Today’s Guardian

Classical music's "period instrument movement" has covered as much ground as music history can throw at it. With a tool bag of gut strings, valveless trumpets, white-noised sopranos and investigative musicology, it has tracked backwards in time from its 18th-century starting point to simulate the music of medieval Parisian troubadours, and forwards to Elgar and Wagner as they might have sounded then. Short of rearing, by barbarous means, some castrati to recreate a night at the opera in Handel's London, where else can the search for musical "authenticity" go?

 

The answer lies not in brilliantly obscure PhDs about harpsichord string lengths in 18th-century Potsdam, or experiments with grain-fed oboists - but it is almost as kinky. It lies in the world of tribute bands.

There are 60 or so Genesis impersonators around the world right now. Lots in middle Europe (a territory where unfashionable rock lives on)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, one each in Brazil and Japan, and several in the UK and north America. They have a certain following, though it is small compared with the crowds their musical parent once enjoyed, and smaller, too, than those of the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Abba stand-ins that seem now to be de rigueur at stately home summer music festivals.

The mother of all (Funnnnnyyyyy!!!)Genesis tributes comes from Montreal, and is a triumph of obsessive dedication to the cause of faithful reproduction. Taking its name from a seminal 1971 track, the Musical Box is a purist Genesis fan's dream. Not only do they restrict their repertoire to a mere five years' worth of the band's 30-year output, they produce as close a sonic and visual facsimile of the band's stage shows from 1972-75 as possible.

Of course, compared with the inspired guesswork that accompanies the "authentic" re-creation of Monteverdi, Bach or Beethoven's work, the Musical Box's task has been easy; rather than dusty scores, beaten-up instruments and performance treatises, there have been recordings and photographs to go on, and, crucially, living musicians and roadies to ask how they did it. (How many classical musos would make their first ride in a time machine a trip to Leipzig to see and hear Bach in action?)>>> Sounds like jealousy to me....

Whereas other bands might use advances in technology to recreate the sounds of the 1970s, the Musical Box go out of their way to be authentic. Ancient keyboard instruments - the eerie Mellotron, the Hammond organ, analogue synthesisers - have been brought out of retirement.

Amplifiers, Leslie cabinets and double-neck Rickenbacker guitars have been reconditioned. It is "period instrument" performance to rival any baroque or classical band. Setting out on one of Tony R Banks's intricately layered keyboard solos with "period" synthesisers rather than a preprogrammed all-in-one keyboard of 2006 is equally as daring as playing an 18th-century horn instead of its modern, valved equivalent.>>> Maybe he suggests the use of krumhorns

The Musical Box is not just about musical verisimilitude. They recreate the lighting design, the stage sets, the running order of a particular concert. Their lead singer, Denis Gagné, sports the regularly changing hairstyles, surreal masks, makeup and costume of his alter ego Peter Gabriel. He even reproduces verbatim Gabriel's bizarre, improvised monologues, which were, and are, required to kill time between numbers while guitars were retuned, synthesisers reset and slideshow carousels restocked.

That this band's musical output is not particularly creative begs all sorts of questions about the difference between reproduction and re-creation, between "tribute" music and covers of originals, and about the effect of elapsed time on what endures and what doesn't.

If popular music continues to be performed after its original creator-performers are retired or dead, it has already become something different from what it was at the point of its creation; the music is no longer the exclusive preserve of its originators.

Two fundamental differences between the cultures of classical and popular music are pop's link between live and recorded performance (the tour to promote the album) and its 50-year history of bands performing their own material. Classical music's notated, published form carries no expectation that its composer will perform it, but with the converse expectation that many different performances will emerge over time. >>> Disagree with this, because most of the classical music he refers to were written before means of copy end engraving means existed!! But Mozart spent months directing the operas he wrote for. And nothing was to day beck then, that Mozart expected his stuff to be still played three centuries later>

The nearest classical music got to the cult of the composer-performer was perhaps the pianists Chopin and Liszt. And the ensembles devoted exclusively to the music of Peter Maxwell Davies, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Michael Nyman and Steve Martland generate genuine, composer-sanctioned performances. But as Radio 3's Building a Library programme shows, one of classical music's abiding fascinations is the multiplicity of various interpretations a single piece of music can have.

And "interpretation" is an important word here, because the Musical Box's facsimile approach to Genesis's music allows for no such interpretation>>> this is not the MB's goal. They are only verbatim renditions. "Covers" of originals can be much more genuinely creative. Jeff Buckley touches heaven with Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, Brad Mehldau refashions Radiohead, and the secondary artist's personality can, at best, always shine through.

I first came across the Fab Four's Can't Buy Me Love not in its Beatles original, but by singing it as a madrigal at school (I was the pipsqueak treble, the baritone was Bernard Jenkin, now Tory MP for North Essex). With vastly varying degrees of success, there are countless other examples of "popular" music being reborn in more "classical" contexts, or taking on "classic" status - Haydn, Brahms, Mahler and Bartok orchestrating folk songs, chamber orchestral Frank Zappa, symphonic rock transcriptions, concertos fashioned out of Beatles tunes; the London Sinfonietta and Jonny Greenwood reworking Radiohead songs together; G4 making it big with Bohemian Rhapsody; the Australian Pink Floyd Show packing out the Royal Albert Hall with its slick 30th anniversary Dark Side of the Moon concerts.

Genesis from the 1970s - with its lengthy "instrumentals" and highly composed, keyboard-driven harmonic sophistication - is particularly conducive to transcription. It is no coincidence that a Norwegian piano duo has now produced two albums of Genesis arrangements, nor that Tony Banks, Genesis's keyboardist and compositional driving force, issued a orchestral disc in 2004 with the London Philharmonic. >>> I heard the first album of that Norwegian duo but although a curiosity, certainly not that interesting.

The term "tribute band" is a silly one. If the Berlin Phil perform a Beethoven symphony, they are not paying tribute to Ludwig. A new kind of rock ensemble may evolve, dedicated to playing discrete repertoire from across the band divide, the music chosen for its intrinsic merit rather than tribal allegiances. It wouldn't be a tribute band, nor a covers band, but something else - more interpretive, more ... "classical".

· The Musical Box's The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway tours the UK from February 23 to March 5

· The Australian Pink Floyd Show are on tour from March 26 to April 30

 

 

 

Otherwise an worthwhile article!!!

Thanks Chris/Syz