Popular musicians have been stealing from classical music for ever

BBC Radio 4
Gary Barlow guested on Desert Island Discs Credit: BBC

Where do pop musicians get some of their best tunes? The answer it turns out, is classical music. Gary Barlow, lead singer of Take That, has just let the cat out of the bag. Back in the mid-1990s he was suffering from writer’s block and got inspiration from a certain great classical composer. On Sunday’s edition of BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, he confessed it was Elgar wot done it; to be exact it was the famous Nimrod Variation from the Enigma Variations. 

Barlow is hardly the first. Popular musicians have been stealing from classical music for ever. The crime goes back at least as far as the 1938 song My Reverie, based on Debussy, and the 1953 musical Kismet, lifted almost entirely from the Russian composer Borodin. Come forward to the pop era and the examples multiply.

There’s Procul Harum’s Whiter Shade of Pale, a nifty amalgamation of two pieces by Bach, S Club 7’s Natural, one of many songs that borrows from Fauré’s Pavane, Radiohead’s Exit Music for a Film, which leans heavily on Chopin’s Fourth Prelude. Last month, at the Ceremony of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall, I was amused to hear a shameless rip-off of Puccini’s Nessun Dorma, in McFly’s hit Born to Fly.

So why do they do it? According to Barlow, the secret of Nimrod’s power is its simplicity.  “I'd been putting together minor major sevenths [chords], augmented sixths and demolished twelfths…I had to find some simplicity. [Nimrod] gave me a whole new landscape to build melody and lyrics on top of."

Well, I wouldn’t go all the way with Barlow. Classical composers have been known to mess with some pretty complicated stuff involving sevenths and augmented sixths, though maybe not the demolished twelfth. And Elgar’s Nimrod isn’t so simple. I wonder if Barlow noticed the clever way Elgar constructed the melody by taking a rhythm and repeating it first forward and then backwards (Elgar loved games of that kind).

It’s frankly hard to discern any direct influence of Elgar on Take That. What is certainly true is that Take That’s songs are rooted in the grand simplicities Barlow tells us he found in Elgar’s music. He realised that what gives classical music its extraordinary power is the combination of an archetypal and therefore simple harmonic and melodic template, with a twist that makes it seem new.

Take Pachelbel’s Canon, the basis of numerous pop-songs including the Pet Shop Boy’s Go West. Pachelbel didn’t invent that irresistible repeating bass, which was a commonplace of Renaissance music. But the contrapuntal pile-up he contrived over the top gave it new life. In the game of creative theft pop isn’t the only perpetrator, and classical music isn’t the only victim. They both steal, from the eternal well-springs of music.

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