Pieces in a Half-Assed Style

William Ørbit, the pasty white British electronica wizard best known for making Madonna relevant to a whole new generation of suckers, has just released a solo effort titled "Pieces in a Modern Style." This record attempts to bridge the gap between classical and pop by clothing masterworks both ancient and modern in electronic textures, sound effects and (occasionally) beats. Well, it's horrible, but not for the reasons you'd assume. Ørbit commits his worst sins not when he is modifying the classics with nouveau sounds, but when he barely modifies them at all.

Let's take one particularly egregious sin as an example. Ludwig van Beethoven's String Quartet in A Major, Opus 132, is one of the transcendent masterworks of the Western classical tradition. It is built around its luminous third movement, titled "Holy song of thanksgiving by one recovering from an illness." In this third movement, the aging Beethoven speaks, clearly and distinctly, in a voice seemingly meant both for all the world and for each individual who listens to it. The music, written in the ancient Lydian mode, is slow and grave and somehow both a struggle and a celebration at the same time. This is music written by a supreme master at the height of his art, saying that through all illness, tribulation and sorrow there is a strength, there is a light, there is a hope.

Now let's look at Ørbit's version. Ørbit changes none of the notes, introduces no sound effects or thumping techno beats. All he does is change the string quartet texture into a wispy computer-generated string orchestra texture, give it reverberance, and remove any suspicion that the composer himself might be speaking. And what this does is remove all the soul, all the struggle, all the pain from the music, replacing it with a prettified, ethereal wash of sound that works better as meditative wallpaper than as anything you could listen to for any length of time. For someone who holds the Beethoven in highest regard, the obscenity here is not in the act of transcribing and arranging the Beethoven, but in removing everything that makes it special, so that it sounds like cheap synthetic background noise.

It's not that arranging great classical masterworks for new instruments is especially wrong. There is, in fact, a long and vibrant tradition of doing just that. One recalls Arnold Schoenberg's adaptation of Johannes Brahms' Piano Quarter in G Minor for orchestra, which included a truly bizarre array of percussion instruments yet which managed to say interesting things about both Brahms and Schoenberg. It's not even that hijacking classical pieces to popular ends is an incredibly devious activity; Coolio's "C U When U Get There," which borrowed Pachelbel's Canon in D, actually did it right, respecting the basic musical material while adding to it and bringing it into a new era.

But most of Ørbit's electronica arrangements have nothing new to say other than "I can make an electronica arrangement of this classical masterwork." Ørbit labors under the misguided notion that making aural wallpaper out of brilliant music is a good idea (as expressed in several interviews about the purpose of doing all this), and it kills this album. Most of the tracks on "Pieces in a Modern Style" fall victim to Ørbit's soporific impulses. Ørbit smooths over the epic dissonances in Samuel Barber's "Adagio," turns the interludish slow movement of Beethoven's Triple Concerto into a directionless miasma (even with its brand-new drum-machine beat), and makes a sweet soupy hash out of Maurice Ravel's "Pavane pour une Infante Défunte."

When Ørbit lets himself respond to the piece in a semi-creative way, the results often are intriguing. For example, Ørbit gives Erik Satie's "Ogive No. 1" a bunch of new sound effects, including a hauntingly beautiful and ominous sample of helicopter blades rotating, and goes all out with the electronic textures. This is one of the more successful arrangements, one in which you can detect an artistic personality at work in response to the original music.

Yet most of the time he simply washes away the elements of life in these (mostly slow) works until nothing is left at all but a few prettified layers of sound. Still, "Pieces in a Modern Style" may well achieve popularity, if properly marketed, with the same people who bought all those Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos records, or folks who still pick up those discs of contextless extracts from great works that are called things like "Mozart is for Bedtime Relaxation" or "Great Classical Stress Busters 3."

The included disc of dance remixes of the Barber "Adagio" may contain some pretty useless music (unless, of course, you have some E and the latest copy of Gramophone handy), but at least the remixes are honest, vital artistic responses to the music. Ørbit, by contrast, is so obsessed with this wallpaper ideal that the music ends up signifying nothing at all. And that is truly the greatest crime one can commit against great music.

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