Is the crossover repertoire finite?

[roger]

Hi everyone,

In recent weeks, several members have suggested that every crossover song has been recorded by so many singers and groups that their is little material left which has yet to be heard. Sorry if I have missed something, but I can't see that.

Every symphony, every concerto, every string quartet, etc, ever written contains several themes, every one of which merely needs a lyric for it to become a crossover song. Looking at my modest classical CD collection alone, there must be enough material there to last one singer a lifetime.

And of course, crossover isn't necessarily limited to classical music arranged and performed in a contemporary way. It might be crossing over in the opposite direction - a pop song performed in a classical style, for example, 'The Queen Symphony'.

Crossover can also include completely original material which is neither classical not folk nor pop or anything else but a fusion of any two of them.

All that considered, I feel the potential crossover repertoire to be vast. So why is it so often suggested that we are running out of crossover material?

Roger

[nicola]

I completely agree with you, Roger. But I think the reason many suggest it is because crossover artists so rarely branch out and truly arrange something completely different. They tend to play it safe with 'Nella Fantasia', 'You Raise Me Up' and 'Un Bel Di'. This is why I get so annoyed with this genre sometimes. It has SO much potential, but record companies do not like to take risks. The best kind of crossover album for me is one with original songs with two or three songs scattered here and there that I already know, but is given a fresh take. Actually, I don't even mind a album full of covers, as long as they're unexpected or obscure. I was really fond of Becky Jane Taylor's release a few years ago, because for me, it got the balance just right. Even Katherine Jenkin's 'Rejoice' was a step in the right direction, though it lost some classical edge because of it - there's no need to sacrifice one for the other.

'Pure' was the PERFECT album for me. I had heard of three songs from it at the time and the rest was new to me. Of course, this becomes more difficult as time goes on as people listen to more music from the genre, but again, this can be avoided by branching out. If you recall, I gave Treasure a bad review because I already knew 80% of the songs. That kind of album irritates me to no end. Of course, Treasure was supposed to be a celtic album, so it was I that missed the point a bit.

I have gone a bit colder with crossover over the past few years because it's just turning into a money machine with little thought. There is only a handful of artists honestly trying to bring new things to the table with their albums and that are truly creative or artistic. Unfortunately, they have not been active as of late. Because the young generation have the monopoly of this market, they are so inexperienced that they probably have not developed the skills to compose music, but will do later on, not to mention that their age means the companies will not trust them with creative control, and patronise them. Hayley has already showed great promise in that department for her age, and I really look forward to her future. She has had a hand on the creative process, not only in writing, but battling for her song selection (such as the 'Wuthering Heights' story). Not all of the artists are as bold as Hayley, though, and will still have a long way to go - if they last that long.

The genre would also become more interesting if different backgrounds came in and gave it a try. We have the whole pop crossover thing a million times over. I have found Tarja Turunen's latest album delightful - she came from a symphonic metal band called Nightwish and went she went solo, she made a sublime album. Different from the others because of her different influences. Emilie Autumn's violin wizardry sounds different to anyone else because of her industrial background. There is so much that this genre can do, and the best that I can do for myself is keep my eyes wide open away from the UK classical charts which spews out the same stuff over and over, and look around on music social sites as Last.FM and ILikeIt for these original artists. It sure is a treat when I find them.

[milewalker]

Hi Roger,

As an American, my viewpoint may be somewhat skewed - classical music and crossover by extention are commercially challanging in this market.

It isnt so much that there isnt a potential wealth of material to choose from - it is that the finished product has to be commercially viable, and perhaps more importantly, the powers that be must have enough confidence in that viability to commit resources into developing it.

Nicola is correct I think in that no one really wants to take risks - and the other side of this is that when artists do, more often than not they get left out in the cold. Becky Taylor is a textbook example of this.

Jon

[Natasha]

I think the main problem is not the lack of repertoire, but simply the artists and record companies fear of loosing their audience. The simple truth is, for the most part listening audiences want to hear something they are familiar with because they can appreciate it more on the first listen than they would something new, so they will buy the album for those songs that are familiar to them. That fact has even thought to have held back great geniuses like Mozart because of the need to follow strict forms so the audience could know what was coming next.

