Kimberly Martin <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >I'm 19 and in college, majoring in music education. I've already found >myself creating a massive gulf between "real" music (an expression one of >my professors unwisely used) and popular music. Recently, the gulf between >heavy metal and symphony music has been brought together through Metallica >and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. I'm curious as to what other >music-appreciative people feel about this blend. Since reading the initial writeups and reviews last month I've been strongly resolved to get hold of this record, but I haven't yet done so. Firstly, while as others have pointed out this experiment has been done before, more important is the fact that it has never been done very fruitfully. There have been some wonderfully ingenious joinings of this kind in the realm of pop (Scott Walker, Sinatra/Riddle, Nick Drake, the Talk Talk album "Spirit Of Eden") and jazz (Miles Davis/Gil Evans, "Parker with Strings") but never in rock. One reason I think it could work with Metallica is that they have always had a tendency to use asymmetrical rhythms and highly contrasted song-sections (though not in the note-spinning longwinded and pompous manner of the 70's prog-rock monoliths like Emerson Lake etc., Yes, Gentle Giant, etc... for me only the mid-70's King Crimson records made the idea work) thus giving the orchestra something to do other than "singalong" to the foursquare verses and chorus. I've always suspected that Metallica had a thing for Bartok and Stravinsky, and they've often shown themselves to be genuine experimentalists, so I have hopes that the orchestra will be allowed to actually do something here and change the nature of the material. Promising is the fact that rather than the usual "London Symphony Orchestra plays the music of (whomever)" approach it sounds like they have used a sort of "Concerto for rock quartet and orchestra" approach. We'll see. I certainly think this sort of thing can be valid but only if the the routines of BOTH types of music are jettisoned. (Take the Miles Davis/Gil Evans albums. They aren't really jazz OR classical.) Conversely, rock songs with orchestral accompaniment, or use of "rock style" in a classical composition, is a recipe for annoyance. Another reason I have to at least hear this release is in hopes that the Lovecraft-inspired numbers ("The Thing That Should Not Be" is one of my all-time favorite titles for anything) will have generated appropriate orchestral material. Why on earth have 20th century composers not exploited Lovecraft for material?! Intentionally, that is-- if you didn't give me a translation text I'd easily believe Lutoslawki's "Espaces Du Sommeil" to be a setting of part of "Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath", Cthulu's name could be put to any number of Varese's works, and don't even mention the Schattenhaft movement of Mahler 7... Jon Lewis [log in to unmask]