EKSEPTION
Ekseption was a Dutch rock band active from 1967 to 1989, playing mostly-instrumental progressive rock and classical rock. The central character in the changing list of members, the only band member present on every album, was conservatory-trained trumpeter Rein van den Broek (10 September 1945 - 11 May 2015). The band knew some commercial success in the 1970’s, having Dutch top ten hit singles with their adaptations of Beethoven’s “Fifth” and Bach’s (Celebrated) “Air”. The second album, Beggar Julia’s Time Trip (1969), won the Dutch Edison Award for album of the year, and the first five albums all went gold. (More from Wikipedia)
I am pretty sure that I must have heard a track or two by the Dutch progressive rock band Ekseption on college radio back in the day; otherwise, I don’t know how Aram Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance” would sound so familiar to me. Their virtuoso bandleader Rick van der Linden was a wizard at combining classical music forms with rock, but that statement alone doesn’t do justice to their music: Every album was good, and they were also quite different from one another. The opening track on their self-titled debut album in 1969, Ekseption (which also included “Sabre Dance”) – simply called “The 5th” – is based on Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. This might be the first pop treatment of the symphony, though there have been many others over the years. One of the Electric Light Orchestra’s earliest hits is a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” that incorporated some parts of the symphony; and then of course, there is the disco version called “A Fifth of Beethoven” by Walter Murphy. Unlike the others though – which mainly focused on the “da da da DUM” opening – Ekseption actually incorporated significant portions of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony into a more complete work. (I had always heard that the opening was based on Morse Code for the letter “V”, standing for “victory” – not to mention the roman numeral V for Fifth – but evidently, the symphony predated the development of the Morse Code).
(January 2013)
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