Hello guys!

This debut as a columnist at Hard Blast is a pleasure to me. I see on this website great opportunities to bands, musicians and all sorts of professionals connected to music, opening doors to musicians and music lovers to talk about music with responsibility, honesty and respect to music itself and to the readers, of course.

Classical music is undoubtedly a huge source of reference to the popular music. So, heavy metal wouldn´t escape from this influence, actually it dove into it.

But what is the relation between classical music and Heavy Metal? Is there a direct influence? Of course there is and if I wanted to make a list of all bands that suffer this influence it would be endless.

From “Ars Nova” of Philippe de Vitry and Guillaume de Machaut until the “New Music” of Brian Ferneyhough and Flo Menezes, taking a period of approximately 700 years of music, we can find a direct influence on popular music inside and outside rock and heavy metal. For this I will give you just one example per period.
If we start chronologically from the Renaissance we can already find the overture (Crossing) of the album Holy Land, from the band Angra, being this one a choir piece from the Italian composer Giovanni Pierluigi from Palestrina (1525-1594), splendorous time for the modal counterpoint.

Influenced by the music of the Baroque period we can mention here a big part of the Swedish guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen´s music, or more specifically the song Black Diamond from the Finnish band Stratovarius, that has in its intro a “Pedal Point”, besides the presence of a harpsichord, a typically Barroque instrument. It´s undeniable the presence of the Baroque sonority of Händel, Bach and co. inside the heavy metal.

From the Classic period we have inherited a lot! Well, who is the musician that has never played Beethoven´s 5th symphony´s theme or “Eine Kleine Nacht Musik” of Mozart? Who is the heavy metal guitarist that has never made a riff typically Beethovenian? Who´s that? Who will throw the first stone?
In Romantic period a very interesting point appears: the Descriptive Music. The Descriptive Music has in the background of its sound the description of a narrative, a fact or an episode, all these without using texts, only the music counts. As example we have the “Symphonie Fantastique” of Hector Berlioz or any symphonic poem. This possibility has been explored by several bands, specially in the progressive rock with those huge solos of synthesizers that, at first may seem a little nonsense but after analyzing and understanding what “musical poetic” means, they all make sense.

The influence of the 20th century music got over the Swedish band “Pain of Salvation” and a good example is the song “BE” (studio version), the track Martius Nauticus II, during an interlude where only the piano and the drums play. There we can see a little of what atonality is, a kind of style that started to be practiced at the beginning of the last century, having as a great mark the year of 1923 when Arnold Schönberg (yes, the guy of the harmony and counterpoint (disambiguation) books that become a “bible” for all musicians) established the “Serial Dodecaphonic Technique”, a technique that originated the “Non-dodecaphonic Serial Technique”, being these two techniques the essence of the musical thought along the 20th century.
But what does it have to do with rock?
A lot, believe me...

At the beginning of the 50s, “Die Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik” or “International Holiday Course of the New Music”, took to Darmstadt, city located near Frankfurt, in Germany, musicians and bands such as Frank Zappa and Jefferson Airplane besides influencing directly musicians and bands such as ELP (Emerson, Lake and Palmer), Pink Floyd, Yes, Miles Davis and Genesis, among other very important names to rock, all of them, musicians interested in keeping contact with the compositional technique applied by Pierre Boulez and Karl-Heinz Stockhausen (the father of the electro-acoustic music), these guys are a part of the extreme vanguard of the classical music. The influence of Stockhausen into rock goes beyond all these (although the bands I mentioned didn´t practice the serial compositional technique), but even outside Darmstadt, musicians of bands like Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane were his pupils. Stockhausen´s influence over rock musicians in general has guaranteed his place on the cover of the famous Beatles album “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band”, since they were all Stockhausen´s admirers, specially George Harrison and Paul McCartney. We can also mention the incidence of Iannis Xenakis over the bands of “Music Math”.

Talking about all these occurrences would be enough subject for an entire life and this, without mentioning citations and variations of all classical themes developed in the heavy metal set list (not mentioning the inumerous bands that made arrangements for “Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi” from Carl Orff´s “Carmina Burana” and several other pieces or even Chamber Groups that have transcribed music from the classical role to formations that include modern instruments such as the electric guitar).

Thanks a lot and See ya!
Allan Christian

I recommend:

Symphonie Fantastique – Hector Berlioz
Carmina Burana – Carl Orff