In a band you are constantly constrained by what you think is and is not appropriate. "If someone working within another work of art feels that music brings something to that work of art, then that's what it does. "Music doesn't have to be made for something in order to fit it," he says. Warren Ellis, who as well as playing violin for the Bad Seeds has an instrumental band, The Dirty Three, has always capitalised on the power of music to convey a narrative, however abstract. It's thus not such an enormous leap to consider harnessing that capacity on stage. Pop music has always lent itself to being appropriated as the private soundtrack to people's lives.
![the highbrow the highbrow](https://morningnewsbeat.com/wp-content/themes/mnb-underscore-theme-v2/mnb-images/new-headshot-1.jpg)
"It's broken all the rules, but it can no longer claim to be superior." "Classical music can go no farther," he says. Yet Sveinsson, who with Sigur Ros invented instruments to use in their 20-minute score for Split Sides, believes that classical music has reached a point where it has become legitimate to fuse it with other forms.
![the highbrow the highbrow](https://fontsme.com/wp-data/h/739/6739/slide/0-charmap-highbrow-font.png)
There has always existed an unofficial hierarchy between rock and other art forms, with rock and pop the lowbrow, disposable language of the people, and theatre, dance and opera its genteel, Establishment cousins. If it's true that pop can gain from looking abroad, then it's also true that opera and classical are ripe for invasion. There's now more to be gained in cultivating mood and atmosphere rather than commercial song structures." "It's partly because the development of pop has slowed down. "People are finding more respect for other genres, says Kjartan Sveinsson, keyboard-player and guitarist with Sigur Ros. Today, rather than restrict their image to a company-controlled look or sound, one way for bands to assert their creative independence and artistic credibility is to involve themselves in projects beyond the reach of the corporate record company. The only way to innovate is to combine different formats."Ĭompare today's anonymous pop landscape with that of the new-wave scene in the 1980s, where almost every band had their own clear manifesto. The sound of the live band has become regressive - it's constantly harking back to older forms of music. There's very little left we can do in the live arena with the conventional two-dimensional left- and right-hand speakers. "Now we've come to a point where that is banal. "Thanks to the massive explosion of hip-hop, acid house, techno and jungle in the 1980s, coupled with the advent of programming, the musical landscape back then seemed endless," he says. One of the prime motivations for Savale in writing the Gaddafi opera was the belief that pop music in its current form is grinding to a creative halt. The emerging feeling is that the old barriers between the art forms need to come down if independent-minded pop is to move forward. Yet this has surely reached its zenith in the aural and visual extravaganza of the world tour, pioneered by U2 in the 1980s but now de rigueur for internationally successful pop stars. The increasingly close relationship between DJs and their visual equivalent, VJs, is one manifestation of pop music's late-20th-century drive for ever more spectacular sensorial experiences.