David Bowie... classical among his favourite recordings
‘Searching for music is like searching for God… there’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable.’ So reckoned the great David Bowie, and few have ‘searched for music’ down as many compositional avenues. This was vividly evidenced in 2003, when the magazine Vanity Fair invited Bowie to choose 25 favourite recordings. There, amongst an extraordinarily eclectic mix, was Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs. The work, said Bowie, ‘aches with love for a life that is quietly fading. I know of no other piece of music… which moves me quite like this.’
Also selected was Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. The teenage Bowie (then known as David Jones) had bought it, he said, in a Woolworth’s store. He devoured the music, a major attraction being Stravinsky’s projection of rhythm: ‘The ostinato theme for the four tubas is as powerful a riff as any found in music.’ Bowie went on to describe being smitten as a child by the likewise super-rhythmical ‘Mars’ from Holst’s The Planets, as used in the 1953 BBC TV drama The Quatermass Experiment. ‘So, I already knew that classical music wasn’t boring.’ Indeed, Bowie was to use ‘Mars’ as intro music to gigs. Rhythmic invention, of course, abounds in Bowie, but try the lesser-celebrated tracks ‘Fame’ and ‘Little Wonder’ for some bewitching beats.
David Bowie... classical in concert set lists
Beethoven and Rossini also turned up on a Bowie concert setlist. And there were other classical picks in his Vanity Fair selection. Elsewhere, in a radio interview with Marc Riley, he chose to talk up – albeit in jest – Elgar over Vaughan Williams, whom Bowie described as ‘a nightmare’, while suggesting he was familiar with RVW’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.
Elgar featured when Bowie acted as DJ for a Star Special show on BBC Radio 1 in 1979. Of all things, he chose an off-the-beaten-track miniature, ‘The Wagon (Passes)’, from Elgar’s Nursery Suite. Again, ostinato rhythm was surely a key attraction, yet Bowie’s love for the ‘transcendental’ Four Last Songs showed a different side to his appreciation of classical music. (Is the achingly wistful ‘Lazarus’ on Blackstar – Bowie’s final album, released two days before his death – his take on the Songs?)
All musical genres were of interest to David Bowie
In truth, as any Bowie buff knows, there was no tying the man down to any one musical genre. ‘He really didn’t differentiate between jazz, pop or classical,’ says Bowie’s biographer David Buckley. ‘He saw them all as interconnected.’
Francis Whately came to know Bowie when making a radio documentary series about him. ‘There was nothing that wasn’t of interest to Bowie. When he came round to my place he’d pore over not just my collection of recordings, but my bookshelves, the gadgets in the kitchen, anything.’ Let’s not forget Bowie’s passion for art, nor his talents as an actor.
Bowie constantly reinvented himself musically, exploring new soundscapes. He didn’t strive for success, he once said, but for what was ‘artistically important’. Intriguingly, he confessed that he routinely became ‘incredibly bored’ after a few weeks of delivering a latest creation on stage. ‘Everything I do,’ he said, ‘is about the conceptualising and realisation of a piece of work.’ That done, it was time to move on. ‘He had this terror of repeating himself,’ David Buckley observes. ‘It’s too cynical to suggest it was just re-branding. The story goes that some members of the audience for a Wembley Arena Bowie concert exited early, realising they weren’t going to be hearing the “greatest hits”. The same thing happened at other venues.’
Where did Bowie's musical adventurousness come from?
Even as a teenager, Bowie was a musical shapeshifter. He wasn’t so much interested in rock music, he said, but in writing a rock musical. So where did this musical restlessness come from? A form of teenage rebellion against parents, school? Who knows? Certainly, in one of his appearances on the Parkinson chat show he seemed to endorse the famous Philip Larkin line that parents ‘f*** you up’.
Having said that, in the same Parkinson interview, Bowie gave his mother credit for some of his earliest musical memories. ‘She would always say at breakfast, “Oh, I could have been a singer, you know,” and then she’d sing.’ Her addiction to the Two-Way Family Favourites radio request show provided regular hearings of Ernest Lough’s legendary recording of ‘O for the wings of a dove’ from Mendelssohn’s Hear my Prayer.
Beyond that, says David Buckley, ‘It’s likely that Bowie benefited from the amount of popular classical music on the BBC when he was growing up.’ And doubtless it was radio that brought Bowie into contact with those famed music-promotional recordings for children Tubby the Tuba and Sparky’s Magic Piano – the latter offering (how could we forget?) doses of Chopin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Liszt, Beethoven, Rachmaninov and Mendelssohn. Appropriate, then, that Bowie was to act as a characterful narrator in a recording of Prokofiev’s child-friendly Peter and the Wolf (albeit as third choice behind legendary British actors Alec Guinness and Peter Ustinov).
