9 minute read
STEVE HACKMAN’S BEETHOVEN X COLDPLAY
Saturday, January 20, 2024 at 7:30 pm
ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL
Steve Hackman, conductor
Casey Breves, vocalist
Gregory Fletcher, vocalist
Malia Civetz, vocalist
BEETHOVEN X COLDPLAY
Beethoven:
Symphony No. 3, I. Allegro con brio
Coldplay:
“Clocks”, “Politik”, “42”, “Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall”, “Trouble”
Beethoven: Symphony No. 3, II. Marcia funebre: Adagio assai
Coldplay:
"The Scientist"
“Princess of China” “In My Place”
Beethoven: Symphony No. 3, III. Scherzo: Allegro vivace - Trio
Coldplay:
“Paradise”
Beethoven: Symphony No. 3, IV. Finale: Allegro molto - Poco andante
Coldplay:
“Viva la Vida”
“Fix You”
The length of this concert is approximately 90 minutes with no intermission.
Guest Artist Biographies
STEVE HACKMAN
A multi-hyphenate music powerhouse and creative visionary, Steve Hackman is a daring voice intent on redefining art music in the 21st century. Trained at the elite level classically but equally adept in popular styles, his breadth of musical fluency and technique is uncanny — he is at once a composer, conductor, producer, DJ, arranger, songwriter, singer, and pianist. He uses these polymathic abilities to create original music of incisive modernism yet rooted in elevated classicism.
His groundbreaking orchestral fusions, such as Brahms X Radiohead and The Resurrection Mixtape (Mahler X Notorious BIG X Tupac Shakur), are introducing the symphony orchestra to its future audience; he has conducted these pieces to sellout houses across the country with the orchestras of Philadelphia, San Francisco, Dallas, Seattle, Pittsburgh, San Diego, Colorado, Phoenix, Nashville, Oregon, Indianapolis, Grand Rapids, Columbus, Charlotte, Southwest Florida, Alabama, Colorado Music Festival, and the Boston Pops.
Hackman has teamed up with some of the biggest pop superstars of today to add a signature virtuosic and classical dimension to their work, including Steve Lacy, Doja Cat, and Andrew Bird. He was trained at the Curtis Institute of Music and the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign and holds degrees in orchestral conducting and piano performance. He recently taught his first course at The Juilliard School entitled “Fusion, Re-imagination and Revelation.” He is active on Instagram under @stevehackmanmusic.
CASEY BREVES
Casey Breves performs across the United States, Europe, and Asia as both a pop and classical vocalist. Born and raised in New York City, he sang with the Grammy Award‐winning vocal ensemble Chanticleer after graduating from Yale University, where he was a member of the Whiffenpoofs. He has performed on Saturday Night Live, Good Morning America, and Prairie Home Companion, as a soloist in concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Seattle Symphony, and the Denver Philharmonic, and at Radio City Music Hall as a backup vocalist for Adele. He recently completed a ten-city concert tour of China and Southeast Asia with husband and musical collaborator Sam Tsui. As a singer, songwriter, and content creator, his videos — including original songs, mashups, and collaborations — have received over half a billion views on YouTube and hundreds of millions of streams on Spotify.
GREGORY FLETCHER
Gregory Fletcher is a versatile, award-winning artist thriving in the greater Los Angeles area. As a vocalist originally from California’s Inland Empire, he has become a multifaceted musician, obtaining session work in various musical genres including R&B, jazz, gospel, pop, classical, musical theater, and folk. Fletcher has performed around the world, spanning from the Playboy Jazz Festival and Super Bowl LIV to international venues, including St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and the National Theater and Concert Hall in Taipei, Taiwan. He has worked alongside world-renowned artists including The Weeknd, Lauren Daigle, Shoshana Bean, Scott Hoying, and Michael Bublé. As a vocalist, Fletcher can be heard on films such as Just Mercy, Bad Boyz 4 Life, Sing 2, Avatar 2, The Harder They Fall, Disney and Pixar’s Turning Red, and Spacejam 2, in addition to television shows like Midnight Mass, Jimmy Kimmel Live, Dear White People, Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, Wednesday, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, and Star Wars: The Book Of Boba Fett.
Fletcher can be found on tour with The House Jacks, and works as a songwriting and piano teacher at Orange County School of the Arts (OCSA), a private voice and piano instructor, studio musician, and lead vocalist of R&B band MiloBloom, in addition to writing for several Warner Music Group artists. He has had the opportunity to serve as a guest artist, educator, adjudicator, and clinician at numerous Heritage Festivals, SCVA Festivals, and the Fullerton Jazz Festival, as well as the Monterey Next Generation Summer Jazz Camp, and continues to work around the world as an active musician and educator.
