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New York Times Arts | Connecticut

Up-to-Date Partners for the Orchestral

By PHILLIP LUTZ  (Published: December 30, 2011)

CAUGHT up in rehearsals, recordings and performances, the hip-hop artist Dominic Shodekeh Talifero — known professionally by his middle name — has little time these days to reflect on his improbable rise from the street to the orchestral stage.

But the reality of his ascension struck him one day recently as he was en route to the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts in Hartford for a workshop connected to the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, with which he will appear in four shows on four days starting Jan. 5.

“I suddenly thought, ‘What am I doing here? I’m just a beatboxer,’ ” he said, recalling the moment it dawned on him that what once had seemed a modest gift for vocal mimicry — beatboxers use their voices to evoke percussion instruments and other sounds — was now affording him entree to the world of symphony orchestras.

Beatboxing, which bears relationships to African click language and American scat singing, emerged about 30 years ago, the province of buskers. It spread to clubs, records and movies, where it spawned stars who inspired aspiring beatboxers like the young Shodekeh. He began impressing friends with his vocal skill when he was 8.

Now 34, Shodekeh accompanies all manner of dancers, records with the likes of the composer Meredith Monk and, with the Hartford Symphony, will reprise “Fujiko’s Fairy Tale,” a concerto by the Finnish composer Jan Mikael Vainio. Shodekeh first performed the piece in July 2010 with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

In incorporating beatboxing into the orchestral form, Mr. Vainio’s concerto, which had its premiere in February 2010 with the St. Michel Strings, a Finnish ensemble, follows a long tradition of symphonic compositions that draw on popular idioms. In the past, those idioms typically included folk and jazz.

“What’s new is what else is around,” said Carolyn Kuan, the Hartford Symphony’s new music director and conductor. “There are a lot more possibilities.”

Ms. Kuan considered at least one other composition that incorporated rap before settling on Mr. Vainio’s concerto, a four-movement work, inspired by Japanese animation, that makes use of pentatonic harmonies, minimalist repetition and what Mr. Vainio likened in an e-mail to “soundscapes of the video games of the ’80s and ’90s.”

Mr. Vainio, a fan of rap and rock, is attuned to the musical vernacular. Still, when Shodekeh was preparing for the Baltimore concert, he sought changes in the score that fit his freewheeling, street-smart style. Mr. Vainio agreed, and Shodekeh added a funk-infused cadenza after the first movement — a change that may surface in the Hartford performances.

Those performances, which promise some of the more unusual cross-cultural encounters on a concert stage this season, should help Ms. Kuan satisfy what she said was “a growing interest in a convergence of styles.” The concerto might bring in new fans, she said, though it has already raised doubts among some old fans seeking the familiar. For them, Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 will close the show.

Given the difficulties in balancing musical constituencies, most of the region’s orchestras are, for now, avoiding extended works for beatboxers or electric guitarists. Instead, they are addressing stylistic convergence in other ways — notably, by organizing string quartets that play arrangements of tunes from the rock ’n’ roll repertory.

“There’s a big boom in the popularity of this,” said the violinist Stephan Tieszen, who belongs to separate string quartets culled from the New Haven and New Britain Symphony Orchestras.

Mr. Tieszen is part of a pool of seven players the New Haven orchestra has recruited for its quartet concerts, which are intended to build an understanding of — and audience for — classical music by drawing parallels between Mozart and classically arranged rock. The next two concerts, Jan. 21 at the Omni New Haven Hotel and Jan. 22 at the Shelton Intermediate School, target families and schoolchildren.

But the expectation is that the music can stand alone, without an educational component. Performing similar arrangements, the New Britain Symphony’s quartet will present a concert of Beatles music aimed at the general public. It will be held on March 11 at the New Britain Museum of American Art.

Some critics question the heft of some arrangements available on the open market, saying that while they may be useful educationally — illustrating how the first and second violins function as lead and rhythm guitars or voices, the viola and cello as bass and drums — their algorithmic predictability can yield a sameness in the end product. But the arrangements that move beyond formulas have made believers of skeptics.

“I was a little dubious when we started doing this,” Mr. Tieszen said. “But I have to tell you, it works great.”

One arrangement that stands out, he said, is the cellist Richard Henrickson’s version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” a textural romp in which unison glissandi, col legno — striking the string with the bow’s wood — and other techniques become vivid acoustic analogs for Hendrix’s electric explorations.

Another standout, said Judith McDermott-Eggert, who plays violin with the New Haven quartet, is the violinist John Reed’s take on the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.” Rather than simply transcribing the original recording, a double string quartet, Mr. Reed employs metric shifts that give new accent to the piece’s propulsive quality.

Gordon M. Ambach, a member of the New Haven orchestra’s board of directors and a former New York State education commissioner, suggested that the quartet’s efforts were not the end of the orchestra’s investigation of popular idioms. This month’s concerts will be followed on Feb. 11 and Feb. 12 with shows that use small ensembles to compare Haydn with hip-hop.

Meanwhile, the small-group efforts might lead to programs of greater scale and, arguably, artistic ambition. While Mr. Ambach was making no announcements, he said a work like Mr. Vainio’s concerto might hold enough aesthetic, educational and entertainment value to warrant a spot on the orchestra’s schedule.

“It clearly does link with the objectives I’ve been talking about,” he said.

“Fujiko’s Fairy Tale” by Jan Mikael Vainio, and works by Brahms and others, with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, Jan. 5 through 8 at the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts, 166 Capitol Avenue, Hartford. For tickets and further information: hartfordsymphony.org; (860) 244-2999.

Classical arrangements of rock tunes and works by Mozart, with the New Haven Symphony String Quartet, Jan. 21 at Omni New Haven Hotel and Jan. 22 at the Shelton Intermediate School. Both at 2 p.m. Information: (203) 865-0831 or newhavensymphonyorg.

Classical arrangements of Beatles tunes, with the New Britain Symphony String Quartet at 3 p.m. on March 11 at the New Britain Museum of American Art. Information: newbritainsymphony.org or (860) 826-6344.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 1, 2012, on page CT8 of the New York edition with the headline: Up-to-Date Partners For the Orchestral.