From colleague Kurt Gottschalk’s "Metal Friday" e-mail newsletter comes news that veteran rock record producer Sandy Pearlman—pseudonymously immortalized by Christopher Walken in the infamous "More Cowbell" sketch on Saturday Night Live—is teaching a seminar titled "Bruckner and Heavy Metal: From Chord Power to Power Chord" at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music in Montréal. An article about the course appeared in yesterday’s edition of the McGill Reporter:

"Anton Bruckner is the single most radical composer in the European orchestral tradition," explains Pearlman, noting the classical portion of the course’s play list "embodies the sonorific, ecstasy-building, complex form and structure that are uniquely Brucknerian."

"Heavy metal is its evil twin," he adds.

And:

"We owe the creation of heavy metal to the Third Reich," [Pearlman] says, "because a lot of the Jewish composers who left Europe went on to compose for Hollywood horror films. They exposed kids to a Brucknerian vocabulary and it subsequently morphed into heavy metal."

I have to imagine that this will likely hit A.C. Douglas like a bad toothache, and honestly, after that last bit I don’t feel so good myself. The whole story is here.

Playlist:

Grateful Dead – Dick’s Picks, Vol. 19: Fairgrounds Arena, Oklahoma City, OK, Oct 19, 1973 (Grateful Dead/Rhino)

Enslaved – Mardraum and Monumension (Osmose)

King Crimson – The Roxy, Los Angeles, CA, Nov 23, 1981 (DGMLive download)

Philip Glass – Music in Similar Motion; Strung Out; Piece in the Shape of a Square; Gradus; Music in Contrary Motion; 600 Lines; How Now – Alter Ego (Orange Mountain Music)

Bob Weir and RatDog – The Fillmore, San Francisco, CA, Mar 04, 2003 (Archive.org MP3 stream)

Grateful Dead – Barton Hall at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, May 08, 1977; Patrick Gymnasium at the University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, Apr 13, 1983; Hartford Civic Center, Hartford, CT, Oct 14, 1983 (Archive.org streams)