MALIA CIVETZ
Malia Civetz has performed as a vocal soloist on countless occasions across the United States and around Europe in Steve Hackman’s symphonic mashups. She began working with Steve Hackman in January 2015, performing in Beethoven X Coldplay, and continues to lend her voice to that piece and a growing list of symphonic fusions, including Stravinsky’s Firebird Remix-Response, Tchaikovsky v. Drake, Skull and Bones, The Times They Are-A-Changin’, Bartók v. Björk, and From Beethoven to Beyoncé.
Civetz, a Los Angeles-based recording artist and songwriter, signed a publishing deal with Warner Chappell Music after graduating from the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music’s Popular Music Program. Post-college, she linked up with powerhouse songwriters Ross Golan and JKash, signing to their newly-created joint label. She initially made waves with her independent single “Champagne Clouds,” which was debuted by Ryan Seacrest on his KIIS FM morning show On Air With Ryan Seacrest. The song quickly earned over 20 million streams and made Taylor Swift’s “Favorite Songs” playlists on both Apple Music and Spotify.
She moved on to sign a record deal with Warner Records, making her major label debut in 2020 with her first EP The Flip, featuring hit radio single “Broke Boy.” Civetz unveiled her second EP, Heels In Hand, featuring “Partied Out” and fan-favorite “Sugar Daddy.” Her work has amassed love from numerous publications and has landed spots in major film, TV, and commercial productions. Surpassing 85 million total streams as an artist, Civetz continues to also write for a variety of artists across numerous genres.
Her musical accomplishments span well over a decade, with early highlights that include performing as a “Star of Tomorrow” at New York’s Apollo Theater at age 13, having the privilege to sing for President Obama at age 16, and performing in Barry Manilow’s show at Paris Las Vegas at 17.
Notes by Steve Hackman on Beethoven X. Coldplay
Beethoven X. Coldplay is a symphonic fusion of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony and the music of Coldplay. The latter’s melodies and lyrics are fused with the former’s music in every possible way, turning the “Eroica” Symphony into an oratorio.
I sought to combine Beethoven and Coldplay because of their shared universality. They both confront broad, humanist themes of the human experience in their music: love, loss, tragedy, triumph, joy, pain. Their treatment of these themes is so elegant and perfect that you do not need to be a fan of classical or alternative rock for their music to speak to you. So their universality is two-fold: in the themes they confront and the appeal they therefore create.
Shortly after beginning work on this fusion, I realized I was the exact same age Beethoven was when he wrote the “Eroica.” This had a curious effect on me. I started to wonder: what was Beethoven the 35-year-old like? What would it have been like to sit down with him? What would we talk about? And, eventually, I wondered: would he have liked the music of Coldplay?
It seems quite a preposterous notion, does it not? But that is only because we by default think of Beethoven as the legendary historical figure, the giant who sits atop our Mount Olympus of composers. I ask you to instead consider Beethoven the human being, as I began to do when I realized the similarity in our ages.
Take the following into account:
At the time of writing the “Eroica,” Beethoven was still preoccupied with becoming regarded by all as the preeminent composer of his day. He knew his “Eroica” would settle this unequivocally. But though the piece is now mentioned among only a handful of pieces that changed the course of music forever, the premiere was met with ambivalence, with some critics calling it “unintelligible.” Would Beethoven have felt empathy with the Coldplay line, “Nobody said it was easy…no one ever said it would be this hard”?
Beethoven had a coarse and unpleasant personality and therefore found sanctuary from the outside world in his music. Would he have appreciated the lyric, “I turn my music up…I shut the world outside…I hear my heart start beating to my favorite song…”?
The natural world was also a refuge for Beethoven; he sought in his music to approach that perfection God had exhibited in his creation of the Earth. Can we imagine Beethoven in this Coldplay line: “Lying underneath the stormy sky…he knows the sun must set to rise…so he dreams of Paradise.”
Or, “When you love someone and it goes to waste, could it be worse?” Would those lines have meant something to the composer who struggled with romance and was often tortured by unrequited love?
And can you imagine the 35-year-old composer, who had recently battled depression to the extent of considering taking his own life, coming to the realization that he was irreversibly going deaf, not being overcome by the lyric, “Tears stream down your face…when you lose something you cannot replace…and I will try to fix you”?
We love Coldplay because we feel they are speaking just to us - their songs seem to tell our own stories. So why shouldn’t they tell Beethoven’s? If he was once a person the same age as us, desperate for recognition of his genius, battling his health and depression, longing for love, and “dreaming of paradise,” who is to say he wouldn’t have found escape in a song by Coldplay? Or a
moment of peace knowing that someone had been through exactly what he was going through and had found a way to perfectly articulate it through song?
So what is the point of an exercise of this sort? Will changing the lens through which we view these artists and composers provide a new perspective? Will finding connections between them offer a new context? Isn’t it just a little too far-fetched to even think that Beethoven would ever have listened to Coldplay? And even if he had — what is the point in combining his music with theirs?
I know my answer. You’re about to hear it.
