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The Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA takes a new direction, composing classical music for a ballet he premiered last year, which is now an album.
When you think about the Wu-Tang Clan’s legacy, you probably don’t think ballet. But Wu-Tang’s RZA, whose unique method of mixing samples helped define the sound of an entire genre, has been trying his hand at classical music. A Ballet Through Mud, which he premiered last year with the Colorado Symphony, has now become an album.
The project started with an old notebook full of lyrics RZA dug up during the COVID pandemic. The notebook contained lines he had written growing up as a teenager on Staten Island. Upon finding the notebook, RZA sat down at his piano and tried to recite the lyrics his teenage self had penned.
“I fought with that for months,” RZA told NPR. “The inspiration was there, but then I realized that the music I was creating didn’t need any lyrics. The music itself would tell the story,” he said, inspired by advice from his wife, Talani Rabb, who told him he could evoke the emotions he wanted without the lyrics.
RZA has composed for TV and film, and says he finds links between hip-hop and composing for ballet, in which dancers “mime or mimic” ideas in their movements that would otherwise be expressed through lyrics. In A Ballet Through Mud, six characters find themselves and are “transposed to their higher selves.”
Each character was named after a different diatonic scale, of which there are seven: Ionian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Dorian, Phrygian, Aeolian, and Locrian. But one of RZA’s characters combines two modes. “Ionian becomes Aeolian, meaning it becomes minor. You have to get the scale back and resolve,” RZA explains. “The store of Ionian is that once she went to her lower self, Aeolian, she had to get back to a higher self, which is Ionian.”
“This approach also reflects how Eastern philosophies inspired the Wu-Tang Clan, which linked the struggles of impoverished Black urban youths to Buddhist teachings on overcoming suffering,” says NPR.
“Mud is known to be dirty, right? But out of the mud grows the lotus, and the lotus flower is the symbol of enlightenment [in Buddhism],” explains RZA. “And sometimes, we got to go to the mud to come out here. And that’s why it’s called A Ballet Through Mud.”
“I hope this inspires people to take a chance in classical, to take a chance with instruments, and to take a chance to be outside the box,” RZA concludes. A Ballet Through Mud is available now.
