Rush Rehm, Professor of Drama and Classics at Stanford, engages members of the cerebral rock band Glass Wave in a conversation about the transubstantiation of literature into music. The group discusses their new self-titled album “Glass Wave,” which recasts great works of literature from the Western canon into the genre of cerebral rock. The conversation includes close readings of the lyrics of songs such as “Lolita” (based on Nabokov's chef d'oeuvre), “Echo” (based on Ovid's myth of Echo and Narcissus), “Creature” (based on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), “Annabel Lee” (based on Edgar Allan Poe's last complete poem), and many others. Rush Rehm also probes the complexities of the album's instrumentation, song structure, conscious dissonances, musical affect, and the album as an aesthetic whole. Members of Glass Wave include Robert Harrison, Stanford Professor of Italian Literature; Dan Edelstein, Stanford Professor of French Literature; Christy Wampole, PhD candidate in French and Italian literature at Stanford; Thomas Harrison, Professor of Italian Literature at UCLA; and Colin Camarillo, Bay Area film maker and jazz drummer.

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