Opus Bowie

This week, I watched the BBC’s “Bowie” Prom concert on the TV. I enjoy the Proms concerts (well, apart from the Last Night which I find mawkishly cringe-worthy) with their eclectic mix of the old, new, familiar and obscure and enjoy the somewhat leftfield performances that they throw in. In the past this has included concerts based around the music of Doctor Who or Jazz orientated themes. As David Bowie died earlier this year they chose to do a prom based around his music. Now, I enjoyed the concert but I have to say that it wasn’t quite what I expected and did rather push the question as to what counts as “Classical” music.

My rather excessive record collection is arranged in a perfectly logical alphabetical order of A-Z by performer apart from the classical section which I keep separately and arrange A-Z by composer. I don’t regard the classical section as being anything especially different from the rest other than I approach it from another angle as I am more concerned about the authorship of the works rather than the performance. Interestingly, I do have a couple of David Bowie works in the classical section but this come under “G” for Philip Glass who based two of his symphonies on the music from Bowie’s albums “Low” and “Heroes”.

I’d actually expected the Proms concert to include one or both of these but as it was they re-arranged many of his songs to have a (mostly) orchestral backing with mainly pop and rock music vocalists – there was one classical singer amongst them but I don’t think it really suited his music. Of the others, they worked pretty well although John Cale was really too close to Bowie’s style and Marc Almond would have benefitted from a more minimalist approach to the orchestration (in fact closer to the sparseness of Soft Cell). But was this really a classical performance or simply a rock gig with orchestration?

“Classical” is really somewhat of a misnomer as it really only covers a period of a few decades between 1750 to 1820 but most people “sort of know” this as meaning anything that is performed by trained musicians from a score produced by the original composer. This is unlike Folk which is an aural tradition, Jazz which incorporates many elements of improvisation and interpretation, and Rock which is tied more to the recorded medium. I suppose what I mean by "classical" is a performance by trained musicians of works as the composer originally scored them and on that basis I’m not sure whether the Bowie Prom really counts. On the other hand, I enjoyed the concert both as a fan of Bowie’s work and of the whole concept of the Proms. So what could be next? A Heavy Metal Prom? Don’t laugh – I really think that one could work. Someone sign up Bruce Dickenson now!