US: Academic band turns literature into rock and roll

There are plenty in higher education who devote themselves to interpreting rock and roll as literature. Fewer devote themselves to the interpreting literature as rock and roll, writes Steve Kolowich for Inside Higher Ed. But that is what four California academics - three at Stanford University and another at the University of California, Los Angeles - set out to do with their band, Glass Wave.

The group, formed two years ago by the Stanford literature professors Robert P Harrison and Daniel Edelstein, recently released its self-titled debut album. Inspired by a line in Ezra Pound's 'Cantos', the band's moniker is consistent with its modus operandi: writing rock songs based on canonical works of literature. The 11-track album adapts themes and narratives from Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, Herman Melville, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Vladimir Nabokov, and sets them to musical compositions, generally in the vein of 1960s and '70s progressive rock typified by groups such as Pink Floyd, The Soft Machine, and Supertramp.
Full report on the Inside Higher Ed site