WQXR: Yeethoven - Great Minds Think Alike: Kanye West vs. Beethoven

WQXR
James Bennett, II

Kanye West and Beethoven

After the success of 2016’s Yeethoven composer and arranger Johan and conductor Yuga Cohler have returned for Yeethoven II, a concert focused on the similarities between the artistry of Kanye West and Ludwig van Beethoven. Besides just having a great name — who wouldn’t want to explore the limits of that wondrous portmanteau — the creators of the project see it as a way to explore the ways in which artists at the top of their game can have a deep impact on the culture beyond their musical influence.

With Kanye’s release of 2013’s Yeezus, the Yeethoven creators were taken by his abandonment of verse-chorus-verse conventions of most popular music and his embrace of a freer, more adventurous sound. Johan and Cohler worked backwards to find Beethoven, but believe their connections fit. For example: the dynamic shifts in the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony share a similar quality with Kanye’s “Blood On the Leaves.”

Some may bristle at the mere mention of these two names in the same breath, but if you look hard enough, it isn’t difficult to find parallels between the two — or of many great artists, for that matter.

For the full story by WQXR, click here.

KUSC: What Happens When You Mix Beethoven and Kanye West?

KUSC

Yuga Cohler and Johan take the stage during a performance of “Yeethoven”

The worlds of classical music and hip-hop may seem too far apart to ever come together in any meaningful way. However, two artists (and a youth orchestra) are looking to remix the way we think about these two different art forms: composer/arranger Johan and conductor Yuga Cohler, the music director of the Young Musicians Debut Chamber Orchestra.

Together, Cohler and Johan have put together a concert of mash-ups of the music of composer Ludwig van Beethoven and hip-hop artist Kanye West. The project is called Yeethoven and premiered last year. Now, they’re back for Yeethoven II, taking place on December 14 at the Belasco Theater in Downtown Los Angeles.

For more information about the project, I interviewed Johan and Cohler.

BL: Where did this idea for combining the music of Beethoven and Kanye West come from?

J & YC: We both have been interested in Kanye’s music for years, and so have many of our friends in the classical world. We wanted to examine what it was about his music, especially on his last few albums, that was so compelling to us as classical musicians. The idea of putting Kanye West side-by-side on a concert with a similar iconoclast from the classical world, such as Beethoven, seemed like a really cool way to illustrate it for people.

BL: From a musical/structural standpoint, what sorts of similarities are there between Beethoven’s and Kanye’s music?

J & YC: Starting with his album Yeezus, Kanye’s music moved away from traditional song formats and towards more freely developed “pieces”. This allowed him to feature extreme juxtapositions between material of different characters, to a degree that felt very Beethovenian to us. For example, the sudden dynamic contrasts found in Kanye’s “Blood on the Leaves” struck us as similar to the subito character changes in the famous Fifth Symphony. Our concert focuses on six of these parameters for comparison, with a pair of pieces illustrating each one.

BL: How did you assemble the scores? What led you to make the musical decisions that you made?

J & YC: We began by finding Kanye songs that felt most conducive to these types of comparisons, while also being likely to translate well to the orchestral format. Simultaneously, we looked for pieces by Beethoven that housed similarly innovative structural elements and held long discussions about what common musical kernel defined both the Kanye song and the Beethoven piece. Johan then transcribed the Kanye works and orchestrated them, finding specific instrumentations that would approximate the sound of the original songs. Once he had an orchestrated version of each Kanye excerpt, he developed them into full pieces.

BL: How big, do you think, is the Venn diagram intersection area of classical music lovers and hip-hop lovers? Do you think there are more classical fans who enjoy hip-hop or more hip-hop fans who enjoy classical?

J & YC: That’s a great question. Many young classical musicians have very wide-ranging taste, and many also have what feels like a newish desire to reach outside of the classical music community. Hip-hop is probably the most adventurous genre of popular music right now so it makes sense that it would receive a lot of attention from curious young musicians. Going the other direction, it’s harder to say. Fans of adventurous pop music seem to respect classical music a lot without necessarily consuming that much of it. We’re both very interested in changing this.

BL: How have audiences responded to Yeethoven?

J & YC: More enthusiastically and attentively than we ever could’ve dreamed, honestly. We talk briefly throughout the concert about the formal elements in each piece, and last year we witnessed the audience erupting into spontaneous applause when the exact techniques we referred to appeared later in the actual music. That level of perception from an audience mostly unused to classical concerts was something we never anticipated.

BL: It feels like genre is becoming less and less important to music consumers. I get the sense that most people categorize music into two groups: “stuff I like” and “stuff I don’t like.” Are you seeing that also?

