David Garrett and Social Inversion

Back in European history there are local traditions of social inversion where the great are brought down and the lowly raised--if only for a day! It shakes up the hierarchy and blows off steam. One remnant of this tradition is the carnival which is still celebrated, especially in Catholic countries. I am reminded of this by a clip a commentator sent recently. This is the crossover violinist, David Garrett, playing the last movement of the Violin Concerto No. 3 by Mozart with the Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester:

This is a more recent clip of David Garrett in his crossover mode:

What is interesting, I think, are a couple of musical clues and some visual ones. Let's take note: in the Mozart, this is an entirely respectable and conventional performance of a piece that is well-established in the classical canon (one of five concertos for violin that Mozart wrote for himself to play when he was nineteen). Apart from the young, well-scrubbed and nattily attired virtuoso, the orchestra and conductor, dressed in formal white-tie garb, are visually part of the classical music establishment.

Now let's look at the Bach performance. This arrangement is a piece that lies in the border zone of the classical canon, not quite fully respectable. It is an arrangement by the 19th century violinist August Wilhelmj of the second movement of Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D dating from 1730 and this arrangement is known as the "Air on the G String". Wilhelmj took a movement with a distinctive and charming melody and turned it into a concert bon-bon. Here is the original performed in adherence to the original performing practices:

What David Garrett has done musically is at two removes from the original. First we have the layer of heavy vibrato and portamenti (those little slides connecting melody notes) that were features of 19th century performance practice. Then he adds an additional layer of modern pop music: the backbeat percussion and general laid-back groove (plus some jazzy countermelodies). But even more important are the visual cues. David is projecting his image as a kind of indie-pop musician with things like the hat, the pony-tail, the stubble, the multiple rings and chains, the t-shirt and, of course, the fact that this is all projected on a huge screen.

We are seeing here, in graphic and aesthetic terms, a social inversion. The young, tidy and respectable aspiring virtuoso becomes a minor pop star with all the associated bling and grooming. The music is trimmed to fit pop sensibilities with its rigid beat and droopy sentimentality. David undoubtedly discovered as his career developed, that he was not an extraordinary virtuoso, but more of an ordinary one (hey, I know what that's like). So he decided to widen his appeal to those people who might not attend a conventional concert. What is interesting is the implied social inversion: he had to move far down-market. Everything that smacked of elite snobbism had to be eliminated and replaced with cues of a relatively low social class.

You would not be taken aback if the current David Garrett approached you on the street asking for spare change, but you would if the young version did. Social inversion: the turning upside down of the hierarchy.