Kimberly Martin told us that:

>the gulf between heavy metal and symphony music has been brought
>together through Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.

and felt that:

>...it's something that should have been done long ago...

In fact, it was.  I can think of a couple of records from the late
60s which contained compositions by the leader of the English rock group
Deep Purple (his name eludes me).  I have no doubt that it was a sincere
attempt to combine the two musical forms but as I recall, it was either the
orchestra or the group playing with little in the way of playing together.
Malcolm Arnold conducted both of these and also, I imagine, had quite a lot
to do with the orchestration, but ultimately, I thought they were
interesting failures.

I'm never too sure of the intended audience for this sort of thing.
Despite Kimberly's understandable feeling of being patronised by her
professor's reference to "real" music, I think most people on the list
think of rock music, if they think of it at all, as something they liked
once but spend little if any time on now - but I could be wrong.  I wonder
whether Metallica fans find such experiments confusing and how many would
be put off by listening to a symphony orchestra.  Is Metallica looking for
a new image? Just another gimmick? Perhaps.

I also know of a short, flashy but rather clever piano concerto - using the
term rather loosely - by Keith Emerson, of Emerson, Lake and Palmer.  This
best appears to illustrates that Emerson is a classically-trained pianist
who happens to play rock.

The best example I know of was a five-movement suite called Synthesis
by Laurie Johnson, who's also written some film and TV scores.  This
successfully blended jazz instrumentalists with the London Philharmonic
and owed quite a lot to Duke Ellington.

Richard Pennycuick
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