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Hudson, S. S. (2019). Feeling Beats and Experiencing Motion: A Construction-based Theory of Meter. Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern University, .
Abstract: Musical meter is often described as an objective grid-like system of time-points that is created by musical sounds. I define meter instead as any pattern of felt beats an individual listener chooses to hear, a physical and cognitive interpretation of the music that is (re-) created in the moment of listening. We construe meter through embodied metering practices: dance gestures, patterns of counting, or epistemologies of rhythmic motion. Many metering practices have conventional metering constructions, specific associations between sounding features, patterns of felt beats, and paths of motion through these beats. Drawing on concepts from cognitive science and performance studies, I explore how this embodied knowledge is constituted and applied in both planning of musical phrases by a performer, and in-time perception and cognition of musical rhythms by any listener or participant.
Metering constructions and practices are often performed by and associated with certain communities and identities. I take a culturally-situated approach to meter and felt motion, studying traditions of embodied movement and bodily discipline including headbanging in heavy metal (Chapter 1), characteristic dance rhythm topics in non-dance concert music of the eighteenth century (Chapter 2), motivic manipulation and developing variation in late Romantic chamber music (Chapters 3 and 4), and prosody and speech gestures in operatic recitative (Chapter 5). Contrary to many existing theories of meter, I argue that our feelings of beat are not necessarily organized in cyclical grids, but are improvised on the spot by stitching together familiar motions. I also explore how movements often embody and perform aesthetic ideologies and cultural meanings, with these hermeneutic frameworks often shaping listeners’ choice of movements, their proprioception of their own movements, and their perception of the qualities of rhythm and motion in the music they are listening to.
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Simms, B. (2019). Foreverdark: For Amplified Cello Soloist and Chamber Orchestra. Doctoral thesis, University of Toronto (Canada), Ann Arbor.
Abstract: Foreverdark is a single movement, ten-minute concertino (short concerto) for amplified cello soloist with live electronic processing and chamber orchestra. The exact instrumentation consists of violoncello solo, flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, trumpet in Bb, horn in F, tenor trombone, percussion, piano, harp, violin 1, violin 2, viola, violoncello, and double bass; each part is played by a single player. The compositional style is a continuation and deeper exploration of the composer’s current compositional interests, namely the integration of quotation and popular music style signals within more broadly art music formats. By amplifying and separating the cello soloist from the ensemble, the player’s position alludes to that of a “lead guitarist;” subsequently, much of their melodic material (and that of the orchestra around them) is sourced from a variety of heavy metal riffs, most of them from bands the composer listened to as a teenager. The piece’s title, “Foreverdark,” both references the song with a similar name (Foreverdark Woods) by Viking metal artist Bathory as well as the composer’s long and somewhat nostalgic relationship to the metal genre itself. In addition to heavy metal-sourced melodic and rhythmic motifs, “Foreverdark” also contains some material bordering on a folk music aesthetic. Surprisingly, metal-turned-folk is a common stylistic shift in for some of the bands quoted within the work.
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Vaughn, E. M. (2015). Harmonic resources in 1980s hard rock and heavy metal music. Master's thesis, Kent State University, Ann Arbor.
Abstract: The first objective of this work was to review the existing literature relating to popular music analysis to determine if standards of harmonic practice within hard rock and heavy metal music have been considered and established. This led to the review of the analytical methods of Guy Capuzzo, Christopher Doll, Walter Everett, Allen Moore, and Ken Stephenson. For the needs of this study, Everett's work (and to a lesser degree, Stephenson's work) is primary as it best summarizes the harmonic schemes used in the pieces analyzed.
Three songs were selected within different subgenres of hard rock and heavy metal: thrash metal (Metallica, “Master of Puppets”), neo-classical metal (Yngwie Malmsteen, “Far Beyond the Sun”), and commercial hard rock (Guns-N-Roses, “Welcome to the Jungle”). These pieces were analyzed extensively to understand the primary harmonic resources that are at work in each. Additionally, the three pieces were compared with regard to their formal elements, melodic materials, texture, and dynamics to draw conclusions about what similarities they share and also how they differ. Depending on the piece and the section under consideration, these three examples exhibited a reliance on modal structures, blues-based materials, and common-practice influences.
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Walch, F. (2023). Extreme Metal Across the Digital Divide: Music, Technology, Genre. Ph.D. thesis, The University of Texas at San Antoniohicago, Chicago, Illinois.
Abstract: This dissertation examines how the analog-digital transition influenced the development of extreme metal, interpreting its present obsession with fine sub-generic distinctions and “old-school” revivals of analog aesthetics as a means of coping with an uneasy dependence on digital media. While extreme metal’s values developed in analog networks, its transcendence of aural and bodily limits required digital prostheses. The digital divide in accessing these contested technologies structured extreme metal’s system of subgenres, which—like the remembered inconveniences of the past—memorialize now-lost resistances.
This dissertation’s arc is conceptual and chronological. Its introduction and conclusion frame its inquiry with present concerns, while the inner chapters are case studies that progress from undifferentiated analog beginnings in the 1980s to sub-generic crystallization up to the arrival of the digital audio workstation in the mid-1990s. Using archival materials, newly conducted interviews, and close readings of musical records, these case studies put vernacular theories into dialog with discourses drawn from the musicology of record production, music theory, and critical theory. Ultimately, these constellations aim to articulate a constitutive relationship between what it means to analyze, make, and enjoy popular music. This dissertation’s contributions are twofold. First, it provides models for the analysis of popular music grounded in the historically conditioned values of an aesthetic community—and how these values are adapted to disruptions. Second, this dissertation argues that (sub-)genre, as the promise of being able to repeat (increasingly narrow) aesthetic experiences, requires technologies that make this repetition possible—at least in fantasy. The Introduction uses ethnographic vignettes to establish the contemporary importance of sub-genre and nostalgia.
Chapter 1 asks why pioneering musicians can claim to have heard extreme metal before it existed, by manipulating the time-axis of existing records on tape or vinyl players. This fetish-like objectification of creativity reflects a disavowal of subjective creativity. Chapter 2 analyzes death metal drumming’s labor theory of value, demonstrating why digital drum sample replacement was both essential and intolerable for the development of the prized blast beat, which was valued as concrete time, but measured as abstract time.
An Interlude examines how moral panics around backmasking let horror-inspired album introductions transmit different messages to insiders and outsiders. Chapter 3 reconstructs the digital-analog assemblage Morrisound Studios used to create the signature hyper-real performance associated with death metal and explores how its aural trace made the digital divide audible. Chapter 4 argues that the death metal production aesthetic undermined the groove-based forms of grindcore, examining how former grindcore bands re-record their own songs in a death metal idiom. Chapter 5 contests the notion that black metal was only a return to an imagined analog past, analyzing it as a post-digital style that used the devaluation of human performance it critiqued in death metal to incorporate influences from electronic dance music. The Postlude returns to the present and considers what is at stake when resistances are lost to remediation. (source: Uchicago.edu)
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