David Bowie's musical education
However, Bowie didn’t benefit from any kind of formal musical training. Hence the hilarious story of how, having decided (note the ambition) on an orchestral dimension to his 1967 debut album, Bowie and collaborator ‘Dek’ Fearnley mugged up on the basics of notation from The Observer’s Book of Music so the London Philharmonic Orchestra could have some idea what was required. (By the way, I’ll bet the whimsical tuba leading off the track ‘Rubber Band’owes something to Tubby).
In fact, Bowie albums benefited hugely from a range of studio collaborators with classical music backgrounds – the likes of Ralph Mace, Tony Visconti and Paul Buckmaster. Ultimately, though, it was Bowie who called the shots. ‘It’s the things behind Bowie’s music that give it its emotional force – he was into feelings, ideas, concepts,’ says British composer Gavin Bryars, a Bowie fan with a similar taste for the eclectic. ‘That’s why his appeal goes beyond the straightforwardly musical.’
David Bowie and minimalism
Hardly surprisingly, Bowie explored contemporary classical music, especially what was coming out of the US. That 2003 Vanity Fair music list includes Steve Reich’s dazzlingly rhythmical Music for 18 Musicians (described by Bowie as ‘gamelan music cross-dressing as Minimalism’) and Crumb’s spooky Black Angels, inspired by the Vietnam War and seen by Bowie as conveying ‘spiritual annihilation’.
Bowie imbibed the experimental minimalist music of Reich, John Cage, Terry Riley and Philip Glass in the mid-1970s, when he took refuge in Berlin to combat drug addiction and over-work. The outcome, Bowie’s so-called ‘Berlin Trilogy’ of albums (Low, ‘Heroes’ and Lodger) demonstrates what he’d taken on board from these composers in the way of, for example, ambient and electronic sound. A massive influence here was off-the-wall producer Brian Eno.
David Bowie and Philip Glass
Famously, Bowie inspired Philip Glass to convert these three albums into symphonic works. The two came to know each other well in New York. Glass found Bowie ‘an extremely gifted and interesting person and musician’ and saw his lack of formal musical training as a plus. ‘You don’t need to have been to a conservatoire to be a composer today. You don’t even necessarily need to be able to read or write music… I like that.’
These Glass symphonies are takes on the original albums, the third not emerging until 2019, three years after Bowie’s death. Grammy-winning maestro Karen Kamensek was assistant conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra for the first recording of Glass’s ‘Low’ Symphony, in the early 1990s. ‘I recall it having been a really fun time… simply a blast! Philip’s musical style is unmistakably unique and iconic, and the “Low” Symphony is such an amazing homage to the equally iconic David Bowie.’
The Glass/Bowie ‘Heroes’ Symphony featured in a rare outing for classical music at the Glastonbury Festival in 2016, broadcast live on television. This tribute to the recently deceased Bowie was conceived by Charles Hazlewood, who conducted his Paraorchestra. ‘The massive late-night crowd stretched as far as the eye could see,’ says Hazlewood, ‘but there was such silence. The symphony offered them few fireworks but this hypnotic music cast its spell. There’s no real climactic moment at the end, but after a short period of awesome silence there was the most extraordinary roar from this vast audience.’
Recognition for David Bowie from the classical world
For Bowie re-imagined in string quartet timbres, seek out the multiple tracks of Strung Out in Heaven, the haunting 2016 Amanda Palmer/Jherek Bischoff tribute release. Try telling me Bowie wouldn’t have approved. And these days, student composers are unlikely to be taken to task for finding inspiration in Bowie – certainly not by Jonathan Cole, head of composition at the Royal College of Music. ‘I’m a huge fan of David Bowie, as are my fellow composition professors Simon Holt and Mark-Anthony Turnage. We’d always encourage students to listen to the best pop/jazz and take inspiration from as wide a range of influences as possible. Bowie himself was always searching for new ways of exploring music, so he’s an ideal figure for any young musician.’
The last word from Gavin Bryars, a composer as impossible to tie down as Bowie. Bryars learned that his Jesus’ blood never failed me yet was on Bowie’s personal playlist. ‘The wife of the publican in the place where I used to have Sunday lunch was so impressed that she gave me extra helpings of Yorkshire pudding! I was taught at university to be – like Bowie – open to all musical influences and not forced to do what’s “right”. Pierre Boulez famously judged new music by deciding if it was “right” or “wrong”. But it isn’t a case of “right” or “wrong”, just good or bad. Bowie’s music proves the point.’
