5 Chart-Topping Musicians You Didn’t Know Got Their Start with Classical Music

The benefits of music education are far-reaching and numerous, even for those without professional musical aspirations.

Learning to sing or play a musical instrument confers numerous developmental advantages, enhancing brain power and functionality, motor skills, language abilities, memory, and much more, both in the short and long term. Plus, music lessons teach discipline, accountability, teamwork, self-expression, creativity, and other essential life skills.

Many pop musicians have credited their artistic and personal development to classical music education, and some even bring elements of classical music into their work. We’ve highlighted five well-known artists you may be surprised to learn had extensive classical training.

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1. Jacob Collier

The 29-year-old British singer, composer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and educator is considered one of his generation’s greatest musical minds. Deemed “your favourite musician’s favorite musician” by Rolling Stone, Jacob Collier has won six Grammy Awards across his first four albums. His output runs the stylistic gamut from R&B and EDM to jazz and classical, demonstrating his insatiable curiosity about different musical genres. For instance, his second album, Djesse Vol. 1, features British vocal ensemble Voces8 and Collier’s own orchestral arrangements for Dutch jazz and pop orchestra Metropole Orkest.

It comes as no surprise, then, that Collier’s roots in classical music run deep. His mother, Suzie Collier, is a violinist, conductor, and violin professor at the Junior Royal Academy of Music in London. Her father, Jacob’s grandfather, was also a violin professor at the Royal Academy of Music and led the Bournemouth Symphony. Jacob was a keen musician from a young age, singing in productions of operas like Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and Britten’s Turn of the Screw as a boy treble. This experience spurred his interest in complex harmonies—a hallmark of his style—saying of Britten’s harmonic language, “My mind was shattered outwards.”

Jacob attended the Purcell School for Young Musicians and later the Royal Academy of Music, where he briefly studied jazz piano before his career took off. Now, he can be seen turning audiences into massive choirs during his concerts, playing them as adeptly as he does other instruments.

Jacob Collier and the Metropole Orkest perform Jacob’s own orchestral arrangement of his song “In the Real Early Morning” from his debut album In My Room, under the baton of Jules Buckley, live at the Quincy Jones Prom at the Royal Albert Hall in London, on August 22, 2016.

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2. Billie Eilish

You may be surprised to learn that Billie Eilish, Gen-Z queen of moody “whisperpop,” was just another choir nerd before she shot to fame. The pop star, who now has three studio albums, two Academy Awards, and nine Grammy Awards to her name, grew up singing in the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus (LACC) from the age of eight. In fact, she was still a member of the chorus when her first single, “Ocean Eyes,” thrust her into the spotlight at 14.

Today, Eilish credits the LACC with teaching her healthy singing technique and letting her explore her creativity. She even gave a shoutout to her former choir director, Mandy Brigham, when she won the Academy Award for Best Song for “What Was I Made For” (Barbie, 2023) alongside brother and longtime collaborator, Finneas O’Connell, who co-wrote and produced the song.

Brigham is now retired from the LACC after leading choirs for 22 years. There, she taught both Billie and Finneas, even preparing the latter for an opera at Santa Monica College. In an interview with People, Brigham reflected that “[Eilish] always sang beautifully in tune, which is a gift to a choir director because you can place that person somewhere and know that others will follow their lead.” She also credits Eilish with inspiring others to join the choir: “When we talk to students at auditions every year, we’ll say, ‘Well, how did you find out about the chorus?’ They said, ‘Well, Billie Eilish was in it.’”

Despite her superstardom, Eilish has not forgotten her roots, featuring the LACC in her 2021 Disney+ concert special Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles.

Billie Eilish: "GOLDWING" (From Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles)

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3. Jonny Greenwood

Jonny Greenwood, guitarist, keyboardist, and arranger for British alt bands Radiohead and The Smile, began his musical training like many grade schoolers—on the recorder. Unlike most children, however, he fell in love with the baroque instrument and sought out fellow recorder enthusiasts to perform with as a teen. He also played viola in the Thames Vale Youth Orchestra. A devoted school music teacher named Terence Gilmore-James was influential in the genesis of Radiohead, which Greenwood formed with schoolmates and his older brother, Colin. The music department provided a safe space for the young musicians, who were often bullied at school for being different. In addition to teaching Colin classical guitar, Gilmore-James immersed his students in the sounds of 20th-century classical music, jazz, postwar avant-garde, and film scores.

To this day, Greenwood cites Alban Berg, Krzysztof Penderecki, György Ligeti, Steve Reich, and Henri Dutilleux as major influences. But perhaps no other composer was a greater inspiration to him than Olivier Messiaen. Greenwood told the New Yorker that upon hearing Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie at age 15, he became “round-the-bend obsessed” with the ondes Martenot. An early electronic instrument similar to a theremin, the instrument would later feature on two Radiohead albums, Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001), lending them an otherworldly quality.

