Back towards the early 2000s, we saw a melding of two different types of music, rock and symphonic, sweeping the nation, as city symphonies invited well-known rock 'n roll acts onto their stage for a new type of entertainment and culture: orchestral rock shows.
Sometimes it showcased instrumentation that had been on bands’ releases, (with even more classical arrangements added,) sometimes it added to their fairly typical rock n roll fair, but it was always an embellishment that brought younger people out to symphony halls and created a bridge for older people to the music that was popular at the time.
Well, the 90’s staple and still-rocking-it, Beck, has announced a nine-show orchestral tour in eight cities this summer. Beck, who is familiar with orchestral colorings, working with his father and composer, David Campbell, on his hit albums, Sea Change and Morning Phase, plans to play some of those songs live. But he’s also planning to play songs from his albums Odelay and Mutations, along with other hit songs, to the crowds that will gather in symphony halls throughout the nation.
Beck is used to melding alternative rock with classical music
Beck is a class act, and where his early songs found him genre-hopping between alternative rock and hip hop, for example, it is no surprise to see him stretching his musical wings out even more. He already did a couple of successful symphonic shows last year at Carnegie Hall with a 73-piece orchestra, so he must be pretty confident going into these shows.
His most orchestrated album, Morning Phase, won a Grammy in 2015, an album which was a surprise win for Beck, considering that it had none of the cooler-than-cool gimmicks that he utilized in former albums and has utilized since.
But Beck is not just a fad, and these symphonic concerts are proof that Beck is a musician who does it for the music, as much as anything else. If you’re lucky enough to be in one of the cities he’s playing in (or can travel to), these will be shows that you don’t want to miss.
Beck is a national treasure, and as places like the Kennedy Center lose great orchestral champions like Ben Folds, it is all the more of a gift and a responsibility to support artists branching out into the world of building bridges instead of creating barriers to real connection through music. The world of music has become a great “melting pot” of genres over the last fifty or so years, and Beck has always been one leading in the charge in that respect.