J & YC: That definitely seems accurate. The way streaming platforms organize music allows people to move much more fluidly between genres. There are still boundaries, but they seem to have more to do with the context in which people want to experience music. Someone might have a wide variety of genre-spanning works which are unified only by the fact that they like to study to them, and a separate, equally wide range of music they like to experience at a party or on the dance floor. In our view, classical music at its best is a spectacular emotional and sensory experience, and can most effectively cater to people seeking that type of immersion.

BL: Anything else you’d like to add?

J & YC: We’re just really grateful to YMF for taking a risk on this event with us. It matters more now than ever that organizations like that are open to experimenting with the way classical music fits into the public consciousness.

The Young Musicians Foundation Debut Chamber Chamber Orchestra performs Yeethoven II on December 14 at the Belasco Theater in Downtown Los Angeles. Johan is the composer/arranger of the show. Yuga Cohen, music director of the YMFDCO, will conduct.

GQ: An Orchestra Is Mashing Up Kanye West’s Hits with Beethoven’s to Create “Yeethoven”

GQ
By Nicole Silverberg

It's pretty epic

Los Angeles's Debut Orchestra of the Young Musicians Foundation is taking a bold approach to their Great Music Series, performing some of Beethoven's classic works alongside Kanye West's Yeezus to create the perfectly titled "Yeethoven." I'm sure it tickles Kanye's fancy to be put alongside someone as musically revered as Beethoven, but it actually works. While it seems a little strange, partially because the best part of Kanye's music is frequently, you know, Kanye rapping, when you listen to the preview, it makes sense.

Yeezus and hits by Beethoven, including "Egmont Overture" and "String Quartet No. 14 (op. 131)," are played alongside each other and reveal some striking similarities. The conductor Yuga Cohler explains that both Beethoven and Yeezy make music with a "brashness creating wild contrast, thrashing juxtapositions within a single bar of music," which isn't exactly what I think of when I'm listening to "I Am a God," but now that Cohler said it, I'm like, Oh, yeah!

Cohler said he chose Kanye and Beethoven because they both have a "willingness to ruthlessly abandon tradition, and their influence on that larger culture can't be overstated." Seeing as Yeezy is getting his own orchestral arrangements, I'm gonna have to agree. Just one question: Does this mean I have to start wearing gowns and pearls to his concerts?

Rolling Stones: 'Yeethoven' Concert to Juxtapose Music of Kanye West, Beethoven

Rolling Stones
By Brittany Spanos

The music of Kanye West and Beethoven will be compared and spliced up by a 70-piece orchestra during a Los Angeles concert.

On April 16th, Beethoven will meet Kanye West when a 70-piece orchestra mashes up and reimagines the work of the two artists. The program is part of the Great Music Series hosted by the Young Musicians Foundation.

Co-curated by conductor Yuga Cohler and arranger Stephen Feigenbaum, "Yeethoven" aims to show the commonalities between the seemingly dissimilar artists. "Obviously, they work within very different traditions," a voiceover reflects in the promotional clip for the concert. "Their willingness to ruthlessly upend tradition and their influence on the larger culture can't be overstated."

The concert will feature six works by Beethoven and six works from West's Yeezus that will be "juxtaposed" and "spliced together" by the orchestra live. It will be put on for free at the Aratani Theatre — Japanese American Cultural & Community Center in Los Angeles.

In 2012, a year before West released Yeezus, he compared himself to the classical composer during a concert in Atlantic City. "I am flawed as a human being. I am flawed as a person. As a man, I am flawed, but my music is perfect," he began. "This is the best you're gonna get ladies and gentlemen in this lifetime, I'm sorry. You could go back to Beethoven and shit, but as far as this lifetime, though, this is all you got."

Los Angeles Times: Kanye meets Beethoven: How young musicians are mixing classical with pop

Photo: Kanye: Flickr/David Shankbone. Beethoven: Shutterstock

The Los Angeles Times
By Mark Swed

It wasn't quite Little Coachella in Little Tokyo. But as if out of nowhere, more than 1,000 hip-hop fans, some wearing Kanye West T-shirts, descended on the Aratani Theatre. A few had arrived as early as noon on Saturday and waited in the hot sun for a 7:30 p.m. concert.

Once the crowd had taken over San Pedro Street, the police came by to see what was going on. It was no big deal, they were assured, simply a queue for free tickets to the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra's Beethoven concert.

Make that Yeethoven, short for "Yeezus" (West's 2013 album) and Beethoven.

Meanwhile, not far away in Glendale, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra sandwiched between the tame "Classical Symphony" of Prokofiev and "Clock" Symphony of Haydn a new cello concerto by Mason Bates, who has one foot in electronica and moonlights as a DJ.

Is something going on? Yes and no.

Every generation genre-bends, each in its own way. They always have and, no doubt, always will. Eyebrows go up and they go back down. But by now it has gotten pretty hard to shock.

