Hello everyone, piano friends, I wanted to suggest this video that I came across a few weeks ago.
The video in question features Celentano's song "Ti penso e cambia il mondo". Why am I presenting this video to you? Perhaps many of you already know that this song can be considered a "twin", at least in the chords, to a prelude by none other than Chopin (prelude op 28 n20)! In practice, it is as if Celentano "gave voice" to Chopin's prelude... someone, reading the YouTube comments, criticized Celentano for plagiarism... but I sincerely find this thing very fascinating! Sometimes it is as if some pieces of classical music hide words within them, held back because perhaps classical music doesn't need words to express itself... but when this also happens, it seems to me that I have found a ground where classical meets light music.
Think that I had listened to it at the San Remo festival completely rearranged and it still seemed familiar to me... I was perplexed. My mother said: wow, this Celentano song is beautiful hahahahahah. She should have said, this Chopin song is beautiful :-)
If you hear the rearranged version at the Sanremo festival, it is unrecognizable. The harmonic base is there but it is not easy to recognize it.
The problem is not the practice itself, the problem is how Celentano does it... music history is full of songs with and without words; to name one, Liszt's very famous Liebestraum No. 3 is both a Lied "with words" and a Lied "without words," wonderful in both versions. We are talking about two "authorial" variants, both written by Liszt, but there are different examples even in "light" music: De André's "La canzone dell'amore perduto" is set to Telemann's music, taken from the adagio of one of his trumpet concertos.
Now, regardless of the fact that taking a Telemann concerto and turning it into a song is a more intriguing thing, in my opinion, compared to taking Chopin's "chords"... De André's lyrics, as usual, are on an incomparable level to Celentano's. What service are you doing for Chopin and music in general by putting text of that ugliness onto vaguely known music? Maximum result with minimum effort!
Ah well, you're opening a floodgate... I love De André! And anyway, regardless of personal tastes (Carlos, long live frankness! everyone has their own tastes), this was precisely what interested me... to know your impressions on the fusion that sometimes occurs between classical and light music.. =)
C
Carlos
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Reply 6 by Carlos
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Daniele87 wrote:
Ah well, you're opening a wide door... I love De André! and anyway, regardless of personal tastes (Carlos, long live frankness! everyone has their own tastes), it was precisely this that interested me... to know your impressions on the fusion that sometimes occurs between classical and light music.. =)
No no, one moment: I did not express a judgment on the "fusion" of genres, but only on this song, which is something appalling (IMHO). But the song, not the mixture of genres in general...
besides, as usual, looking at history one might be a little less surprised by things that are not new at all.
I always remember that the "song" form is a traditional form, and that in current studies of early music no one would dream of truly distinguishing between "light" music and ... "non-light" music. The presence of traditional, folk, "pop" melodies in classical musical pieces (which would be the opposite of what we are discussing) is pervasive in every musical period. And if our musical culture were not so obtusely "instrument-centric," meaning it was not limited to pianism and symphonism, this discussion probably wouldn't have even started, given that the international vocal tradition (especially chamber music) sees very few differences (in value) between light music and less light music
