arts culture

AZ Central: Is Kedrick Lamar a modern Stravinsky? Why Phoenix Symphony thinks so.

by Phoenix Symphony

May 25, 2026 By Ed Masley Combining the music of Igor Stravinsky and Kendrick Lamar, as the Phoenix Symphony is about to do the weekend of May 29-30, may not be the world’s most obvious juxtaposition. But guest conductor Steve Hackman is known for finding common ground between what others may view as the strangest of b

May 25, 2026
By Ed Masley

Combining the music of Igor Stravinsky and Kendrick Lamar, as the Phoenix Symphony is about to do the weekend of May 29-30, may not be the world’s most obvious juxtaposition. But guest conductor Steve Hackman is known for finding common ground between what others may view as the strangest of bedfellows. In 2024, he led the Phoenix Symphony in The Resurrection Mixtape, combining Gustav Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony with works by two of hip-hop’s most beloved icons — the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur.

In 2025, he was back at the podium, leading the Symphony, the Academy Drum and Bugle Corps drumline, three female vocalists and three additional musicians in recontextualizing 15 of Beyoncé’s greatest hits as movements in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7.

Now, he’s turned his attentions to bringing together Stravinsky’s Petrouchka ballet with the first rap album awarded a Pulitzer Prize, Lamar’s “DAMN.,” for which the Phoenix Symphony will be joined by two rappers, a vocalist, drums and bass.

Conductor sees Kendrick and Stravinsky as ‘disruptive innovators’

“I find that Stravinsky and Kendrick Lamar are both exemplary of explosive creativity,” Hackman says. “They are both disruptive innovators. They’re both the authors of musical works that have sort of shaken the world upon release. You think about ‘The Rite of Spring.’ You think about ‘To Pimp a Butterfly.'”

He originally intended to combine those works he mentions.

“And as I was tangentially absorbing and just living in the world of the broader catalogs of both, I realized, wait a second, Petrouchka and ‘Damn’ is an uncannily good pairing,” Hackman says.

“They both have this show-within-a-show device. In Petrouchka, there’s the stage of the ballet. Then there’s the mini-stage where you have the puppet show going on. In the Kendrick Lamar album, ‘Damn,’ the device is this alternate world he creates when he

encounters this blind woman. Then we hear this gunshot, and Kendrick Lamar is portraying this world where maybe he never existed.”

The more he thought about combining the two, the more connections he began to see.

“In the ballet Petrouchka, one of the most brilliant devices at work is that the puppets are seemingly experiencing these human emotions more than the carousing passers-by are,” Hackman says.

“They’re experiencing love and pride and humility and fear. And those very emotions are the titles of the songs on Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Damn.’”

He decided to combine the ballet and the album as originally sequenced so that each new scene in the ballet would correspond to each new track on “Damn.”

“I’ve never done that before,” Hackman says.

‘I see somebody like Kendrick Lamar as the Stravinsky of today’

The fact that “Damn” relies so heavily on samples worked in Hackman’s favor – philosophically, at least.

“When you look at all the samples that were used on ‘Damn’ and just the broad range they’re sampling from, in a way, it gives permission,” Hackman says.

“If Kendrick’s brilliant verses and melodies can exist in so many different contrasting sound worlds that are tied together by them just being compelling and authentic and captivating, of course his melodies, his raps and lyrics could exist in Stravinsky’s sound world.”

There is no puppet show or ballet in the symphony’s production.

“It would be amazing to do a more fully realized theatrical version of this,” Hackman says. “That would be quite a dream.”

Hackman recently released an EP of Lamar material realized for strings, “The Kendrick Lamar Suite.”

“The fact that I now have this full-scale fusion production and now this EP just indicates how much I love his music and how strongly I feel that it should be played on an orchestral stage,” Hackman says.

“I see somebody like Kendrick Lamar as the Stravinsky of today, and I want to build that bridge between the art form of classical music and where he sits. The classical music world has become increasingly distanced from the popular music world over the decades. They were much closer during Stravinsky’s time.”