Classical and opera singers nowadays also face the same problem. If they are lucky enough to get a record deal they don't want to risk it on unknown, even if it is, beautiful music. If the singer's a soprano you'll find, "O Mio Babbino Caro" the tenor will have to sing "Nessun Dorma" and the mezzo will tackle Carmen... come to think of it the same would go for Broadway singers. And yet contrary to popular belief, classical music is surviving. As my music professor explained to my music history class, only %20 of people have been into classical music anyways, so it actually is reaching it's audience quite well. The same goes for crossover.

So yes every crossover singer is going to record "The Prayer" and now probably Choen's "Hallelujah" as well, but personally on almost every crossover album I find new songs pushing the limit. All Angels are a perfect example! Who would have thought Coldplay could be so beautiful? Aled Jones finds lovely gems of songs on his records, Hayley certainly has a knack for finding interesting tracks and now writing her own, Russell Watson is going all out nowadays, and because of Celtic Woman we are getting a new side to crossover as well. So I personally think that although we will continue to get covers of the hits so far, there are literally endless possibilities for this genre, especially with all the great individual personalities it has!

[milewalker]

Jan 28, 2009 15:25:45 GMT Natasha said:

. And yet contrary to popular belief, classical music is surviving. As my music professor explained to my music history class, only %20 of people have been into classical music anyways, so it actually is reaching it's audience quite well. The same goes for crossover.

Hi Celtic Woman,

In 2007 in the US, classical music claimed right around 3 percent of the total market. This is hard to reconcile with the statement by your professor.

Market share in my opinion is the relevant consideration in this case because it reasonably affects the willingness of record companies and writers/arrangers to invest time money and effort into that genre. It is not that the genre cant survive at that level - it just isnt likely to thrive.

Jon

[nicola]

Jan 28, 2009 15:40:36 GMT milewalker said:

Hi Celtic Woman,

I would be delighted if classical music really had 20 percent of the market. So would the record companies. In 2007 in the US it was more like 3 percent. It is a bit higher than in the UK, but not a lot.

Jon

I'm not so sure... it's a good point. I think the percentage here must be rather large, as almost every well marketed classical crossover album reaches the UK top 20. Increasingly the top 10. But that depends what you would classify as 'classical'. I don't recall "pure" classical music getting into the top 100 at all. Pavorotti did when he died (and the Three Tenors did), and some film scores (Harry Potter, Gladiator, Titanic) but that's it. Katherine, Hayley, Russell (who is not crossover anymore, he has gone a completely different direction over his past two albums) all reach very high in the charts.

As to what Celtic Woman was saying - you do get one or two gems in a whole album - Coldplay is actually a standard in crossover, and has been for quite a while (which was later confirmed after their release of 'Fix You' which crossover artists fall over themselves to record). There will always be new pop artists that make converterable material which I whole heartedly welcome. The thing that companies are so scared to do is take unknown classical pieces and turn them into something different. That's the shame, and the problem with repetitive tracklistings. In order to qualify for the classical charts in this country, you need to do classical pieces. Unwilling to try different things, the same old classical pieces come up again and again.

[milewalker]

Hi Nicola,

My apologies for editing my post above yours.....the point however didnt change. The only relevant American artist who consistantly charts high is Josh Groban

[Richard]

This lengthy article from the New York Times is three years old, but it's certainly relevant to the current discussion.

www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/arts/music/01hunt.html

The Classical Crossover Conundrum

By JAMES HUNTER
Published: January 1, 2006

DAVID MILLER, a 32-year-old American tenor on the brink of making his Metropolitan Opera debut, received a call to audition not long ago. The project involved, he had heard, "opera singers not singing opera."

Mr. Miller, who studied at Oberlin Conservatory and had years of repertory under his belt, aced the audition and landed a spot in Il Divo, the hunky Armani-clad vocal group assembled by Simon Cowell, the musical impresario best known as the acid-tongued judge on "American Idol." Mr. Miller's detour from a more conventional classical path to the pop superhighway, where he now sings operatic renditions of "My Way" and "Unbreak My Heart" in Italian, leaves him shaking his head in wonder.

