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 [log in to unmask]