Read on to discover how Bach, Vivaldi, Handel and Rossini were the original disco divas…
Disco sounded a clarion call of liberty, sexual freedom and the pleasure principle as political protest in the 1970s, a generous invitation to collective delirium that took over the world. And in the sounds that disco made – trance-like rhythmic repetition, some of the most lavish instrumental arrangements ever created and its commitment to keeping the moment of ecstasy going as long as possible – it was a new sound of irresistibility in musical action.
Reich, Glass and Eastman… hypnotic rhythms
But in 1970s New York, there was something in the air in disco’s musical ideas, and not only in music made for the clubs: in the minimalism of Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Julius Eastman – whose Stay On It is more disco than disco – you’ll hear another vision of what happens when you repeat rhythms into the infinite and hypnotically focus on a handful of sumptuous harmonies.
Baroque rhythms and beats… disco 18th-century style
And yet centuries before, the disco principles were already out there. I’m not saying that 18th- and 19th-century composers were writing club tracks before Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder, but if you want a precursor of the ideas that define disco, you can hear so much Baroque music, in particular, sharing disco’s obsessions with rhythmic repetition, harmonic sensuality and instrumental richness.
And if you experience Bach, Handel and Vivaldi not as music made for reverential contemplation, but instead take their dance movements seriously as invitations for our bodies to feel and to get moving, so the music flows through you, and you just can’t resist the beat: you’re doing disco, 18th-century style.
Take Bach’s Sixth Brandenburg Concerto, in a performance like Reinhard Goebel’s with Musica Antiqua Köln – you’ll hear the pounding rhythms of the first movement, making a four-to-the-floor banger that trips along at about double the BPM of most disco classics.
Or take the fast movements of Vivaldi’s violin concertos: no need to remix them with beats behind them, as that’s what the basslines and the continuo parts are doing already. While for sheer vocal sensuality, long lines arcing over dazzling accompaniments, Handel’s arias for his star sopranos and castratos got there before the disco divas.
Rossini… intoxication and guilt-free pleasure
Walter Murphy’s A Fifth of Beethoven turns Beethoven’s rhythmic onslaught into a disco classic, but there’s more in the music of the 19th century that burgeons with disco possibility. And towering above them all is Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle and, in particular, the ‘Cum Sancto Spiritu’ fugue.
You don’t need a bass-drum and a snare: Rossini’s got the rhythmic principles of disco right there in his chugging strings, off-beat timpani and a tune so heretically pleasurable in its evocation of the Holy Spirit it should be riding into Studio 54 on a white horse. Disco’s principles, of intoxication and guilt-free pleasure: Rossini got there first.