Fantasies of Improvisation: Free Playing in Nineteenth-Century Music, which is a slog to read but which is worth reading. Gooley points out early on that the great improvising composers of the 19th century have since been thought of as the "second tier" composers. Hummel was so great at jamming that he was praised everywhere he went for his taste and his ability to take tunes suggested from audience members and then improvise whole concert-closing pieces on them. Another brilliant composer-improviser was Mendelssohn, who became sheepish about improvisation in concerts and shifted toward jamming with fellow musicians at private parties later in his career. That the big jammers of the early and mid-Romantic era came to be regarded in the later 19th and 20th centuries as the second-raters (whether we're talking Hummel, Mendelssohn, Lizst, or even Schumann depending on who's sniffing at them) in theory/history terms may be due to ... maybe I should delicately call it the reception history of academics who, as Kyle Gann has put it, like to teach the music that makes their conversations about form and structuer easier rather than harder.
One of the fun things about reading Robert Gjerdingen's work in recent years is he has been digging up things about the Neapolitan pedagogy that includes partimento. Take his most recent book, which I'm working through, Child Composers in the Old Conservatories: How Orphans Became Elite Musicians. Orphans were, Gjerdingen warns us early on, subjected to a very strict regime of study and learning in communal housing that we would, with cause, regard as child labor! For children who lost their parents and children whose parents could not afford to feed, house and clothe them, however, these music schools became training grounds for them to join the musical workforce and through partimento and solfeggio and study of counterpoint music students learned the guidelines of part-writing. What is more, a partimento, as Gjerdingen and other scholars have explained it, is a a stock bass line (not always but I'm trying to not digress into ever rabbit trail of a body of music pedagogy that's getting excavated), over which students could "realize" solutions that showed how well they were picking up musical style and sensibility. The kids were supposed to improvise over the pre-given bass line to demonstrate they were gaining the knowledge to work as court and church musicians by the time they were old enough to graduate from the school.
I'm still about halfway through Gjerdingen's book but he discusses how kids jamming on existing, well-known bass lines so as to learn how to compose music of their own comes across loud and clear in the first half of the book. For anyone unfamiliar with his work he's also written Music in the Galant Style, which is available on Kindle these days. The hardback form of the book is expensive and the book is not for novice music students but Gjerdingen's mining of galant era practices intrigues me. I've written about his work here in the past in a couple of posts working toward a neo-galant approach toward music composition that could bridge the distances between "classical music" and popular styles. Once we introduce room for the schema known as the Romanesca to be played across modes then a mixolydian Romanesca then TLC's "Chasing Waterfalls" can be heard as keeping the core scheme of the Romanesca but with the modal anchoring point being mixolydian rather than ionian, which I've written about elsewhere.
I'll want to actually get to quoting Gjerdingen at some point in the future but, for now, I'll leave it at having linked to his published books that discuss galant style and his recent book on how Neapolitan music training included having boys improvise over stock bass lines as part of their training. Ditto for Gooley's survey of improvisation in nineteenth century European music. One of the things I've appreciated about what Ethan Hein has been doing is digging into a variety of styles and style histories along the way to advocating for hip hop music education. I may not actually end up being a hip hop fan myself but I am totally behind music approaches that encourage people to make music here and now and to make use of the past as a foundation by way of inspiration.
If, per Norman Lebrecht's worry that American opera may not survive the Met closure, couldn't this be taken as a sign that American music eduation should incorporate rock, pop, country, hip hop and various American-born popular styles (generally pioneered by African Americans but also Hawaiian Natives if we dig into the history of steel guitar and slide guitar techniques), then what's the point of getting students to incur record-high levels of debt for arts degrees in fields for which there may be no work? Why train to be an operatic singer if, per Lebrecht's worries, there might not even be opera as "we" know it in five years? There aren't even a whole lot of rock operas getting made these days, for that matter. I mean, yeah, there's the Trans-Siberian Orchestra but these days rock opera isn't so common.
I know I wrote somewhere that this weekend I wanted to write an analysis of Matiegka's Op. 31, Sonata No. 2 in A minor this weekend but I wanted to write about stuff like this first.
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