Are rock and classical music polar opposites? Certainly, it's hard to see much in common between, say, the screeching onslaught of death metal and the exquisite refinement of a Mozart string quartet. Nonetheless, a recent announcement in London has revealed an interesting, if utterly random connection between the two genres. It turns out that the baroque composer George Frederick Handel and the rock legend Jimi Hendrix were once housemates. Well, sort of. There may have been centuries between them, but Handel's London house became home to the American guitarist in the late 1960s. Now the connection is being brought into the public eye, as the museum now occupying the house has just announced it will show Hendrix's old flat to the public this Autumn.
Such different musical figures sharing an address may be pure coincidence - though the connection apparently delighted Hendrix when he discovered it - but the rock and classical traditions are linked in many other unexpected ways. From Hendrix's period on, many rock musicians have taken inspiration from classical greats, trying to write music that adopted the thematic complexity and structure of orchestral music while keeping rock's raw energy. This music has remained almost terminally unfashionable since the late 1970s, but there's no denying its ambition. These fusions throw up some interesting questions: is there any shared aesthetic between the two forms or do they work on totally different principles? And do the ambitions of rock and classical music mix well, or do they just create an almighty mess when combined?
Certainly there is some overlap between the two worlds. The veneration of lead guitarists among lovers of classic rock has a clear parallel with the romantic cult of the virtuoso; dandyish 19th-century figures such as the violinist Paganini and the pianist Liszt being the Hendrix and Jimmy Page of their day. Likewise, the bombastic sensory onslaught and aspirations to grandeur of much rock continue a trend rooted in romantic music. It is surely no coincidence that many rock bands arrive on stage for concerts to the sound of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries or Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, music whose mood and volume fits strangely well with their own.
Sometimes, the classical influence on rock has been more direct. In fact, it was around the time that Hendrix moved into Handel's old London quarters that popular bands began to look to "serious" music for inspiration. This reflected a sea change in the music world. Until the mid-1960s, rock and pop musicians never quite stepped beyond the counter-cultural, rebel template of the early rock 'n' roll era. While they could be very talented, people beyond their fan base were more likely to see them as depraved troublemakers rather than proper musicians. Their music was viewed as too disposable so they could still be easily dismissed as offering little more than prepackaged rebellion to the young and impressionable in return for their pocket money. The massive success of The Beatles and their second-wave contemporaries, however, proved that these new bands were part of a global phenomenon set to shape the culture of the future. With The Beatles being decorated with MBEs by the Queen in 1965, rock and pop became almost respectable. Emboldened by the new seriousness and respect with which the wider world was treating them, rock musicians set out to explore how their music could be developed into more sophisticated, intricate forms. Could the answer be to aspire to classical music's complexity and thematic coherence?
Some musicians seemed to think so. Freak Out, the 1966 debut album by Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention, mixed orchestral arrangements with pop, jazz, doo-wop and satirical rants against the American establishment. Too free-form and subversive to wear its classical influences obviously, Zappa's music nonetheless rocked the music world with its eclectic ambitions and inspired many to play around with classical forms. This trend only grew in the 1970s, with bands such as Pink Floyd peppering their early album Atom Heart Mother with interludes of brass and strings and the Electric Light Orchestra combining rock and pop with lavish orchestral arrangement. In a genre that came to be known as symphonic rock, Genesis arguably took this experimentation furthest. Their 22-minute song Supper's Ready (1972) was written in sonata form, reworking recurrent themes and including radical shifts in key in a broadly classical manner. Depending on your point of view, the piece is either an impressively ambitious experiment in musical fusion or a rambling bit of hippy nonsense, but it certainly showed an ambition that few bands have since dared to emulate.
These experiments were bold and interesting, but did they work? The jury is still out. Symphonic rock's reputation has taken many knocks over the years. Damned for its pretentiousness - the genre rarely wears its sense of mission lightly - the music of bands such as Genesis suffered a huge critical backlash as the hippy era faded. In part, the short, sharp shock of punk rock later in the 1970s was a reaction to this sort of music - its raw simplicity and deliberate amateurishness offering a refreshing antidote to the florid expansiveness of earlier times. Likewise symphonic rock wasn't often taken seriously among lovers of classical music, to which its connection is arguably tenuous. Despite an interest in developing variations on a theme as opposed to the standard verse/chorus framework of pop, symphonic rock still favoured an episodic, improvisational approach closer in spirit to jazz - and was thus always unlikely to win over classical music die-hards.
There was more to the overlap between "serious" and popular music than this brief experiment alone, however. On the avant-garde fringes of both worlds, other genre-busting musicians took the art-rock fusion in a totally different direction. Andy Warhol's protégés The Velvet Underground openly despised the hippy culture of their late 1960s contemporaries - their brutal minimalism is miles away from the tripped-out bombast of symphonic rock - but they too had a similar interest in art music, albeit of a more current variety. The music they liked was of a modernist bent, in marked contrast to the romantic underpinnings of symphonic rock. The band's early work is directly influenced by the groundbreaking composer LaMonte Young. It blended an abrasive update of 1950s rock 'n' roll with a repetitive, trance-like drone that also featured in the work of such contemporary minimalists as Young and Steve Reich.
This avant-garde fusion continued later in the work of composer Glenn Branca, whose experiments on the borders of rock include a rough-edged, rather frightening symphony for 100 electric guitars. Such arcane creations may sound entirely fringe - but they actually aren't. Some of Branca's early associates went on to found Sonic Youth, the band whose combination of melody with distortion and feedback became a major influence on grunge. Meanwhile, the repetitive rhythms of Young have filtered through rock into electronic dance music. This all may seem a world away from Hendrix listening to records of Handel's Water Music in the composer's house. Nonetheless, it shows that once recorded music was widely available, no single genre could stay exclusive and separate for long.
Jimi Hendrix's old flat will be open as part of the Hendrix in Britain Exhibition at Handel House Museum, 25 Brook Street, London, W1K 4HB from September 15-26. Limited tickets go on sale from June 1 at www.seetickets.com/events.