"In the opera world," Mr. Miller said, "you make a recording, then you go back to singing opera. This was a minimum four-year commitment to see if the first album would go. So here we are almost two years and three albums later, and it's going gangbusters." Il Divo's debut album has sold nearly five million copies - nearly a million in the United States this year alone, according to Billboard magazine.

The degree of the group's success is extreme, but its story is by no means unique. The quartet sits atop the musical domain known as classical crossover, an odd and sprawling genre that offers classically trained singers a lucrative detour from traditional concert repertory and practice.

This is the high season for crossover music. But despite its huge popularity (by comparison, "The 5 Browns," one of the past year's best-selling straight classical albums, sold only 60,000 copies), it is often ignored by the critics, or dismissed as market-tested gloss and airy sex appeal.

But the category is more complex than that. Sometimes, for better or worse, the music originates in the corporate boardroom; other times it echoes the countless permutations that arose on their own and continue to echo throughout the world.

Classical crossover has its own chart in Billboard. On the magazine's crossover chart last month, Il Divo occupied the two top slots, its recent "Christmas Collection" at No. 1 followed by the first album (with "Il Divo Gift Pack" further down at No. 12).

After that, things get even more eclectic. The chart includes John Williams's soundtrack to "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith" and Dario Marianelli's for "Pride & Prejudice." There are albums like "You've Stolen My Heart" by the Kronos Quartet and the singer Asha Bhosle, in which the adventurous string quartet delves into Indian film music via the Bollywood songs of R. D. Burman. And there is the debut of the East Village Opera Company, a six-member band that performs, along with a chamber orchestra, famous operatic arias as rock 'n' roll. Helping round out the list are collections by crossover superstars like the self-taught Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli and the English soprano Sarah Brightman.

As a commercial tag, crossover troubles many in the classical recording business. "Firstly, I don't like the word 'crossover,' " said Robina Young, vice president of the Los Angeles-based Harmonia Mundi USA label. "It implies that there are barriers between one thing and another to be jumped over, and I don't believe those barriers exist anymore. Secondly, as a company, in 47 years of existence, I promise you that not one single time has anyone sat down and thought, 'Let's make a crossover record.' "

Many who make classical crossover music resist the idea that their music stems from the cigar-chomping designs of record executives. Tyley Ross, the lead male singer of the East Village Opera Company, first began to revisit arias as rock songs after a film producer asked him to devise "some unconventional manner" to record Italian opera arias for a soundtrack. "We never thought it would appeal to people, it was so left field," Mr. Ross said. "It caught us more by surprise. It was all accidental." (The other extreme might be the English provocateur-producer Malcolm McLaren, who on his 1984 collection "Fans" sought to sell the sublimity of Puccini's greatest hits as electronic dance music.)

The East Village Opera Company, said Chris Roberts, the chief executive of Universal Classics, was "its own thing, from the beginning." Mr. Roberts also works with Elvis Costello, who does not use the term "classical crossover" but who has explored the phenomenon. His 2003 production of "For the Stars," by the Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, met with acclaim. Mr. Roberts, for his part, has overseen albums ranging from straight classical to the pop-classical recordings of the female string quartet Bond.

"I have always had to walk in that delicate gray zone between those things that some would consider the scourge of the earth and others say is the future of music," Mr. Roberts said. "It can be awkward at times. But I think that if you focus on quality as much as you can, then that's always the saving grace."

The masterminded act has certainly not disappeared. Il Divo, one of whose producers has also worked with the Backstreet Boys, is Exhibit A - a boy-bandish variant of the model pioneered by José Carreras, Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti in their commercially formidable Three Tenors venture in 1990.

"Basically Simon spotted a gap in the market for these kinds of acts," said Robbie Macintosh, a senior vice president of Sony BMG in Britain, referring to Mr. Cowell. "He then went about finding singers from around the world - one from the U.S., one Spanish, one French, one Swiss. When we had done these auditions and put the act together, he then put the songs together, which we were all involved in. And off we went."

