Why Jon Batiste is the Master of Genre Bending

Taking one type of music and overlaying another type is not a new concept by any means. Typically, it involves either taking an established piece of music and overlaying a varying style on top of it, as in Duke Ellington's Nutcracker Suite that takes Tchaikovsky's base material and transforms it into a long-form Jazz work; or, alternatively, producing a wholly new work that fuses two or more genres, as Mason Bates has done in much of his music that brings together classical orchestral and electronic club music. There is a third less common category, though, and that is using a variety of genres within one work to evoke specific emotions connected to those genres.

Alfred Schnittke used this technique but exclusively within classical music - he rarely left the genre, although occasionally referenced folk and jazz music - but instead used the wealth of styles existing within the classical compendium. Each style he applies evokes a specific emotion that the listener assumedly has associated with that style. Take his String Quartet No. 3 for example: in the first 8 bars alone he famously quotes a Stabat Mater by Renaissance composer Orlando de Lassus, Beethoven's Grosse Fugue, and the famous theme by Shostakovich spelling that composer's name, DSCH (Dimitri Shostakovich). The listener is immediately transported from an Italian Court hearing spiritual music, to one of the key moments of music pilgrimage, to the epitome of artistic suppression and resistance, within less than a minute of music.

Schnittke assumes an established association with these pieces from the listener, which may not necessarily be the case in the mainstream. Not that the piece is ineffective entirely without context, but it does lean on these societally established reactions. Erik Satie uses a similar tactic, but far less frequently shifts between styles, typically associating one style or format with a particular work to enhance the desired effect within that piece. Satie, also, is assuming these associations are already in place.

In his 2024 album "Beethoven Blues," Jon Batiste utilizes a similar polystylism to Satie and Schnittke but takes it a step further and opens it up to the very concept of Genre rather than specific styles within a genre. In much of Beethoven's music - and generally within classical music - there is an implied effect meant for the audience to experience, typically by way of the harmonies and/or the structure of a particular work. Without text, though, this effect is just that - implied. In Batiste's album, rather than adding words or providing a performative interpretation, he uses genre as a way to explore those implications and make them more apparent to the listener, and he does so masterfully.

How is this possible? How can genres be applied so quickly and liberally and result in some kind of emotional response? Music sociologist and philosopher Theodor Adorno spoke rather negatively about "popular music," as it is often referred to, and much of his material on that topic is easy to ignore because of how broadly he depicts its cultural stature, but he does make some specific points that apply in this context.

For example, he argued that most genres of popular music aim at "standardized reactions...It sets up a system of conditioned reflexes." In other words, these genres put music into a very specific structure with fierce limitations, ones that will typically make it possible to transplant one song of a genre on top of another - at least structurally - and have a similar effect. After years of engaging with and consuming these kinds of media, an audience "learns" how to react to music as soon as they hear it, and the system becomes fairly cyclical with only minor shifts in the structures over many years.

Adorno goes on to observe that this has been a societal standard for centuries:

"Just as the standard forms of pop music are derived from traditional dances, those dances were frequently standardized long before commercial music started pandering to the ideal of mass production. The minuets of lesser seventeenth-century composers were as fatally alike as our pop songs." 

Adorno's language is harsh and steeped in prejudice. Where literature written since has shown him incorrect is that there can indeed be a great deal of subtlety and individualism within a song that interplays with that immediate response. Still, there is some truth to the idea that many genres of popular music work within the genre to issue a standard immediate response. Whether it is a ballad or a beat, certain structures evoke certain emotions in the listener based on their history with that structure, and in many popular music genres, that history is more widely shared than it is with the more esoteric structures found in the classical compendium.

It is in this shared emotional experience that Batiste finds a way to manipulate the listener's emotional responses to famous works in unexpected ways. He also specifically uses mainstream classical works by Beethoven, assumedly because they, like the genres he infuses into them, have a certain aspect of socially constructed rote emotional responses to them. This creates a musical environment where he can interact with both preconstructed responses, and engage with them to build out a specific response to the music, sometimes even down to each phrase of the music.

