Conference Agenda

Metal’s rhythmic experimentation has proven generative for theories of musical time. However, a conspicuous set of voices is all but absent from the music theoretical literature on metal: with a few exceptions, the perspectives of metal musicians have been kept separate from formal music analysis. In this paper, I argue not only that responsible music theoretical exploration of metal should take into account the perspectives of its practitioners, but that techniques developed by metal insiders in writing and learning complex music can offer access to greater analytical efficiency and deeper musical insight.

Drawing on my own interviews with practitioners of complex metal, I explore a set of insider techniques that I call contextual counting that offer significant analytical leverage. Most musicians are familiar with both divisive counting, which construes rhythms in relation to a larger, steady beat, and additive counting, which construes rhythms in relation to a fast underlying pulse. Contextual counting does neither; instead, it reveals patterns by assigning numbers to salient musical details in contextually specific but internally consistent ways.

I point out that while contextual counting may seem to be a conceptual or visual technique, it is in fact an aural one, in that the relation between the numbers and the sounds of a passage will only be clear if you already know the passage well. Relatedly, conceptual counting schemes are not deterministic: the same string of numbers may refer to dramatically different rhythmic surfaces. Both of these facts may seem to detract from the usefulness of contextual counting in formal music theory. However, I argue that they are precisely the technique’s strengths—their flexibility allows them to sidestep the obfuscations and inefficiencies of standard notation when representing this music, and their aural contingency reflects the predominantly sonic and embodied nature of metal composition and performance.

Heavy metal music’s relationship with popular culture is complicated. The materials and strategies of metal composition overlap significantly with those of mainstream rock music, yet metalheads imagine their community in opposition to the consumerism of the popular mainstream. Andrew Cope argues that metal, in comparison to rock, “re-centred the function … from the vocals to instrumental timbre and textures,” focusing on episodic multi-sectional forms based on guitar riffs “and judicious omission of blues and rock conventions.” Correspondingly, metal songs frequently diverge from standardized structures. But, in practice, rock’s formal schemata remain vital for a song’s commercial success.
How, then, do metal composers navigate opposing demands of mainstream conventions and avant-garde experimentalism? This paper repudiates this dichotomy to address metal artists as rational producers of cultural commodities, evading essentialist formulations of style and the idealist conception of art as the concretization of metaphysics. Adapting Habermas' theory of communicative rationality, I consider musical performances as aesthetic arguments born from an expressive approach to the physical universe including the given state of historical-technological development. In this way, experimentalism answers demand left unsated by an oligopolistic music industry during the period of metal's rise from the late 1960s onward, mirroring conditions that led to the sublation of the Tin Pan Alley model by commercial recording artists following the Great Depression.
Though recent pop and rock music increasingly challenges—to use Brad Osborn's term—the "verse-chorus paradigm," metal is the locus of this study because metal musicians revolutionized verse-chorus-bridge form ahead of their peers in other genres. Drawing from a wide repertoire, I demonstrate the tendency in metal composition to expand the formal vocabulary and organizational strategies of verse-chorus-bridge form, introducing novel formal functions and alternative teleologies. Notwithstanding rejection of consumerism, these formal innovations seek to satisfy a market for authenticating aesthetic experiences outside of the avenues provided by the commercial recording industry.