Classical Music Is The New Rock'n'Roll. No, Really; Cool kids are

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Feb 17, 2002 | by Barry Didcock

HERE'S a teaser: what's the connection between Levi's jeans and every British coronation since 1727? If you said Elton John you should be ashamed of yourself. Congratulations, though, if you plumped for George Frederick Handel. His old testament blockbuster Zadok The Priest, written for George II's big day, has been sung for every new monarch since and in terms of popularity is second only to The Messiah among his choral works.

But it's a lesser known piece which forms the Levi's connection. Turning its back on what the finest modern pop music has to offer and spurning 50 years of back catalogue classics, the company has chosen Handel's Sarabande In D Minor as the soundtrack to its new pan- European advert.

The piece has been transposed from its original harpsichord setting to give it a moody orchestral feel, but otherwise it remains untouched: no beats, no synths, no William Orbit. Images come courtesy of Jonathan Glazer, director of Oscar- nominated Sexy Beast and the man who thrilled audiences everywhere with his surfing Guinness horses. Needless to say, it looks and sounds fantastic.

The advert hits our televisions this week and blazes into the multiplexes shortly afterwards. One classical music-driven ad that's already there, however, is Classic FM's latest. It shows a succession of young people chilling out on a sofa as soothing strings play in the background. Radio Three, meanwhile, has ripped up its traditional late night schedules in favour of an eclectic mix which is as likely to feature Stockhausen and Frank Zappa as Sibelius or Vivaldi. Latest figures from Jictar show that the two stations between them now have over eight and a half million listeners a week - and they're getting younger. Swapping clubs for cellos, this crowd says Bow! Selector!

So what gives? How does an obscure example of a musical genre most young people describe as boring find itself soundtracking the hippest ad of the year? And what can Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata possibly say to the chill-out generation?

Stephen Butler thinks he has some answers. Creative director of the advertising agency behind the Levi's ad, Bartle Bogle and Hegarty, it was he who chose the Handel piece over other more obvious candidates. Fatboy Slim, say, or the ubiquitous Moby.

"What happens cyclically with classical music is that there's always some moment that reintroduces it. It's what is good about all classical things or all things that manage to survive not only decades but centuries. Things become relevant again. There just seem to be moments when it comes round."

And maybe now is one of those moments. Accordingly, Butler never viewed the decision to use Handel on the Glazer ad as risky - it simply fitted the visuals. Neither, he stresses, is he attempting to pre-empt the zeitgeist. But he's canny enough to see (or has seen enough focus groups to know) that classical music's outsider status, as well as its combination of brainpower and emotional brawn, give it the potential to be as cool in the future as jazz is today. In fact he sees that the two may have more common ground than we think, as least as far as younger listeners are concerned.

"Kids are having to look further and further outside the common gene pool to find influences, to find things that can make them individuals. So whether it's swinging from jazz riffs to Fela Kuti, to Handel there's always this outer edge who are looking for something they can lay claim to."

For common gene pool, of course, read Fatboy Slim and the ubiquitous Moby. But even those who stick with contemporary sounds will one day realise that their beloved techno owes a great debt to the tonal experiments of mid-century groover Karlhinz Stockhausen or that minimalist composer John Cage was experimenting with turn- tables in the late 1940s. Eat that, Sasha.

"With the internet, and with how accessible everything is, kids are having to search wider. And the exciting thing about communicating is that you can throw ideas that feel a little left of centre and kids can engage with that."

Of course there's nothing new about lobbing classical music into the pop culture wok. But as anyone who ever owned a Sky album will know, pop music's relationship with classical music has been far from tasty.

From borrowed riffs (Procul Harem's Whiter Shade Of Pale) to wholesale massacres (anything in the Hooked On Classics series) the pop and classical forms have always reacted badly to each other. Rick Wakeman is the obvious culprit but dig out, if you can, the collected works of one Isao Tomito. Born in Tokyo in 1932, Tomito spent most of the 1970s cooped up in a recording studio with an arsenal of first generation synthesisers re-recording the works of Debussy, Stravinsky and Bach. The results weren't pretty. Even Beethoven would have winced.

Another man who should have known better is Madonna's favourite producer, William Orbit. He released an album of dance music- inspired classical updates only last year under the title Pieces In A Modern Style. That would have been fine had it not been for the "modern style" bit. It's not a mistake Levi's have made.