Musicologist Jeroen D’hoe: “Just because a pop song is easy to listen to doesn’t mean it’s easy to make”

Like almost everyone, Jeroen D’hoe, musicologist and composer, thought that you should approach classical and popular music differently. He loved Beethoven, Queen and Billy Joel, but those were different traditions for him. After studying musicology and composition in Leuven, he obtained his doctorate at the renowned Juilliard School of Music in New York. One day he received a harmonic analysis of this Still crazy after all these years (1975), an album by Paul Simon. “That was approached as if it were a composition by Frédéric Chopin. I fell backwards. In New York I learned to discuss pop music with an academic approach. There people spoke with as much respect about Bach as they did about Michael Jackson.”

He has now written more than 60 classical compositions, but (with Paul Michiels) also the songs for an album of pop music, which It’s a gas is called. He teaches classical composition at LUCA Music in Leuven and pop music at KU Leuven. On the radio he explains Mahler’s secret as eloquently as Bazart’s. And for the past five years he has been writing Masters of pop: a lengthy book that takes an academic approach to 150 years of pop music, but with the ultimate goal of loving it even more. “I see the book as a large puzzle box in which every reader can put the pieces together themselves, to rediscover a world.”

You build your book on in-depth reviews of ten albums, such as Sgt. Peppers (The Beatles), Graceland (Paul Simon) and The miseducation of Lauryn Hill (Lauryn Hill). Are those the best?

D’hoe: “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is certainly one of the best for me, but first of all I have chosen ten turning points in the history of pop music. History is not a linear sequence of flows, but a dynamic whole of rising and falling waves, tensions through contrast, transformations and cross-pollination. How fixed patterns are blown up and redrawn at a certain moment is one of the fascinating aspects.”

For you, pop music begins in the late 19th century, with a number of forgotten genres such as vaudeville, revue, burlesque, ragtime: genres from which the musical grew. We don’t read that in every pop history.

“For me, the musical – and therefore all the smaller genres contained in it – is the cradle of what we call pop music today. The musical offered people entertainment in the form of song and dance in a striking setting, with some romance and humor. That was the popular music between 1920 and 1950, both on theater stages and in music clubs and on recordings. In that heyday, great masters such as Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and Oscar Hammerstein II made it their profession to write good, accessible songs, according to fixed templates, such as the popular AABA form: a verse and chorus, their repetition, a contrasting ‘bridge’, and then a second repetition. That became the basis for the modern pop song.”

That modern pop song was also based on a second tradition, the somewhat troubled blues music of the black population. An unlikely merger, you think.

“Because they were two different worlds. Not only because you had a black and a white population group, but also because the blues was about the heaviness of life and had a repetitive structure, oriented on riffs and modes (specific scales, ed.), and easily leading to trance through those repetitions. The classic musical songs, essentially optimistic entertainment, were more melodic, less repetitive, and better harmonically developed. It was almost unthinkable that two such opposing traditions would merge, but at the same time each had exactly what the other lacked.”

And then the new medium of television gave that new music, rock ‘n’ roll, all the attention. Yet, you think, that old song tradition has survived well.

“Rock music brought a completely different sound in the 1950s, with an exciting image that was better suited to a new, post-war era. The genre pushed out many other genres and monopolized the music landscape for several decades, but classical pop music continued to live on under the skin, without being recognized or named as such by the general public. The Beatles had to sound new and energetic, like rock ‘n’ roll, but you can clearly hear in their songs that Paul McCartney’s father’s record collection was full of musicals. There he learned how to construct a good song, according to an ancient recipe. If you ‘forget’ that fact, you are doing great violence to history.”

If you minimize rock music because it is “not musical” enough, as some maestros in the classical world dared to say, you are also doing violence to history.

