ABSTRACT
Robert Walser, Professor of Musicology at Case Western Reserve University, was one of the first academic scholars to attempt a serious and sympathetic analysis of the much-maligned genre of heavy metal in his landmark study Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993). The essay reprinted here draws on material from his book, and was originally presented as part of a 1992 American Studies conference at Princeton University. At the time, few could have imagined two more polar opposites than the supposedly brutish power of “lowbrow” heavy metal and the sophisticated taste of “highbrow” classical music. But Walser complicates this assumed division, showing how heavy metal guitarists from Ritchie Blackmore (born 1945) to Eddie Van Halen (born 1955) have long “experimented with the musical materials of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century European composers,” to the point where classical conventions are an essential component of the heavy metal style. Walser carefully demonstrates how classical’s symbolic values and theoretical musical language has become imbued in heavy metal through such pedagogical forces as the widely influential magazine, Guitar for the Practicing Musician. Long after its commercial peak of the 1980s, heavy metal continues to thrive as a popular international style. To what degree does classical music figure into today’s heavy metal?
