Hiphop & classical music

Hip-Hop & Classical Music
Hip-hop is often seen as a genre that exists outside the world of classical music. Yet for years now, it has played a substantive role within the practice of contemporary composers and conservatories, and it has grown into an important reference point for progressive classical music festivals. Not as a style or a “cross-over,” but as a way of thinking about time, form, and sound.

Beat
One of the core ideas of hip-hop is beat-based thinking. Whereas the classical tradition often starts from melodic development and harmonic tension, hip-hop works with repetition, cycles, and groove. A beat is not a background element, but the foundation on which everything rests. Contemporary composers adopt this principle by building music from loops, patterns, and gradual changes in density, timbre, and energy. This approach aligns with a broader development in new music, in which process and structure have become more important than narrative or thematic development.

Composition Education
Within conservatories, this influence is clearly visible. Composition students increasingly work from a producer mentality: they begin in a digital environment, build up layers, experiment with textures, and only later translate that material (sometimes only partially) into notation. In this context, the score is not always the final goal, but one of the means of making music transferable. This connects with the practice of composers such as Gabriel Prokofiev, who brings together club culture, turntablism, and orchestral music without reducing hip-hop to a stylistic feature.

Sampling
Hip-hop consciously and creatively builds on existing material. Its dialogue with the past is one of adaptation, transformation, and appropriation. Classical music has that tradition too — Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven all relied heavily on what came before them — but the contemporary classical world sometimes treats the repertoire more as sacred heritage than as living material to play with. (Tip: Een flat met duizend ramen uses a form of sampling and is an exception in this regard.)

Notation and Timing
The approach to notation is also changing under the influence of hip-hop. Flow, timing, and microtiming are essential, but they cannot always be captured in traditional time signatures. That is why composers work with grids, graphic instructions, or spoken text in which rhythm and articulation are more important than exact pitch. This flexibility aligns with a performance practice in which performers are given greater responsibility for timing and feel — a principle that comes directly from hip-hop culture.

Text as Music
Spoken word, too, is playing an increasingly important role in contemporary music. The voice is used as a rhythmic and percussive instrument, not only as a carrier of melody. Text and music influence each other reciprocally, as in rap, but within a composed context. For festivals, this means that concerts are not only listening experiences, but also direct, physical, and linguistic events.

Recognition
The fact that hip-hop is now recognized as a fully fledged art form is evident beyond the classical world as well. The fact that Kendrick Lamar received the Pulitzer Prize in 2018, and Manu van Kersbergen was nominated in 2025 for both a Theo d’Or and the Annie M.G. Schmidt Prize, marks a broader cultural shift: complex, socially engaged, and formally sophisticated music does not have to belong to the classical canon in order to be artistically relevant. For progressive festivals, this is not a threat, but an enrichment.

Hip-hop is therefore relevant to contemporary classical music because it opens up new ways of listening, composing, and performing. It compels composers and programmers to think differently about time, repetition, the body, and community. That is why hip-hop belongs at Oranjewoud Festival, which explores the future of classical music.