Mashing Up Ludwig

One of the great things about living in the digital age is the easy availability of incredible pockets of creativity that simply wouldn't have found any distribution channel before the era of the internet and user-generated content. YouTube, in particular, has become a way for talented people to share the kind of wildly creative but commercially non-viable projects that would otherwise likely never have existed.

I suspect that no musical genre has benefited from this phenomenon more than hip-hop. (And no genre has benefited less than classical, for a number of frustrating reasons that I'll leave for another day.) As a style that has always specialized in piggybacking on other genres through sampling and other techniques, hip-hop is uniquely positioned to take advantage of technologies like "autotuning," which allows the user to manipulate the pitch of voices and sounds. In other words, what would seem gimmicky and trite in, say, jazz, just comes off as fun and creative in hip-hop.

But gimmickry can be fun, too, and I've spotted a number of truly impressive efforts lately that make silly but impressive use of autotuning. For instance, you know that awful infomercial that seems to be on every half-hour or so lately? Wouldn't it be a lot more tolerable if that smirky little Vince character had a beat you could dance to?



Even better, wouldn't hot-button issues like gay marriage and climate change be a whole lot easier for everyone to deal with if the talking heads on TV sounded like this...?



I bring all this up because we're playing Beethoven's 7th this week, and along with being one of my favorite pieces in the world to play, it's a symphony that a good friend of mine once did something similarly creative with. If you've ever watched South Park, you know that there's a wheelchair-bound character named Timmy who can only say his own name. He says it a lot, and with great enthusiasm every time. In fact, his energy level is so high that my friend thought it could just about match the energy he'd heard that week at Orchestra Hall, where we'd been playing Beethoven's 7th. And it wasn't long before I was handed a homemade CD featuring this brilliant mash-up. (Listener advisory: it starts off pretty subtly - definitely listen all the way through to get the full impact...)



The credit for that little bit of genius goes to Mr. Benjamin Johnson of St. Paul, Minnesota. Benjamin's a former dancer with James Sewell Ballet, and these days makes his living as a massage therapist in Northeast Minneapolis. He also went to a heck of a lot of trouble to dig up this file when it became clear that everyone else he or I had ever given it to had lost it. Somebody buy that boy an auto-tuner...