Greg Stepanich

'Classical' also means classic

A colleague here at The Post asked me once to blog about what classical music actually is, and I have found myself in the last couple days giving this question some thought.

And the reason I started thinking about this question again is that there is a current television commercial out that bothers me. It’s not a commercial that brings in a bunch of Beethoven for elevated comic effect, or uses operatic love duets to sell food.

This is a commercial that manhandles a 1960s pop song, and the reason it bothers me has something to do with what we mean when we say classical.

It’s a commercial for iShares, and most of the time I hear it rather than see it because the TV in our section of the newsroom is behind me and I have to turn around if I want to look at it. But I looked at it the other day because I wanted to know who had done the commercial, and most of it consists of tableaux of frustrated people that have reached a point of bitterness with their mutual funds.

The music, though, I have heard, and it‚s a parody rewrite of the Burt Bacharach-Hal David hippy-dippy hit from 1965, What the World Needs Now Is Love. This never has been one of my favorite songs, and I suppose one of the reasons it was chosen for this commercial is that not a lot of people would complain if it was toyed with. Or maybe the money was simply too good to turn down for whoever’s controlling the rights.

In the commercial, we hear two somber, slow minor chords, then a singer with one of those had-a-hard-night confessional baritones opines that what the world needs now is clarity, and fresh ideas, and more transparency, and other such laudable business concepts, and the takeaway message is that exchange-traded funds represent your chance to get away from all the nonsense, as another part of the parody lyric has it.

It’s actually a very effective, memorable piece of commercial making, but it bugs me. Here’s why: The song itself, while easy enough to laugh at, already is something of a classic. It’s canonical, even though it came from a cheesy era, and the thing about canonical works is that while they can be endlessly interpreted and made new, you try not to vandalize them.

I admire the craft that went into Bacharach’s jazz waltz, whose melody uses the ambiguity of a minor seventh to moody effect, and Hal David’s lyric matches the tune very well (I don‚t know which came first, but if it was the music, that could not have been an easy writing assignment). As a whole, the song is what it is, and deserves respect for that, whether anyone likes it anymore or not.

Pop songs are much in evidence as video accompaniments these days: Jerry Bruckheimer rolls out the Who catalog with each of his CSI theme songs, Louis Armstrong’s version of What a Wonderful World has been used on a couple different commercials, and Dinah Washington can be heard singing a Quincy Jones chart for the DoubleTree hotel chain. But in each of these cases, the songs themselves haven’t been changed, though you can argue about the uses to which they were put.

One of the great joys of classical music in the form we usually think of it is that we are reinvigorating works of art that often are centuries old, designed for very different audiences, and yet they speak with unabridged passion to our ears, too.

In the widest sense, I’d argue that “classical” means canonical, and that’s what those radio stations playing classic rock mean when they program those old Led Zep records, and what tribute bands like the Beatles cover band The Fab Faux mean when they recreate those George Martin arrangements with such fidelity.

So: “Classical” music can also mean classic music, or music that’s been accepted by listeners as an intact work of art, and even if we’re not necessarily going to go out and find a club where someone's singing Bacharach and David, the least we can do is understand that even commercially oriented works from an orange-suede time can be classics, and classical, too.

Here’s a vintage clip of Jackie DeShannon, probably from 1965:

Here’s Dionne Warwick with what I think of as the classic Bacharach sound, from 1970:

And this is an Australian vocalist named Ricki-Lee Coulter in a somewhat overblown but powerful version from late last year: