Orchestral music and rock music will collide tonight at the Union Theater.
At its concert, the LSU Symphony Orchestra will be performing the “Song Reader Symphony,” an arrangement of six songs from Beck Hansen’s “Song Reader.”
Beck is an American alternative-rock musician who rose to fame in the mid-’90s with his 1993 single, “Loser.” Since then, Beck has had a continuously successful music career with genre-crossing albums such as “Odelay,” the particularly hip-hop influenced “Midnite Vultures” and the singer/songwriter-style “Sea Change.”
In December 2012, Beck released “Song Reader,” a 20-song album in the form of an intricately designed book of sheet music. For over a year, Beck didn’t release any studio versions of the songs.
In an interview with National Public Radio, Beck said the idea was for anyone to be able to create their own interpretation of the songs. The result was thousands of YouTube videos of amateur and professional musicians performing the songs.
The “Song Reader Symphony” was orchestrated by associate professor of percussion Brett Dietz, who will also be conducting the piece.
“I originally arranged the entire ‘Song Reader’ for New Music Raleigh, a group in Raleigh, North Carolina, that’s primarily interested in performing new orchestral music,” Dietz said.
The songs that will be played tonight, however, are an entirely different arrangement made specifically for the LSU Symphony Orchestra.
“A while back, [symphony orchestra conductor] Carlos Riazuelo asked me to write a new piece for him,” Dietz said. “I told him I thought Beck’s ‘Song Reader’ would work perfectly, and he went with it, so I arranged the piece for strings, brass, woodwinds, and percussion sections — the full orchestra. Most of what I’ve done is simply to transcribe straight from the album, but I have added a few things.”
Mostly, solo instrumentalists will be playing the melodies of the songs. The only song that will have a vocalist is “America, Here’s My Boy,” featuring associate voice professor Loraine Sims.
“It’s a really interesting song. It starts out sounding like a war march, but in the end, it turns into a very anti-war song, with the lyrics changing thematically and literally from, ‘America, here’s my boy’ to ‘America, where is my boy?”’ Dietz said.
In total, the six-song cycle is about 30 minutes long. The “Song Reader Symphony” will be followed by orchestra performances of composer Michael Daugherty’s “Reflections on the Mississippi,” and Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” orchestrated by Maurice Ravel.
“Tons of bands­—like, say, Beck or Radiohead — are constantly re-inventing themselves, Dietz said. “Orchestras will do well to try to constantly reinvent themselves too. I think this is a great step in that vein.”
You can reach Tyler Fontenot on Twitter @TylerFontenot83.