Today I heard Billy Joel’s Opus 2. Waltz # 1, from Fantasies and Delusions. It got me thinking, what other rock artists have composed classical music?
Paul McCartney (Liverpool Oratorio, 1991; Standing Stone, 1997; Working Classical, 1999; Ecce Cor Meum, 2006; Ocean’s Kingdom, 2007)
Frank Zappa (London Symphony Orchestra, Vol. I & II, 1983 & 1987)
Roger Waters (Ça Ira, 2005)
Billy Joel (Fantasies and Delusions, 2001)
~Max
I can’t find much on the 'dope about this topic, just a lone 20 year old post by Sam_Stone mentioning McCartney and Joel.
While it may not technically qualify as “classical music,” several rock artists have composed movie soundtracks, which were recorded by orchestras.
Trevor Rabin, best known for being a guitarist with the progressive rock band Yes in the '80s and '90s, has written the soundtracks for several dozen films, including Armageddon, Remember the Titans, and National Treasure.
The French electronic music duo Daft Punk composed the soundtrack for Tron: Legacy, which used traditional orchestral instruments as well as electronic instruments.
Mike Oldfield has an album called “Music of the Spheres” which is reasonably classical, with Lang Lang on piano. And his second album, Hergest Ridge, is basically a Pastorale like Beethoven’s Sixth, complete with thunderstorm. A guitar freakout in this case, not strings.
John Cale - he of the Velvet Underground - springs immediately to mind. Here are some of his less avant-garde pieces. He’s done shed loads of classical pieces, but then he was classically trained.
There’s a headline on this week’s Radio Times about Paul Weller Turns Classical At 63 or somesuch. Hmmm.
Ack. Excuse me while I go get my walker. 20 years ago…
Anyway, Warren Zevon threaded classical music through much of his music, and he even got some training from Igor Stravinsky. He has supposedly written at least one symphony that was never released. You can hear some of his string compositions in this song:
Here’s one of his songs with a string arrangement:
Jeff Lynne did a lot of classical arranging in ELO’s music. Eldorado is kind of a rock opera with tons of classical arrangements:
Speaking as an ELO nerd: Jeff Lynne could not read music at that time (and it appears that he still doesn’t read music, or at least claims that he doesn’t). Lynne worked with arranger Louis Clark to do the actual arranging of the orchestral sections, based on what Lynne wrote, on almost all of ELO’s albums from 1974-1983, and Clark conducted the orchestras for the recordings.
I’ve long heard that many composers and performers of modern popular music don’t know how to read or compose in traditional musical notation; one thing that unifies people like Lynne, McCartney, and Berlin is that they were from working-class families, and had little or no formal musical education as young people. However, even though a lot of rock and popular musicians can’t read traditional notation, many of them use other notation systems (like guitar tablature or the Nashville Number System) to write down the music that they’re composing.
McCartney is an interesting case here, since, as you noted in your OP, he’s written several albums of classical music. It appears that, like Lynne, he collaborated with orchestrators or arrangers to translate what he was writing into notation for the musicians (and, on Standing Stone, he also used a computer to transcribe what he was writing).
In Berlin’s case, he, too, worked with “musical secretaries,” who would take dictation from Berlin and transcribe his melodies.
Ben Folds did some piano concertos with the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. He followed that up with an album of some “chamber pop” songs but I don’t know what that is.
