This week London’s Medieval Baebes will be jetting across the Atlantic to begin their scarcely anticipated Canadian tour, but it’s not just the ocean they will be crossing over.
The Baebes, according to their website, are ‘eight young women who share a passion for music several centuries old but are as 21st century as they come.’ Their songs are medievally-inspired pop ballads, big on vocals, with a bizarre minstrel-twist. This is crossover music and it sells.
For Joe McLellan, classical music critic emeritus of The Washington Post, ensembles like the Baebes should be approached with caution. ‘For some music-lovers,’ he writes, ‘”crossover” is a dirty word…When an opera singer tries to make a quick buck singing pop material with a foreign accent and too much vibrato, obviously “slummin'”, the result can be a musical disaster.’
The annals of music history are littered with work from crossover artists best forgotten (try violinist Nigel Kennedy’s Riders on the storm – The Doors Concerto) and yet without the crossover tradition musicianship would still be in the dark ages.
Diversity and experimentation is integral to the development of any art form. It was the key that opened the door for rock music during the fifties and sixties, itself a fusion of styles and techniques, mainly of the black rural Blues musicians who moved up from the South after WWII.
Of course black musicians had began ‘crossing over’, selling records in what were traditionally white markets, decades earlier. The History Matters online project asserts: ‘Expansion and commercialization extended a process that began with the minstrel show: songs that had once been restricted to ethnic minorities or immigrant groups were marketed to the entire nation.’
At the time white artists such as Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, and later, The Rolling Stones, began appropriating black blues, country and folk music to create their own unique takes on the emergent sound of rock ‘n’ roll, ‘crossing over’ was seen in a predominantly positive light.
And as far as many serious musicians are concerned, it still is. With respect to jazz, National Arts Journalism Program (NAJP) research fellow, Larry Blumenfeld, writes that crossover is ‘a blessing’ and that ‘American jazz players looking to Cuba and Brazil these days retrace a diaspora that gave rise to jazz in the first place.’
Brian Bell, producer of the Boston Symphony radio broadcasts for WGBH in Boston, puts it simply thus: ‘What works musically is what is going to work. If it [crossover] is staged and it has kind of that dollar sign behind the thing and a marketing sort of thing, I guarantee you, it won’t fly. But if there’s an artistic conviction behind it, it’ll work.’
It is beyond doubt that artistic conviction was profuse among the early rock musicians but discerning audiences have become weary and wary of the succession of manufactured ‘groups’ formed solely to make punters part with their cash. Crossover has become a tired word, almost an insult,’ writes Peter Philips, ‘Too much money has been made out of dumbing down what originally was something of quality for anyone to have much respect for the processes involved. And once a piece of music or an artist has been thus dumbed, what do we think of them then? What is the future for Vivaldi’s Four Seasons amongst melomanes, let alone Vanessa Mae?’
And yet even sceptics have reason to be cheerful. Because the artists are still at it, leading the charge for innovative exciting sounds. And all the dumbed down music marketing executives in the world could not prevent them from producing the future sounds that will entertain, inspire and cross over into territory as yet unheard.