Over the years, Greenwood’s appetite for unique sounds has never waned. He has amassed a large collection of diverse instruments, from Indian tamburas to steel-strung harps, which have made their way into his various projects.

Though most will know Greenwood from Radiohead, he has maintained an impressive career as a composer, writing for such ensembles as the London Sinfonietta, London Contemporary Orchestra, and BBC Concert Orchestra. He is highly sought-after as a film composer, with two Oscar nominations for Phantom Thread (2018) and The Power of the Dog (2021) under his belt.

Always one to push boundaries, Greenwood recently wrote an eight-hour ambient piece for pipe organ whose name changes depending on the age of the church in which it is being performed. For instance, for its world premiere at the Octagon Chapel in Norwich, the piece was called “286 Years of Reverb.” The idea is that these old churches have absorbed sounds into their walls over centuries of music-making, which this piece aims to shake out and distill into an eight-hour meditation.

Excerpt from the world premiere of Jonny Greenwood’s Horror Vacui played by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the Proms Youth Ensemble with violin soloist Daniel Piero and conducted by Hugh Brunt.

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4. Alicia Keys

American singer-songwriter Alicia Keys has been a musical tour de force for over two decades. Since her 2001 debut album, Songs in A Minor, she has won 16 Grammy Awards and sold over 90 million records, making her one of the best-selling artists of all time.

Keys’s unique upbringing is legendary and even the subject of a new Broadway musical she co-wrote and produced (Hell’s Kitchen). The daughter of a hard-working single mother, Keys became enamored with the piano at age seven when a friend offered her a free, rickety upright that would have otherwise ended up in the junkyard. The only caveat was that she and her mother had to move it into their small Hell’s Kitchen apartment themselves.

In her piano lessons, she concentrated on classical music and jazz, counting Mozart, Beethoven, Satie, and Chopin among her favorites. She often practiced for as long as six hours a day and soon began writing her own songs. The precocious musician attended the Professional Performing Arts School in Manhattan, graduating two years early as valedictorian. She attended Columbia University for one semester before signing a record deal.

While her music remains firmly within the realms of R&B, soul, and hip-hop, Keys credits her classical music education as vital to her development as a musician and as a person. She cited her piano lessons as giving her much-needed stability and keeping her out of trouble as a teen. In an interview with NPR Music, she said, “That type of studying, that type of discipline... after a while, I realized what it provided me—focus, the ability to pay attention for a long enough period of time to make progress; the work ethic; the actual knowledge of music, that then unlocked the ability to write my own music, put my own chords and things I heard in my own head to different lyrics that I maybe felt, and I never, ever had to wait for anybody to write something for me.”

To celebrate the release of Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, Netflix, Shondaland, and Alicia Keys created a 74-piece Global Orchestra made up entirely of women of color to perform a rendition of “If I Ain’t Got You” for the song’s 20th anniversary.

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5. Laufey

Like Jacob Collier, Icelandic singer-songwriter Laufey (pronounced “Lay-vay”) is a third-generation musician. Her mother is a professional violinist, and her grandfather was a violin teacher at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, China. The 25-year-old musician, who skyrocketed to fame on TikTok during the pandemic, began studying piano at age four and cello at age eight. She made her solo debut as a cellist with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra at age 15 and was also a finalist on Iceland’s Got Talent and semi-finalist on The Voice Iceland as a teenager.

After graduating from the Reykjavík College of Music in 2018, she attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, graduating with a degree in music business in 2021.

Laufey released her first EP while at Berklee, followed by her debut album Everything I Know About Love (2022) and Bewitched (2023), for which she won her first Grammy. A further live album called A Night at the Symphony (2023) sees her in concert with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, performing orchestral arrangements of her original songs, covers of jazz standards, and renditions of Icelandic folk songs.

Laufey’s music honors her classical roots as well as her love for jazz and the Great American Songbook. Dubbed “Gen Z’s Pop Jazz Icon” by the New York Times, she strives to introduce younger audiences to jazz and classical by blending the barriers between styles and breaking down misconceptions about who these genres are for. While her soft-spoken nostalgic aesthetic has appealed especially to anxious Zoomers, she has found fans across age groups. “My hope is that an older audience finds a sound in my music that reminds them of when they were younger,” she told NPR. “And my hope for a younger audience is that it’s introducing something new, but then also something that can just bring audiences together.”

Having grown up on the symphonic stage attending rehearsals with her mother, she now performs with orchestras around the world, bringing new audiences into the concert hall. She’s also bringing orchestras to new stages: on Friday, August 2, Laufey will perform at Chicago's Lollapalooza with the Chicago Philharmonic, marking the first time an orchestra will grace the Lolla stage.

“I Wish You Love,” performed with Iceland Symphony Orchestra (conductor: Hugh Brunt, orchestral arrangement: Sigrún Kristbjörg Jónsdóttir)