# Classical Music for Metalheads



## Conservationist (Apr 5, 2007)

Classical music offers what everyone secretly wishes metal would: an unbroken cultural tradition untamed by the modern *****, untouchable by the mediocre tools who seem to thrive in our industrial cities.

Here's a few favorites:

1. Brahms, Johannes - Get your Romanticism on. Flowing, diving, surging passages which storm through tyrannical opposition to reach some of the most Zen states ever put to music. _4 Symph. (2CD)_

2. Respighi, Ottorino - Italian music is normally inconsequential. This has an ancient feeling, a sense of weight that can only be borne out in an urge to reconquest the present with the past. _Pines, Birds, Fountains of Rome_

3. Saint-Saens, Camille - Like DeBussy, but with a much wider range, this modernist Romantic rediscovers all that is worth living in the most warlike and bleak of circumstances. _Symph. 3_

4. Bruckner, Anton - Writing symphonic music in the spirit of Wagner, Bruckner makes colossal caverns of sound which evolve to a sense of great spiritual contemplation, the first "heaviness" on record._Romantic Symphony_

5. Schubert, Franz - A sense of power emerging from darkness, and a clarity coming from looking into the halls of eternity, as translated by the facile hand of a composer who wrote many great pieces before dying young. _Symph. 8 & 9_

6. Paganini, Niccolo - Perhaps the original Hessian, this long-haired virtuoso wore white face paint, had a rumored deal with the devil, and made short often violent pieces that made people question their lives and their churches. _24 Caprices_

Excerpted from one of my blog posts at Metal Blog. For more information, see the original metal/classical fansite, The Dark Legions Archive.


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## World Violist (May 31, 2007)

Ginastera's second String Quartet is rock music for string quartet; ridiculously intense, driving rhythm - just great rock type music.


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

Beethoven was the first headbanger.


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## Metalheadwholovesclasical (Mar 15, 2008)

Great list!

My list for any metalhead who wants to listen to some classical are songs like this.

O Fortuna by Carl Orff
Threnodies For The Victims of Hiroshima by Penderecki Krystoff (spelling?)
Night On Bald Mountain by Modest Mussorgsky
Requiem for a Dream by Clint Mansell (film score, but brilliant 



 )

Metal ad classical are very closely related, so most metalheads would enjoy classical music, and many classical fans would enjoy metal.


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## peterpoesantos (Nov 4, 2008)

Antonio Vivaldi always gives me the same high as metal music


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## Tapkaara (Apr 18, 2006)

I notice that there are several threads here related to metal music and classical music. This is not a coincidence.

Metal music is all about overwhelming and crushing musical sounds. Really, the only other musical genre that can offer this type of experience is classical. 

It's a false stereotype that all classical music is relaxing elevator music. Classical offers some of the most bombastic and earth-shattering music of all time. I can see why many metalheads also get their fix with some of the great composers.

We can go down the list of famous works of classical "metal":

Rite of Spring/Stravinsky

The Planets/Holst

Carmina Burana/Orff

1812 Overture/Tchaikovsky

Scythian Suite/Prokofiev

and the list goes on and on.

May I recommend the music of Japan's Akira Ifukube for those who enjoy bombast. Aside from his classical output, he was a famous film composer...who scored much of the original Godzilla music. It's great music to take in as you imagine huge reptilian gods leveling major cities.


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## Rondo (Jul 11, 2007)

Some good stuff mentioned. Others which may interest a metalhead convert: _Concerto for Orchestra,_ _The Miraculous Mandarin_, _Symphonie Fantastique,_ and an old favorite of mine, _Ivan the Terrible_.


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## JoeGreen (Nov 17, 2008)

Thats _Concerto for Orchestra_ by Bartok, right?


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## Rondo (Jul 11, 2007)

JoeGreen said:


> Thats _Concerto for Orchestra_ by Bartok, right?


Yes, that's the one.


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## Bach (Jun 2, 2008)

The miraculous mandarin and the concerto for orchestra are two different pieces by Bartok..


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## Christi (Nov 21, 2008)

weston said:


> beethoven was the first headbanger.*


   

Is Metallica In this cate . ???


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## Mirror Image (Apr 20, 2009)

Conservationist said:


> 3. Saint-Saens, Camille - Like DeBussy, but with a much wider range, this modernist Romantic rediscovers all that is worth living in the most warlike and bleak of circumstances.


I'm sorry but Saint-Saens was NOTHING like Debussy (not DeBussy). Saint-Saens actually despised Debussy and the whole impressionistic movement, so this statement couldn't be any further from the truth.

Checkout this little paragraph from something I pulled from Wikipedia:

*Saint-Saëns hated the music of Claude Debussy; he is reported to have told Pierre Lalo, music critic, and son of composer Édouard Lalo, "I have stayed in Paris to speak ill of Pelléas et Mélisande." The personal animosity was mutual; Debussy quipped: "I have a horror of sentimentality, and I cannot forget that its name is Saint-Saëns." On other occasions, however, Debussy acknowledged an admiration for Saint-Saëns' musical talents.*


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## Conservationist (Apr 5, 2007)

I didn't know they hated each other. Too bad. I'm not the world's biggest fan of Debussy, but it gets silly beyond that.


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## bdelykleon (May 21, 2009)

Bartók's String Quartets.


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## Mirror Image (Apr 20, 2009)

Conservationist said:


> I didn't know they hated each other. Too bad. I'm not the world's biggest fan of Debussy, but it gets silly beyond that.


 Okay, good for you.

I'm not sure what you mean by silly, but Debussy was a serious composer and one of the most influential of all-time. There's nothing silly about that.


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## Conservationist (Apr 5, 2007)

What was referred to as "silly" was any interpretation of dislike of Debussy beyond not being the world's greatest fan.


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## Mirror Image (Apr 20, 2009)

Conservationist said:


> What was referred to as "silly" was any interpretation of dislike of Debussy beyond not being the world's greatest fan.


I'm confused now.  This sentence above makes absolutely no sense.


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## Conservationist (Apr 5, 2007)

Conservationist said:


> What was referred to as "silly" was any interpretation of dislike of Debussy beyond not being the world's greatest fan.


What I was referring to as "silly" was any interpretation that I dislike Debussy in an active sense, although I am, as I said early, not the world's greatest Debussy fan.


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## neoshredder (Nov 7, 2011)

Vivaldi-The Four Seasons definitely suits for the melodic metal head. Some of the Romantic Era and Contemporay stuff will be hard for metalheads to get into. The choices above would be more suited for those that like more dissonant metal. But yeah Metal has a wide range of sounds just like classical music. But when I hear the Interlude to Master of Puppets, I'm thinking Baroque sound while the beginning is more of a Paganini chromatic thing. So yeah Bach, Vivaldi, Beethoven, and Paganini would be my choices for metalheads.


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