The Great Kat Shred Classical
Julliard Violinist Combines Metal Performance and Romantic Music
Feb 2, 2008
What does a classical musician do when she starts classical piano lessons at age 7 and classical violin lessons at age 9, winning a scholarship to Julliard School of Music for her violin talents at age 15? Should she audition for the chair of the New York Philharmonic? Embark on a dazzling solo career with performances at Carnegie?
Perhaps such would be the normal route for many promising young classical musicians, but after performing at Carnegie Recital Hall and touring the world, Katherine Thomas had different ideas about her professional career.
Liszt may have inspired screaming fans in his day, but the concert halls performing his music today seemed tame. Thomas accordingly changed her performance name to The Great Kat and brought her technical proficiency and love of classical music to an entirely different genre: Speed Metal.
By transcribing works by classical composers over to guitar and playing them at break-neck speed, with head-banging intensity, The Great Kat sought to merge 2 (seemingly) disparate genres into the entirely new Shred/Classical (a quick Google search on Shred/Classical does seem to indicate that most occurrences of the term are associated with The Great Kat, but whether a genre of one musician really counts as an entire genre is a different question).
Classical and Metal: Worlds Apart?
At first glance, the 2 genres that The Great Kat attempts to combine really do seem worlds apart. The visual flamboyance and superhuman ferocity that The Great Kat adopts from one of the more extreme genres of Metal don't seem to fit with the refined passion of a genteel Classical performance. A violinist at Carnegie may play till his forehead glows, but the performance is always controlled, distant from the audience. The Great Kat, on the other hand, encourages chaos and slave-like devotion in her audience. Her website bleeds the eyes with garish fonts and gruesome images.
But if you shut your eyes for a brief moment and just listen to the sounds, the disparity starts to melt away. The lightning-fast scale passages of Paganini and Liszt blend well with the superhuman intensity required in Speed Metal.
In fact, those late Romantic composers were often called "possessed" in their own day, illustrating that virtuosity has long meant surpassing what the ordinary human being can do. And amongst the eye-bleeding fonts, The Great Kat includes biographies of several Romantic composers on her website.
These Romantic, 19th-century composers are the reason The Great Kat switched genres: she was frustrated by the work of 20th-century composers Cage and Schonberg, whom it seemed just about anyone could play. It is Beethoven, Sarasate, Wagner, Paganini and Liszt whom she transcribes (as well as earlier composers Bach and Vivaldi).
What does The Great Kat prove? That yesterday's Romantics are simply today's Shred Classicals?
Sources
"The Great Kat Biography." The Great Kat website.
"Interview with The Great Kat." Interviewed by Brian Rademacher. Sept. 18, 2005. Rock Eyez.
