Roll over Beethoven and give Tchaikovsky a rest

IT'S a classical idea in pop, but that doesn't make it seem any less cynical: Take a rarefied art form, dress it in contemporary threads, then watch, through splayed fingers, as Jamie Foxx is usurped from the Billboard No 1 spot, not by Mary J Blige, but by Frankenstein's monster - or, as they insist on being called, Il Divo.

Now, let's be clear about something. Under no stretch of the imagination can Simon Cowell be considered an evil genius. Reconfiguring the Three Tenors as an international quartet of unctuous, swarthy opera singers collectively determined to bludgeon Toni Braxton's Unbreak My Heart into a pot pourri of romance languages doesn't exactly take smarts. But it is surely an assault on the purity of classical music. Isn't it? Actually, what Cowell and a legion of complicit numbskulls stuck for a Valentine's Day gift have inflicted upon the world could only have been achieved with the help of classical music itself. Classical crossover or popera isn't a new idea, but if you want someone to blame for Andrea Boccelli, Josh Groban or the pre-pop Charlotte Church, don't take it out on Cowell. Instead, blame Beethoven.

Exactly 200 years since he sent shockwaves through classical music (which, at the time, was simply referred to as "music") with his third symphony, the Eroica, Beethoven struck again. In 2005 he upset the download charts when the BBC made his symphonies available on the internet for free, promptly shifting 1.4 million recordings in two weeks.

The Beeb was quite entitled to do this - there were no copyright issues and, besides, they owned the recordings - but even as a whole new generation of kidz got down with B8hoven, the music industry threw a strop over perceived sales losses. It was a spurious claim (it would take a commercial CD more than five years to shift that many units), but the pressure was enough to prevent the BBC from uploading a series of Bach recitals last December.

It was another gasp from a music form long under threat. But downloading, like the tuxedo-wearing boybands, is something that classical music has brought on itself.

It's worth remembering that classical music was once as free and available as pop; pieces were bartered around in the marketplace, concerts were eclectic jamborees of different works and the most popular arias were played like hit singles, gaining heavy rotation among street organ-grinders. Verdi, the Kanye West of his day, went so far as to claim that the box-office was the only barometer of success . . . the commercial hussy.

But eventually that kind of earthiness just wouldn't do. Manners were put on the music and the classical era was born, one that co-opted the late 18th-century hellraisers Mozart and Haydyn, while making the next century's performances stilted and elitist. The music retreated to the sanctity of concert halls; audiences were taught to dress up and sit quietly; musical improvisation was extinguished and, soon enough, classical music decided that it preferred its composers dead. Musical necrophilia had begun in earnest.

Flash forward to today and classical music is apparently in its extended death throes. Audiences who felt frozen out by the intellectual bias of 20th-century composition (the ice-cold shower of 12-tone, anyone?) and uncomfortable with the fustiness of the concert hall, proved pretty susceptible to anything that presented classical music as pop (Pavarotti in the Park, Classic FM) or pop as classical (Josh Groban, the dreaded Il Divo).

Now begins a classical clamour towards accessibility. In New York, cellists have started storming the punk haven of CBGB, while string quartets are taking things downtown. Dublin's Crash Ensemble have done their heroic bit here, setting contemporary composers next to video and electronics in venues as inviting as The Project and The O'Reilly Theatre. And even Steve Reich, who visits Dublin next week for RTÉ's Living Music Festival, is recognised as much by the slivers of his minimalism as his ever-present baseball cap.

The airless elitism of the classical repertoire may have allowed something like Il Divo ooze into being, but it has also led to such transgressive little miracles as last year's Acoustica, a breathless album by the young ensemble Alarm Will Sound performing the works of Aphex Twin without digital intervention. These people have worked out pop music's dirty little secret, something almost lost to classical music's old guard: classical music still has the power to shock. So roll over Beethoven. Rock me, Amadeus. There's life in this music yet.