Orchestrators David Mallamud (left) and Carl Marsh visited at the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s performance of R.E.M. Explored at the Stifel Theater on April 5, 2024. That performance, on the 44th of R.E.M.’s first performance, was the first performance of what has become the final version of this new orchestral adaptation of R.E.M.’s music. (Photo by Chris King)
April 5 is a date to conjure with for fans of R.E.M., the post-punk pioneers from Athens, Georgia (fronted by Michael Stipe, a military child who attended high school in Collinsville, Illinois, and moved to the University of Georgia from Granite City, of all places). On that date in 1980, the band performed live together for the first time at a birthday party in a former Episcopalian church in Athens on Oconee Street. The forty-fifth anniversary of this church-turned-house party was celebrated this past Saturday, here and there around the world.
Last April 5, 2024, on the arguably more number-magical 44th birthday of the band’s birthday-party debut, St. Louis was the cynosure of R.E.M. history. On that anniversary, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra performed R.E.M. Explored at the Stifel Theatre, a remarkably more glamorous venue than the now-hallowed but then-crumbling deconsecrated church on Oconee Street. R.E.M. Explored is a unique program that presents full symphonic orchestrations of eleven R.E.M. songs by Carl Marsh and David Mallamud, followed by a concerto for violin, rock band, and orchestra that concert violinist Robert McDuffie commissioned from Mike Mills, the songwriter, arranger, multi-instrumentalist and singer best known as R.E.M.’s bass player.
Though St. Louis cannot claim the April 5 debut of R.E.M. Explored as the church in Athens can for the band itself, this performance featured a new sequence of the program that has become standard in subsequent concerts, not to mention the only time Mills’s compositions have been re-imagined by Marsh and Mallamud’s orchestrations and performed by a symphony orchestra on the iconic date of R.E.M.’s nativity. This slender but real claim to fame was enough to compel The Common Reader (the only publication to preview the concert last year) to memorialize R.E.M. Explored by looking back at the exciting and original orchestral reconstructions of eleven R.E.M. songs through the eyes of the two orchestrators.
Mills assigned Marsh five R.E.M. songs, in the order now sequenced at the top of the program: “Near Wild Heaven” from Out of Time (1991), “Cayuhoga” from Lifes Rich Pageant (1986), “Pilgrimage” from Murmur (1983), and “Everybody Hurts” and “Try Not To Breathe” from Automatic for the People (1992).
Marsh’s deconstruction of “Near Wild Heaven,” the orchestrator wrote to me, “is quite literal, using the exact sequence of melody, rhythm and tempo as in the original song.” The R.E.M. song has a rare lead vocal by Mills (his only better-known lead vocal is on “Superman,” a cover of a 1969 song by The Clique, sequenced as a closing surprise track on Lifes Rich Pageant). Marsh wrote, “After a brief brass fanfare based on the original background voices of the breakdown section”— background vocals by frontman Stipe and drummer Bill Berry, not by the usual harmony specialist Mills—“the sections of the reconstruction exactly echo the original song’s construction, with only a middle-section departure which features the African djembe.”
On “Cuyahoga,” Marsh took the entirely different tack of writing program music based on Stipe’s compelling lyrics, which were just starting to emerge with clarity from the notorious murk and mumble of his early work. “Cuyahoga” counterpoints a more balanced Native life with the violence and pollution of settler culture, while calling for a valiant renewal of healthier values.
Marsh’s piece opens, the orchestrator wrote, with a pastoral passage evocative of pre-contact Native life, with the double basses employing the first five notes from Mills’ bass line, which anchors the rock band’s song. “Slowly, the other string sections join, from lowest to highest pitches,” Marsh wrote. “Meanwhile, muted solo brass play fragments of melodies from the song (echoes of European invaders murmur on the horizon). An orchestra-wide climax ensues. Then, muted French horns telegraph trouble in the distance.”
The tension of contact with the invaders becomes “more and more intense,” Marsh wrote, “before the orchestra erupts into the battle scene. Then the opening bass line reappears solemnly in double basses and tympani.” Marsh quotes from the invaders’ national anthem in a de-evolving line for solo woodwinds “that descends into dissonance,” he wrote. “After spooky violin harmonics (meant to suggest cogitation), more positive rebuilding winds itself out and finally climaxes with the entire orchestra playing the song’s main chorus theme.”
Marsh’s musical challenge then shifts from one of R.E.M.’s most clear-eyed and anthemic songs to one of its most cryptic, “Pilgrimage.”
“Pilgrimage,” Marsh wrote, is one of those early R.E.M. songs where “one can get the feeling of being suspended between stream of consciousness and deep metaphor, without any roadmap to connect the dots.” He spotlit one of the song’s more puzzling images: “‘a two headed cow’???”
“It’s certainly easier for me to deconstruct a song by just stripping away what is already there until I arrive at bare bones,” Marsh wrote. “Reconstruction is a different matter. For me, the concept of a rock band as a platform for a reconstruction for symphony orchestra had to be abandoned; otherwise, what would be the point?”
With the lyrics offering enigma rather than clear direction, Marsh moved toward creating a soundscape of an expedition into exotic other worlds. “I didn’t have any specific destinations in mind, just a feeling of moving through strangely wonderful exotic settings,” Marsh wrote. “Is the music indigenous of Spain? Morocco? Algeria? I leave that decision to the listener.”
He described his musical pilgrimage: “After a brief, enigmatic intro where muted horns echo the original R.E.M. voices over tremolo strings, a rather aggressive rhythm begins. A solo violin, cello and vibes play the original song’s full verse melody, the score instruction being ‘gypsy-esque.’ When the chorus follows, muted trumpets broadcast the melody. During the next verse section, the entire string section plays a densely harmonized verse melody.”
