Bruckner rocks!

From colleague Kurt Gottschalk's "Metal Friday" e-mail newsletter comes news that veteran rock record producer Sandy Pearlman—pseudonymously immortalized by Christopher Walken in the infamous "More Cowbell" sketch on Saturday Night Live—is teaching a seminar titled "Bruckner and Heavy Metal: From Chord Power to Power Chord" at McGill University's Schulich School of Music in Montréal. An article about the course appeared in yesterday's edition of the McGill Reporter:

"Anton Bruckner is the single most radical composer in the European orchestral tradition," explains Pearlman, noting the classical portion of the course's play list "embodies the sonorific, ecstasy-building, complex form and structure that are uniquely Brucknerian."

"Heavy metal is its evil twin," he adds.

And:

"We owe the creation of heavy metal to the Third Reich," [Pearlman] says, "because a lot of the Jewish composers who left Europe went on to compose for Hollywood horror films. They exposed kids to a Brucknerian vocabulary and it subsequently morphed into heavy metal."

I have to imagine that this will likely hit A.C. Douglas like a bad toothache, and honestly, after that last bit I don't feel so good myself. The whole story is here.

Playlist:

Grateful Dead - Dick's Picks, Vol. 19: Fairgrounds Arena, Oklahoma City, OK, Oct 19, 1973 (Grateful Dead/Rhino)

Enslaved - Mardraum and Monumension (Osmose)

King Crimson - The Roxy, Los Angeles, CA, Nov 23, 1981 (DGMLive download)

Philip Glass - Music in Similar Motion; Strung Out; Piece in the Shape of a Square; Gradus; Music in Contrary Motion; 600 Lines; How Now - Alter Ego (Orange Mountain Music)

Bob Weir and RatDog - The Fillmore, San Francisco, CA, Mar 04, 2003 (Archive.org MP3 stream)

Grateful Dead - Barton Hall at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, May 08, 1977; Patrick Gymnasium at the University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, Apr 13, 1983; Hartford Civic Center, Hartford, CT, Oct 14, 1983 (Archive.org streams)

Comments

[Steven Smith]

We seem to have more in common than our names. I've been a King Crimson/Robert Fripp fan for a long time (though today hardly as obsessed as I once was) and it's encouraging to see KC frequently in your "playlists". I love the DGM downloads. Fripp's soundscapes especially continue to inspire and fascinate.

[Reality]

Classic metal (not all that call themselfs metal) are very influnced by Classical music. Just listen to the intros on a Black Sabbath album or take their Litz like themes into consideration. Black Sabbath was born into the Prog era when bands were delibratly fusing rock and Classical music. Fast forward to the 80's and you have bands like Iron Maiden (influnced by the Prog era) who take Vivaldi discipleship and fuse it with romanticism all in a compact rock format. The 90's had Neo Classical metal (or shredding) that was based on experiments of Ozzy Guitarit Randy Rhoades and his love of Neo classical composers and the technical possobilitys of rock guitar. Classical music and "Classic" metal go hand and hand, both can be highly intelegent, complex and epic in scope. I could write a whole book on the comparisons but (because of sterotypes) no one would buy it. Before you write me off I must say I come from an acomplished classical background and have come into metal because of that background.