Stravinsky, Strauss and The Starman

For David Bowie, who died ten years ago this month, classical music was one many important influences

- 

‘Searching for music is like searching for God… there’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable.’ So reckoned the great David Bowie, and few have ‘searched for music’ down as many compositional avenues. This was vividly evidenced in 2003, when the magazine Vanity Fair invited Bowie to choose 25 favourite recordings. There, amongst an extraordinarily eclectic mix, was Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs. The work, said Bowie, ‘aches with love for a life that is quietly fading. I know of no other piece of music… which moves me quite like this.’

Also selected was Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. The teenage Bowie (then known as David Jones) had bought it, he said, in a Woolworth’s store. He devoured the music, a major attraction being Stravinsky’s projection of rhythm: ‘The ostinato theme for the four tubas is as powerful a riff as any found in music.’ Bowie went on to describe being smitten as a child by the likewise super-rhythmical 'Mars' from Holst's The Planets, as used in the 1953 BBC TV drama The Quatermass Experiment. 'So, I already knew that classical music wasn't boring.' Indeed, Bowie was to use 'Mars' as intro music to gigs. Rhythmic invention, of course, abounds in Bowie, but try the lesser-celebrated tracks 'Fame' and 'Little Wonder' for some bewitching beats.

Beethoven and Rossini also turned up on a Bowie concert setlist. And there were other classical picks in his Vanity Fair selection. Elsewhere, in a radio interview with Marc Riley, he chose to talk up – albeit in jest – Elgar over Vaughan Williams, whom Bowie described as 'a nightmare', while suggesting he was familiar with RVW's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.