Remixing classical music is a notoriously difficult thing to do: slap some beats underneath a well-known piece and you’ll be accused of doing the original music a disservice while leaving yourself wide open for critique—but anything more complicated is going to require a certain degree of musical and technical mastery; and not everyone, after all, is a Wendy Carlos.
Fortunately, improved technologies have consistently helped melt the boundaries between classical and contemporary electronic music since Carlos’ classic Switched On Bach in 1968, and combined with the right creative attitude and talent, has created some ambitious and stunning albums.
One project that immediately springs to mind is 2011’s Re: ECM, which saw Berlin-based DJs and composers Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer take on the famously diverse and genre-blending ECM catalogue to create a double album of specially-created “sound-structures” that pretty much defied everyone’s expectations.
Utilising acoustic source materials from recordings by jazz musicians and composers such as Christian Wallumrød, Alexander Knaifel, Louis Sclavis, John Abercrombie, Bennie Maupin, Arvo Pärt, Wolfert Brederode, Paul Giger and more, the pair crafted a masterfully deconstructive record that leans towards ambient and avant-garde than the dancefloor, fearlessly merging snippets and samples of harp, clarinet, guitar and piano with abstract pops, dissonant found sounds and eldritch vocals—with not a techno beat in sight.
2016’s Re:Work took a different approach, opening up the extensive Decca classical repertoire to an array of electronic music producers that spanned Starkey and Mr. Scruff, Henrik Schwarz and Fort Romeau, Patrice Bamuel and Kate Simko. Many of the results here were certainly tailored to the dancefloor, including Simko’s house music rework of Schubert’s “Schwanengesang (Standchen)”, Fort Romeau’s plodding take on Satie’s “4 Préludes Flasques,” and Thomas Gandey’s chic flip of Holst’s “The Planets (Neptune)”, all of which avoided descending into cliché. Balancing these out were more delicate compositions, such as Starkey’s downtempo version of Satie’s “Gnossienne No.1”, and Ulrich Schnauss’s sparklingly ambient take on Bach’s “Prelude and Fugue in C,” helping create a diverse but very listenable album.
In 2018 and 2019, Icelandic composer Víkingur Ólafsson took things to another level with his Bach Reworks Parts 1 & 2—a pair of EPs that followed his 2018 tribute, Johann Sebastian Bach, which mixed his original Bach compositions with transcriptions ranging from Stradal, Busoni and Rachmaninov up to the present day. The reworks were more adventurous and created with contemporaries such as Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Ben Frost, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Peter Gregson and Valgeir Sigurðsson, veering from abrasive electronics to gently-rendered piano.
More recently, DG revealed their Fragments series, which began in 2021 by handing over the minimalist oeuvre of French composer Erik Satie to twelve leading electronic artists, releasing one single per month. The results have again been impressively diverse, with tracks like "Piéces froides II: Danses de travers" transformed into bubbling melodic techno by Berlin-based Two Lanes (complemented by a wonderful animated music video made by motion designer and illustrator Karim Dabbèche), "Gymnopédie No. 3" reworked into something more intense and cinematic by Henrik Schwarz, and Snorri Hallgrímsson presenting a hauntingly melancholic take on “Avant-dernières pensées: I. Idyll”.
The second Fragments came in 2024, this time based on the music of French composer Lili Boulanger, the younger sister of renowned composer and teacher Nadia Boulanger, who tragically died of a chronic illness at the age of 24 but left behind an inspiring body of work. For this follow-up project, 13 contemporary musicians, DJs and producers reimagined Lili's works, resulting in a fluid blend of house, electronica, downtempo and ambient sounds from the likes of Niklas Paschburg, Rodriguez Jr., Ann Clue, Anja Schneider and more.
What’s next? We’re not sure. But by now it’s certain that—in the right hands at least—centuries-old classical music can be updated and enjoyed in new ways and by new audiences all around the world.