Chloe Flower fuses classical and contemporary music in a style coined 'popsical'

Lisa Desjardins:

American pianist and composer Chloe Flower is on a mission to get young people into classical music. She's doing it by collaborating with rap, house and pop stars and creating her own genre of music, a style she's coined popsical.

While Flower may be the new face of classic music with a contemporary take, her new Christmas album honors the female composers who came before her.

Independent Television News correspondent Amelia Jenne has this story.

Amelia Jenne:

A world-renowned pianist and composer who collaborates with house, rap, and pop artists, a musical activist on a mission to draw young people into classical music.

Chloe Flower has created not just her own label, but her own genre of the same name.

Chloe Flower, Musician:

I do hip-hop, but I'm not a hip-hop pianist. I do house, but I'm not a house pianist. So, for me, explaining to labels and to people what my sound is, I just thought it was easier to say popular music and classical music mixed together, popsical.

Amelia Jenne:

She began playing piano over tracks for social media, and after Cardi B spotted her version of Kendrick Lamar's "Humble," she made Chloe the centerpiece of her Grammy set.

Chloe Flower:

I don't know if you know "Money." This is it. There's nothing else in the whole entire song, not a pad, not like a chord, not a choir. There's nothing else. And so I was like, I will do it if I can write a few solos, and then just have a moment.

She taught me that women can empower women even at the highest level in the music industry. During the rehearsal, she actually said to the team, "I want Chloe to have her moment in music." And she gave me the center stage. She brought my piano, the Liberace piano, from Vegas. She paid probably $20,000 to have that restored and sent over.

It's, for me, all about classical music. I'm like, bring more people into classical music, because it's such a timeless art form. It's so valuable. Like I said, in order for us to get kids to want to learn an instrument and adults, they have to be excited about it.

So when you start combining and working with these artists at these kids' revere, that's cool. I think it can help change that narrative.

Amelia Jenne:

Her latest Christmas album called "She Composed: The Holidays" revives music entirely written by women from as early as the ninth century.

Chloe Flower:

Kassiani from what is now modern-day Istanbul, Turkey, she was a stunning, amazing woman and she was supposed to marry the emperor. And she decided that she was too outspoken for that. So she started her own convent and started composing. And she's actually the earliest known composer whose work still exists.

Florence Price, she's from late 1800s, early 1900s and she's an American composer of color. So not only did she suffer from misogyny, but she also had to deal with the Jim Crow South in America during that time. And I think she's just so inspirational, because she really overcame so much.

One of the most amazing things, I think, about her career is that her work went completely undiscovered, even though she's from the early 1900s. They discovered a huge amount of her work when they were doing a house renovation, when a tree had collapsed onto an attic. And this family was like, what is all this musical notation here?

And they realized it was Florence Price, who had already been successful during her time. And this was discovered in 2009.

Amelia Jenne:

There's an amazing fact that I have heard you speak about, that 5 percent of orchestral music played right now is written by women, even though there is lots more of it out there. Did that sort of tie into why you wanted to make this?

Chloe Flower:

Absolutely.

I think that number is high for the holidays. It's noticeably absent to me in the concert halls. We have heard like 5,000 versions of "Sleigh Ride" and Handel's "Messiah" and Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker," but there's so much music out there that was written by women that is seasonal that exists.

So I wanted to kind of make that the new norm.

(Music)