Mr. Macintosh noted that Il Divo never worked in the classical field and therefore has not crossed over literally. He said the group offers "pop songs with a classical twist."

Before joining Il Divo, Mr. Miller, the American tenor, had sung opera internationally for a decade. He says leaving its traditional realm amounted to "a tough decision, definitely." He credits his work with the director Baz Luhrmann in the Broadway production of "La Bohème" with expanding his thinking.

"His idea was, there is this great music out there, but it's in the hands of the Opera Club," Mr. Miller said. "He wanted to bring that more back into mainstream, make it popular again, make great romance and good melodies and good singing back into fashion."

Il Divo explores a pop communion with traditional opera akin to the work of Italian singer-songwriters like Lucio Dalla and Mango in the 1970's and 80's. "We're looking at creating a new style of music," Mr. Miller said. "It's not exactly crossover; we're not opera. We're blending vocal techniques, as well as repertoire."

For Robert Hurwitz, president of Nonesuch Records (and no fan of boardroom schemes), "There is a natural sense of what people call crossover that's a very organic thing that has been around for the last 30 years, which has to do with a generation of people who have all grown up with this incredible panorama of music around them."

The Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer John Harbison, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sees crossover as "very much not a recent question." What has changed in recent years, Mr. Harbison said, is the technology.

"We've always had music of various types, genres and intents," he said. "The audiences for all music had to simply just get there. Now, in the communications age, the opportunities for cross-pollination are tremendous."

The pianist Christopher O'Riley said, "I think crossover in general as a commercial term has been a bad designation of something that has an awfully long history to it." On his most recent collections, "True Love Waits" and "Hold Me to This," Mr. O'Riley plays transcriptions of Radiohead songs. He conjures the image of "Beethoven, Mozart, sitting down at a dinner party, playing the popular aria of the day."

"Beethoven was probably better known as an improviser until people started paying attention to his symphonies," Mr. O'Riley said. "Liszt, taking Hungarian folk songs and making them into these orchestral piano fantasies. Bartok used the raw building blocks of popular music as the way he set up major pieces of art. And then Stravinsky would lift them whole cloth."

Richard

[stevemacdonald]

Roger asks: "Is the crossover repertoire finite?" My answer: "Yes!"

The finiteness in this case comes about because crossover is self-limiting. It will do only what sells, whereas other genres go on and on, with or without market forces driving them. You'll find hundreds of garage bands playing loud rock music to no one in particular, and you'll see dozens of tiny theatre troupes plying their tunes to miniscule crowds, but you'll NEVER encounter crossover music on the fly. You have to buy it or it doesn't exist.

That means it's not real music. It's just market-making, and it's purveyors are as cynical as P.T. Barnum.

(Thanks Nicola, for reviving my "Is crossover scary?" thread wherein I named my grievances against this frightening development.)

[postscript]

Jan 28, 2009 4:47:57 GMT @roger said:

Hi everyone,

All that considered, I feel the potential crossover repertoire to be vast. So why is it so often suggested that we are running out of crossover material?

Roger

Because those that 'do' do not look at the wider potential. Perhaps this is where Hayley might add her lyrics. It needs someone, perhaps the singer, to instigate, something which someone of the ages of Faryl etc are simply not equipped to achieve. It also requires the ability (based on knowledge) to take command. Hayley can but Faryl could not be expected to at this stage.

Peter S.

[martindn]

Actually I'm confused as to what exactly crossover is. There is nothing new about mixing classical and other genres. Many so-called "progressive rock" bands from that genre's hayday in the 1970s might qualify. Bands like Yes, Renaissance and the Moody Blues used classical as well pop/rock forms, Pink Floyd, Soft Machine and Mahavishnu Orchestra were a combination of Rock and Jazz. Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span were Folk/Rock. I know that stuff sounds a lot different to what we call crossover now, but in the sense of a fusion of two genres it qualifies.
Most of those artists produced original material pretty much exclusively. If you can do that there is no limit to the amount of material.
The difference seems to be that modern crossover has a number of standards that it seems all crossover artists are expected to record. Pure was a crossover album that was almost entirely original in that respect, most of thse songs had not been done by any previous crossover artists. This might be something to do with the stipulation that Hayley should not record anything previously recoded by Charlotte Church. The Maori dimension was completely original in the genre of course.

