What Was Baroque Rock All About? Get the Story at the Rock Hall Library & Archives

Thu 10/11 @ 7PM

 In the mid-late 60s, good old rock & roll began splintering into a hundred sub-genres, as drug- and mysticism-fueled experimentation broke out all over the place.

One of those sub-genres was so-called “baroque rock,” related to “symphonic rock” or “orchestral rock,” in its borrowings from the lush, ornate sounds of classical music. The late 60s cult pop band the Left Banke (“Walk Away Renee,” “Pretty Ballerina”) is credited with coming up with the name. But honestly, rock music got pretty baroque all over the place at that time.

Learn more about it when musicologist/University of Arizona assistant professor of music Sara Gulgas comes to the Rock Hall Library & Archives on the Tri-C Metro campus for a lecture/discussion co-sponsored by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and American Musicological Society. She’s currently working on a scholarly monograph called Baroque Rock and the Memory Politics of Musically Representing the Past, “a study of baroque rock’s sonic representations of a distant past through the blending of string quartets and harpsichords with rock instrumentation in the 1960s.”

She describes bands such as Procol Harum, the Beatles, the Kinks and more as participating in “postmodern nostalgia: an ironic interpretation of history that references an unexperienced past, in order to alert the listener about the dangers of nostalgic memory.”

The event is free. You can register here.

rockhall.com/ams-gulgas

Cleveland, OH 44115

 

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