The end of musical civilisation as we know it, says Tom Service. Epic hoax, or compelling and captivating - what do you think of a symphonic project that melds Brahms’s First Symphony with Radiohead’s OK Computer?

Readers, meet Steve Hackman. Steve Hackman meet the Guardian. For those of you who don’t know him, Hackman is the genius (or not … more on this later) who has fused Brahms’s First Symphony and Radiohead’s OK Computer. They’re both masterpieces in their own right, so together, surely they would produce the Ultimate Mash-terpiece? Bradiohead? Radiohahms?

And he’s done the same with Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony and Coldplay, too. He’s conducting the Brahms/Radiohead project tonight with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra; you can also watch both pieces in previous performances (Bradiohead and ColdBeethoven) by the Colorado Music Festival Orchestra.

And when you do, you can weep at the breathtaking cultural violence done to both OK Computer and to the First Symphony in one of the most remarkably cynically conceived musical projects I think I’ve ever heard.

The problem isn’t so much the mashing up – well, I mean it absolutely is, but bear with – as the reasons behind it. Berio, John Zorn and the whole culture of sampling across all the musical art forms relies on the creative juxtaposition and superimposition of pre-existing musical fragments, and is an essential part of compositional practice wherever you work in music. The question is why you’re doing it. There are infinite reasons why putting Stockhausen, Beckett, Boulez, Beethoven, Ravel and Debussy on top of and among the bars of the scherzo of Mahler’s Second Symphony is so dazzling when Berio does it in the third movement of his Sinfonia.

Berio’s idea was to compose-out the musical and cultural connections that are subcutaneously (subcutaurally, ie under the skin of your hearing, ought to be a word but isn’t – yet …) present when a brilliantly creative mind hears the Mahler. What Berio isn’t trying to do is to fuse anything together, or to show that Mahler and the other composers he quotes from are somehow on the same creative page. Just the opposite.

Whereas – oh sweet goodness, whereas – sorry, I’m in the third movement of Hackman’s Bradiohead right now, and – oh God, no! – Hackman’s idea is to show that Radiohead and Coldplay are “the Debussys of today”, by creating connections, as seamlessly as possible, between the textures of Brahms’s symphony and his (technically accomplished, I’ll give him that) arrangements of the pop tracks.

Hackman calls it “compelling and captivating”:

The envelope of what is possible and permissible is constantly pushed, with Radiohead songs being superimposed above Brahms’s music, Radiohead’s melodies being altered to coexist with Brahms’ harmonies, the motives of one interjected into the other, and departures from the score left and right to accommodate journeys into a new compelling and captivating world. Lovers of Brahms will appreciate that the sound world always adheres to his late-romantic and densely contrapuntal style; lovers of Radiohead will enjoy a unique and virtuosic re-interpretation of their repertoire. And both will hopefully become fans of music they’ve never heard before!

I beg to differ. Have we really reached this nadir of all musical cultures where we can no longer distinguish the meaningful differences between anything, and that the only index of pop music’s quality is how it can be smeared within a symphony, or the only way that classical music can be relevant is if it’s oleaginised as part of this nausea-inducing mash-up? (To be clear: the marvellous thing about Radiohead and Brahms is that they’re different, that they are both defining classics of their respective genres. That’s enough for either of them, and it ought to be enough for us. We don’t need to fuse them for that to be true …)

Of course we haven’t. This is just an isolatedly insane project of musical relativism gone stark staring bonkers. Music and the internet did exist before I watched Hackman’s mash-ups. Didn’t they? Good grief. It’s hard to get the sound of the Eroica’s opening chords melding into Coldplay – out of my brain.



It’s just occurred to me that the only possible way to hear this properly, apart from as an epic hoax, is not to know anything about either Beethoven or Coldplay, Radiohead or Brahms. Then you might be able to listen to it without your stomach exploding. Possibly. If you’re in that lucky yet benighted group of listeners, I salute you.