What does seem new is the lack of controversy. One almost longs for the days when Parisians rioted the premiere of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," the Viennese practically threw Mahler out of town for smudging the sacred symphonic art form with street music, and the 1950s avant-garde horrified the establishment with pursuits that redefined the definition of music.

I heard the Sunday night repeat of LACO's program at UCLA, and for both this and the YMF event Saturday, the musical and social welcoming mat easily co-opted rebellion. Still, it is hard to complain about attaining, through music, a unifying feel-good mood in our otherwise divisive feel-bad times. "Yeezy season approachin'," West tells us. Could that be the revolution we need?

What made "Yeethoven" especially engaging was its unmistakably sincere musical roots. The Debut Orchestra, a training ensemble for instrumentalists and conductors founded in 1955, happens to boast among its alumni André Previn and Michael Tilson Thomas, famed for their groundbreaking mixing of symphonic and pop worlds. The 26-year-old Juilliard-trained YMF music director Yuga Cohler is in their mold, a self-proclaimed hip-hop fan since childhood who does not see that and Beethoven as worlds in opposition.

A young composer of like mind, Stephen Feigenbaum, served as "Yeethoven" arranger and co-curator. Six Beethoven scores were paired with songs from "Yeezus," each grouping given a theme — Form, Contrast, Harmony, Rhythm, Gesture and Will — representing qualities Cohler and Feigenbaum find shared across centuries and cultures by Beethoven and West.

Introducing the pairings, Feigenbaum noted the chaotic, over-the-top nature of Beethoven's "Egmont" Overture and West's "New Slaves" or the heroic yet ambiguous character of the snappy second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony and "Hold My Liquor." These are, of course, all general enough qualities that you could make the same case for any number of composers.

In fact, dissimilarities could be more striking than similarities, beginning with an informal pop crowd that little resembled the formal musicians on stage. Neither do Beethoven and West sound alike. And while West does profess some of Beethoven's democratic ideals and confidence, there are also major differences, such as the pop star's attitude toward women so radically opposed to Beethoven's idealized "Immortal Beloved." And, of course, orchestra and pop concert settings have little in common.

Yet "Egmont" and "New Slaves" are, each in its own way, transgressive arguments for freedom. Putting West in orchestral dress and removing the vocals meant avoiding anything offensive. Were his language to be used in a traditional classical concert (or this newspaper, for that matter), there really would be trouble.

All but two of the pairs were mash-ups. Beethoven seldom upgraded West, rather West infected Beethoven with contemporary funk and spunk. The final mash-up mattered most. An orchestral arrangement of the last movement of the Opus 131 string quartet undercut Beethoven at his most spiritually transformative with the raunchy side of West in "On Sight." Cohler and Feigenbaum's theme was Will, but it could just as easily have been Impurity. Beethoven kept earthy, and West's music rose spiritually higher than you might have otherwise expected.

For the enthusiastic crowd (200 or more were turned away), every recognizable West hook got a shout out and Beethoven got respect. Cohler conducted with surety and security. The orchestra, though looking a little dazed in these surroundings, played with a joyful sense of making a history.

The crowd at Royce Hall on Sunday night was more standard issue for LACO, with but a few more young people than normal in attendance. (I wonder what would happen with audiences at UCLA if the school eliminated its $12 parking fee for concerts.) Much of the interest here focused on Matthew Halls, the British conductor who became music director of the Oregon Bach Festival two years ago and whose strong showing makes him a credible candidate in LACO's music director search.

An all-around early music guy whose recording of Bach harpsichord suites is a knockout, Halls also happens to be big on 19th century opera, symphonic blockbusters and contemporary music. He went for boldness in both Prokofiev and Haydn, getting some of the loudest playing I've heard from the orchestra.

But he put most of his attention on Bates' new Cello Concerto, which had its premiere earlier this year with the Seattle Symphony (conducted by Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla). It was written for Joshua Roman, who has his own street cred. The popular young cellist will, for instance, be playing at Amoeba Music on Wednesday, and he showed up at Royce in a showy print suit reminiscent of '60s Carnaby Street.

Bates is everywhere. The new composer-in-residence of the Kennedy Center (a first), he will have his next premiere streamed next week on the San Francisco Symphony Facebook page (believed to be a first for a major orchestra). He has lively orchestral imagination excellent for evoking specific sonic environments (such as primordial life or a future colony in Iceland) by adding beats and electronica effects to snappy melodies.

The Cello Concerto is more traditional. It includes instances of lightweight jazziness and commercial pop. It exploits Roman's flowery virtuosity and offers the cellist diverting light touches — such as bouncing the bow on the strings and plucking them with a guitar pick. But with Roman's propensity for cuteness, this concerto becomes less the transgressive expansion of our musical vocabulary than a contrivance suitable for taming the "monster about to come alive again" that West unleashes in "Yeezus" and Cohler cavorts with in "Yeethoven."