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Soothing The Savage Beat: When Electronic Artists Conjure Classical

Electronic artists such as Mason Bates (pictured above), Aphex Twin and Tiësto have blended classical music into their dance beats.
Courtesy of the artist
Electronic artists such as Mason Bates (pictured above), Aphex Twin and Tiësto have blended classical music into their dance beats.

The divide between classical and popular music is often narrower than we might think. In 1795, Joseph Haydn blended a toe-tapping Croatian folk tune into the finale of his Symphony No. 104. Two hundred years later, we find the electronic dance music artist known as Aphex Twin, overhauling one of his pulsating tracks with composer Philip Glass.

Electronic artists, be they traffickers in trance, techno, ambient or house, have turned to classical music for inspiration. Here are a few extraordinary examples of what can happen when those two worlds meet on the dance floor or chill out room.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Tom Huizenga is a producer for NPR Music. He contributes a wide range of stories about classical music to NPR's news programs and is the classical music reviewer for All Things Considered. He appears regularly on NPR Music podcasts and founded NPR's classical music blog Deceptive Cadence in 2010.