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. 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. Throughout heavy metal’s history, its most influential musicians have been guitar players who have also studied some aspects of that assemblage of disparate musical styles known in the twentieth century as “classical music.” Heavy metal guitarists, like all other innovative musicians, create new sounds by drawing on the power of the old, and by fusing together their semiotic resources into compelling new combinations.