The most prominent example of this on the album is the interplay of genre found in his interpretation of Für Elise. He begins the piece as you would normally hear it, with the famous "E-D#" repetition, resolving the D# down to D natural, leading to a broken A minor triad. The original score evokes a yearning or a pain that can not be shaken, so when the figure should repeat in Bar 5, Batiste instead shifts to a light Blues scale improvisation, landing on A minor. That sense of pain is immediately heightened and shifted to a more tangible quality.

In the second half of the phrase, starting Bar 9, he hints at Gospel with a diminished flourish where it should be a strict Major III chord. On the repeat, however, it suddenly transitions fully to Gospel, even changing the time signature to 4/4 momentarily to emphasize the expansiveness usually associated with that genre. The chord progression here revolves briefly around Major III, and using Gospel here brings out the "Major-ness" of these bars. As soon as the "E-D#" comes back, though, we are ushered back to the blues by way of Beethoven's original measure of octave Es. The juxtaposition of the Blues with Gospel amplifies the harmonic differences found on the first page of the music.

In the next section, Batiste enhances the classical qualities of Beethoven's score, providing thicker textures with sixths in the right hand. This, plus some slightly jazzy ornamentations, helps note to the listener the flirtatious elegance found in this section. Using an expanded-upon version of the next few bars, this time referencing not so much the Blues but more the improvisatory nature of Jazz as if Batiste was trying to find the next notes, we are shifted into a Pop-style chord progression based on the original theme. Here, Batiste simplifies things, lulling the listener into a pattern much like the original score does but using a harmonic device potentially more familiar to a general audience.

Before shifting back into the original classical style in bar 61, we are again grounded in the Blues starting in bar 54, as Batiste refuses to let us forget that this is a song of longing. Once arriving on the pedal "A" in the base in bar 61, though, Batiste respects Beethoven's broodiness, as no one does broody like Beethoven. The effect is clear, and he lets it sit with the listener. In bar 73, the spell is broken with another Major chord progression for which Batiste invokes a feeling of Gospel music again. The pedal "A" returns in bars 79-82 and is treated with respect to Beethoven's original score. Then the chromatic scale in bars 83 and 84 is enhanced with a Chopin-esque figure that the listener might associate with virtuosic pianism.

Batiste does not simply copy and paste his use of genre from the first page onto the final section. He heavily leans on the Blues scale to bring us back to the main theme, but where he went to Gospel before, he now stays in the Blues, evening shifting the harmonies to stay away from the Major III. To finish the piece, he goes back to the Pop harmonies, this time with a stricter adherence to the original melody. Rather than ending with the pain of longing, he uses this Pop sequence to give the piece a sense of finality, as if the listener will feel solace with another individual (often the feeling invoked by popular music, especially the ballad style that this progression is referencing) rather than personal longing.

Looking at the rest of the album, he doesn't always use genre to enhance the emotion already implied by Beethoven, but sometimes to usurp it. For example, in "5th Symphony in Congo Square," by using Congo rhythms on a lone piano with improvisatory sections mixed in, he takes what is arguably Beethoven's most famous work that would instinctively exude a brooding, heavy quality and lightens it into an intimate and almost casual dance number. In fact, it gets increasingly loose and lax throughout his interpretation, almost as if mimicking the feeling someone might experience dancing away their stress.

To what extent these uses of Genre are instinctual or purposeful it is impossible to say without speaking to Batiste personally. But it is clear that each genre comes with an impression relevant to the music on the page, and every shift away from Beethoven's original score is filled with purpose in communication. Batiste uses Genre itself as a tool to express emotion and dances between various genres with ease. While he is surely not the only musician working today using multiple genres to great effect, his method of using a general feeling evoked by a Genre, and the extent to which he successfully uses it, I believe is wholly unique.

-P