“Let us cherish them both. The Beatles were crazy about rock ‘n’ roll and blues, but they had grown up on the classic pop song, and made their unique synthesis. ‘I want to hold your hand’ beautifully shows how they mixed the melodious musical format with repetitive blues accents. They made very original melodies, used ingenious chords: that is a grammar that goes back to musical, and therefore operetta, and therefore European classical music. You hear that classical, tonal tradition much less in the music of The Rolling Stones. Those who lived alone in that classical world did not recognize that Stones approach as ‘music’. But we are past that now.”

As a musicologist, you have extensive knowledge of classical and contemporary music, and you are very fascinated by pop. How do the two relate in your life?

“There are three families in my own music collection: classical music, pop music and jazz. I have the most instinctive bond with pop music: I need a dose of pop regularly, almost in a ritual way. I want to feel a beat, and harmony, from Yazoo, ABBA, Kendrick Lamar. Sometimes I have to say ‘No reply’ by The Beatles or Black radio from Robert Glasper. With Mahler, Arvo Pärt and Bachs St. Matthew Passion I have a deep spiritual relationship, but in pop you also get grooves, mesmerizing voices, trance, and I have a physical need for that.”

Which are your favorite pop songs?

(moans) “Hundreds. ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ by George and Ira Gershwin. ‘A day in the life’ by The Beatles. ‘Doo Wop’ by Lauryn Hill. It’s all genius.”

In the later chapters of your book you show how rock, folk and country enriched pop music. Why do musicians in those biotopes prefer not to be associated with pop?

“Music fans have thought for decades that pop music was commercial and easy. It’s a lazy misunderstanding: just because a pop song is easy to listen to doesn’t mean it’s easy to make. It was only when the hegemony of rock started to wear off in the 80s that people started to recognize again how important a good melody was. ABBA was spit out by rock fans in its heyday because the songwriters allegedly exploited a calculated, commercial hit formula, while those two gentlemen tried to make good songs without knowing how to do that. For me, ABBA is classic, brilliant pop music.”

Do you like a perfect pop song more than its deviation?

“I really enjoy bubblegum songs like Little Richard’s ‘Tutti frutti’ or Billie Eilish’ ‘Bad guy’. But perhaps I enjoy songs that question the format and unclog the ears even more. Such as ‘Overgrown’ by James Blake, which fills in the fixed format of the modern pop song, until at the end it is ‘overgrown’ by a soundscape that lives up to the song title. I see the two possibilities as a complementary and colorful dynamic.”

And who is higher: George Gershwin or The Beatles?

“Both have created a beautiful symbiosis. However, Gershwin is a classical writer, while The Beatles immersed their listeners in a special, psychedelic zeitgeist and created new classics in the process. I choose The Beatles.”

In your book you analyze the spirit of the times behind songs and artists, and you think along sociologically. That is quite well accepted today. But you also approach the music technically, musicologically. Many music fans distrust that.

“Because it would destroy the magic of the pure experience, right? I do not share that opinion. I always tell my students that you start listening to a song out of love, but you should also end it with love. In between is the analysis of music and production. If you don’t, Steve Hurley’s “Jack Your Body” will remain a regular house exercise around a steady beat. But if you better understand how an entire rhythmic world is built from that beat as a basis, with repetitive chord progressions and choruses, and how those puzzle pieces come together in such a sophisticated way, the experience can be even more ecstatic. When I War and turpentine I think it’s a good book. When I hear Stefan Hertmans talk about how he used his grandfather’s diaries, there is great added value.”

What have you learned in those five years of research?

“I especially fell in love with music genres with which I previously had little affinity. For example, I have become a big fan of house music, and I think that the best house songs, such as Marshall Jefferson’s ‘Move your body’ and Inner City’s ‘Good life’, really belong to the canon of pop music. And I’ve realized how little understanding I sometimes had for styles like country, which out of ignorance I found too kitschy. I only saw the mainstream production from Nashville, but when you see the whole landscape you understand how authentic many country songs are.”

Masters of pop has been published by LannooCampus.