After cleansing the musical palate with a brief oboe solo—Marsh is a woodwinds player, having first mastered bassoon— the orchestrator lifts an insistently pounding bass drum and repeating bass line from the R.E.M. song.
“As the tension increases, the verse melody reappears, this time a colorful mélange of woodwinds and xylophone, with strings and horns offering accompanying splashes of color,” Marsh wrote.
“Suddenly, the entire orchestra plays the break rhythm of the original song for eight measures. Then the music crescendos further into a no-holds-barred final dance. Is this some exotic boisterous dance ritual that the expeditioner has stumbled upon? After gasping one small breath in the flutes and oboes, the piece concludes with the bass instruments pounding out a final triplet motif.”
Mills must have known he had handed Marsh a tough row to hoe in such a spare and cryptic song as “Pilgrimage.” Perhaps in compensation, he also assigned him one of R.E.M.’s biggest hits with one of their most recognizable melodies, “Everybody Hurts.” One has less to say about the easy assignments.
“This has a general feeling of the bittersweet struggle of the lyrics and the ever-present existential question of why the necessity of life with pain,” Marsh wrote. “At the beginning and at the very end, the entire string section plays my enigma-of-life chord, a sonorous stack of three simultaneous chords. Throughout my career, I have employed this chord in other orchestrations that explored similar settings.”
Marsh reached back for his first classical instrument that he once played with the symphony orchestra in his home city of Memphis, Tennessee, the bassoon, for the first solo in his rendering of “Try Not to Breathe.” Marsh, who came to Mills’ attention by orchestrating Big Star’s immortal record Third (1978), also played rock’s greatest bassoon part on “Blue Moon” off Third.
“This reconstruction uses the original 6/8 rhythm of the original rhythm from start to finish, starting out very light with pizzicato strings and solo bassoon, and slowly adding instruments of the orchestra as the rhythm very slowly intensifies,” Marsh said.
“I imagined this rhythm to be a ticking clock that was representing the eventual ending of a long life (‘I have seen things that you’ll never see’). Strings take the melody on the first chorus, woodwinds on the second verse, and then a modulation ensues, releasing the full rhythmic and melodic capabilities of the orchestra until the rhythm inevitably goes out with a bang.”
Marsh and Mallamud both adored the SLSO performances of their compositions. The two orchestrators came to the collaboration from different places. Marsh is classically trained and can play, approximately, any instrument, whereas Mallamud (a generation younger than his counterpart) grew up playing rock guitar and, though degreed from the best academic institutions, is more at home in musical theater than on the concert stage.
Andrew Cuneo, first chair on bassoon for SLSO, said he was excited to see that one of the orchestrators for a pops concert played his instrument. “Before I saw the music, I joked to a colleague that maybe he’d include an especially nice bassoon part or two in the set,” Cuneo said. “As it turned out, a couple of the numbers did have much more interesting writing for the bassoon than many of the shows we play from pop music. Carl took the tunes and mashed them up with musical language from our standard repertoire—there were nods to Stravinsky, Ravel, Copland, and others—and the results were, for me, a lot of fun to play.”
Whereas Marsh composed five discrete pieces, with Mills’ encouragement Mallamud sculpted reimaginings of his six assigned R.E.M. songs into one interconnected suite. In the order they appear in his suite, those songs are “Find the River” from Automatic for the People (1992); “Supernatural Superserious” from Accelerate (2008); “Fall on Me” from Lifes Rich Pageant (1986); “Man on the Moon,” also from Automatic for the People; and “The One I Love” and “Its the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)” from Document (1987), a record that happens to feature Carl Marsh playing Fairlight, an instrument he also played on a sizzling string of ZZ Top records.
Mallamud’s collaboration with Mills started by orchestrating the concerto that McDuffie had commissioned, which Mills wrote on guitar and piano for violin and rock band. “I did three versions: one where it was skewed exactly to what he wrote, one where I strayed a little, and a third where I strayed a lot,” the orchestrator told me. “And Mike was even like, ‘No, no, no—go further!’ So, it was always this amazing collaboration where I never felt like I was just a hired gun. The biggest people you work with tend to be the sweetest.”
Mills sent the orchestrator the six R.E.M. songs to reimagine after the concerto had been premiered, in an effort to give it a second life by broadening its appeal to the millions of R.E.M. fans. “We were coming out of COVID,” Mallamud said. “I also do theater. I write musicals and things like that. So, I always try to think of some kind of dramatic arc. That always helps me really get into the piece. I had the idea to use stages of grief. That helped me structure the piece in terms of something extra-musical to help me get into it more. We need limitations, especially when starting things, because if you don’t have them, it’s too overwhelming, the number of places you can go.”
Mallamud said the one stipulation Mills gave him was from each R.E.M. song he should use “at least one iteration of the melody, and beyond that I could do what I wanted to do.” The composer decided to bookend his suite with “End of the World,” thinking: “That will be the one song that I don’t change much. I really just want to do a big, exciting, explosive arrangement of a song that we all know and love, and the piece can really build towards that. It gave me a direction. And, of course, it made sense to end with ‘Its the End of the World.’”
That R.E.M. song, famously, has Stipe more or less rapping a frenetic string of clever, baffling and dizzying lines—Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” from Bringing It All Back Home (1965) is the obvious precursor. The mash-up of silly, disjointed lines and punchline chorus make the song comic, something that would have been impossible to foresee from the haunted, cryptic early lyrics (“a two-headed cow”???). Mallamud proudly donned his own jester cap for the occasion.
“Life is strange and funny, and humans are messy and funny,” he said, “and we should just embrace that.”
