“What does Beethoven really have to do with electronic music?” Lake George Music Festival Music Director and Conductor Roger Kalia posed this question to the crowd of several hundred that gathered last night in Shepard Park for the Festival’s “Sounds of our Time” concert. The event brought together LA-based EDM group Mako and the LGMF Orchestra to demonstrate the connection between classical and electronic dance music. The “Sounds of our Times” series, created by Kalia, is a new feature of the classical music festival, developed to explore relationships across different musical genres.
Mako is the duo of Alex Seaver and Logan Light. The pair are rising stars in the EDM genre with their tracks Smoke Filled Room and I won’t Let You Walk Away both making Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart. Seaver is a classically trained horn player from Julliard. “I actually went to school with a couple of these guys,” Seaver says, pointing to orchestra musicians behind him on the stage. “I’ve always loved movie music; it’s been one of my passions. After I graduated from school, I went down to Los Angeles to pursue that…I met Logan. He introduced me to electronic music, then, all of a sudden, everything started happening at once.”
Kalia says he met Seaver in 2010 at the Aspen Music Festival, and when he discovered Seaver was creating EDM, he sent an email: “Hey, you remember 2010 when you were playing French horn at the Aspen Music Festival and I was conducting you, and now I see you are on the Top 5 Billboard charts … How did this happen?”
Kalia recognized the relationship between the two genres of music, a relationship he wanted to explore with the “Sounds of our Times” series. “Mako’s sound lends itself to that cinematic quality which is inherently symphonic in many ways,” says Kalia. “You can imagine strings below Mako’s sound. You can imagine the percussion of an orchestra grooving with them, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
“Tonight you’ll witness two groups coming together on this stage. We are going to bend the rules as we mix and match genres. And, I must say, this isn’t going to be your typical symphony orchestra concert by any means, just so you’re prepared.” — Roger Kalia, Lake George Music Festival Music Director
The concert opened with the Lake George Music Festival Orchestra performing the 2nd movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. Kalia used this piece to illustrate the similarities between Beethoven and EDM. “… the rhythm is constant and regular, just like you would see in an electronic music concert. The harmony, the chords of music, are very simple and slow-moving. And lastly, there is an intensity of sound that grows throughout the course of the piece.”
“For example,” he continued, “we started with one group of instruments, but then other instruments joined in, so that by the finale, almost every instrument, the entire orchestra, was playing….this concept of growth is very similar to what you would experience with an electronic music concert.”
In addition to Beethoven, the orchestra performed works by contemporary minimalist composers John Adams and Steve Reich. Mako followed with two of their own compositions. Both groups then joined to perform together. Following the performances, the musicians took their bows to a standing ovation. Kalia closed the evening saying, “Classical music is not dead; it is very much alive …this is the future.”