Glass Wave: Professor Lit-Rock Band Drops Album

Glass Wave seems like any other band: They pose in shadows for MySpace portraits. They record their jams and post them online. They wear cowboy hats and eclectic jewelry. Oh, and they have day jobs, as professors at various northern California colleges.

The band, which recently released its first album, keeps in line with its members' scholarly pursuits by turning books into music. Inside Higher Ed has more:

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 Allen 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.

The band came together in 2008 when Stanford literature professors David Edelstein and Robert P. Harrison dreamed up the idea of helping students review for exams by performing classic texts as songs. Harrison's brother, a UCLA literature professor, and Christy Wampole, then a Stanford PhD candidate and a trained singer, came on board, and with the addition of a jazz drummer the group was complete.

The professors say that their extracurricular activity can be a challenging act of translation -- finding the balance between music and lyrics adapted from Moby Dick isn't always easy. As Edelstein told Inside Higher Ed:

"This kind of music really stands or falls on how much it translates into aesthetic pleasure. It has to succeed musically first and foremost. The lyrics can be absolutely fantastic. But if the music sucks, it's going nowhere."