Martin

[nicola]

I think the definition of crossover is a whole different debate, and I'm almost certain there is another topic for it already.

Modern crossover is very easy to spot in the mainstream - you only need to look at the tracklist, but I classify other artists as crossover on my own, such as Emma Shapplin, Tarja Turunen, Emilie Autumn, Era, Gregorian, etc. I find that one thing that they all have in common, is that if they were to be officially categorised, they could easily slot into at least two different ones (most often it's classical and pop). I categorise them no matter what genre they really belong to, but if they take heavy influence from classical, I will say they are crossover. I am probably the only person on the planet to say 'Sweetbox' are crossover but it's such a problematic term that people would have a hard time arguing against my categorisation for them.

[martindn]

Hi Nicola,

If the contents of the tracklist define crossover, then its repertoire must by definition be finite. If new music can be added it is infinite. I suppose that is what it boils down to. To understand the extent of the genre one has to set its limits. Without a clear definition, we don't know what those limits are.
If it is a finite list of songs, then perhaps that list needs to be published! But I think there could be other definitions (like anything recorded by certain artists for example). Perhaps we do need a new thread.

Martin

[milewalker]

Hi Martin

One factor may be that it is possible to "cross over" in three ways - but only one of these ways is really "crossover". A classical musician can cross over into another genre, like Rene Fleming to Jazz. When she does this however, there is no loss of her genre specific identify. The same thing is true in a case like Pavarotti and the Three Tenors, although he did take some flack from the purists for the effort, he was in no real danger of appearing to be a crossover artist. The same thing is true about groups like the Moody Blues from the other direction - they may incorporate classical motifs into a pop tapestry, but no one is going to confuse them with anything but a pop group (albiet with a certain artistic pretension)

Singers like Charllotte and Hayley are different. They are not perceived to be either classical or pop singers, but are actually classed in between - and the classical crossover genre was actually invented for the music of the singers of that type in particular. In the case of the early Charlotte in particular (one can now see the same sort of discussion involving Hayley as well to a lesser extent) the idea of the kind of crossover she was doing was considered unstable in the sense that many people did not expect her to remain exactly where she was - the speculation was that she would either become all classical or all pop. One also currently finds people who like Jonathan Ansell on both sides of a similar debate.

I am afraid that I have to agree with Steve to some extent (he often overstates valid points ) I think that there is such a thing as classical crossover but for most artists it is a moment in time. Many people start there, and others may visit for a while, but rather few stay for long. I think it is that instablility - whether real or merely perceived - which makes the industry as a whole reluctant to invest a lot of time, money or creative effort into developing it.


Jon

[roger]

Jan 28, 2009 23:24:53 GMT milewalker said:

I think that there is such a thing as classical crossover but for most artists it is a moment in time. Many people start there, and others may visit for a while, but rather few stay for long.

But isn't that because there is relatively little material for them? If so, that brings us back to the original question.

Jan 28, 2009 15:25:45 GMT Natasha said:

Classical and opera singers nowadays also face the same problem. If they are lucky enough to get a record deal they don't want to risk it on unknown, even if it is, beautiful music.

Okay, so there may be an element of tisk but so there is in all things. Wherever there is risk, there is always someone willing to take it on. The success of Nella Fantasia, You Raise Me Up, Un Bel Di, Nessun Dorma and the rest of them surely prove that crossover can be very popular. And if it works for River of Dreams (based on Vivaldi's 'Winter'), why not 'Romance' from The Gadfly Suite by Shostakovich, the slow movement from Mozart's Clarinet Concerto, Pachelbel's Canon, or any one of several themes from Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony to name but four? I suppose the supply of classical" crossover may be finite, but I still believe it is huge and I am surprised that more lyricists haven't tried to capitalize on the success of those few tracks that have been recorded time and time again. If they did, Hayley and many other crossover singers may benefit hugely from it.

Roger