Conference Agenda

This paper discusses the emergence of V7sus in 1960s pop/soul/R&B. The decade features frequent near-encounters with V7sus without sounding it explicitly. Comparing the 1961 and 1970 versions of “Every Beat of My Heart” captures the stylistic endpoints across that time period: the earlier ii7 is later replaced by V7sus. Early-1960s V7sus typically occurs as a textural byproduct. A common scenario involves bass figuration, as in the Temptations’ “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” where V7sus appears briefly when the tonic-pedal bass bounces off ^5. That fleeting moment of upper IV over bass ^5 offers a glimpse of what future songs would employ as a multi-measure sonority. Another source of proto-sus is vocal harmonization. Early- to mid-60s vocal arrangements usually harmonize the melody with tertian voicings. This can produce a “collateral” V7sus on melodic ^1, as in Smokey Robinson’s “Ooo Baby Baby.” There is an incompatibility between melodic ^1 and the ^7 of tertian V, tonic against leading tone. The 60s popularity of pentatonic melodies—and their emphasis on ^1—heightens this frictional relationship. (There is no such friction with IV, the decade’s preferred pre-tonic.) A workaround is to let the melody touch down on ^1 only when it is safe to do so (during IV or vi), otherwise keeping to ^5 or ^2 during V. Because V7sus contains ^1, it spares singers from vacating the pentatonic during dominant harmony. But prior to the chord’s widespread adoption, songwriters often circumvented V7sus despite ideal conditions for it, as in “You Can’t Hurry Love” by the Supremes. The talk closes with an overview of how the sus chord eventually becomes a discrete harmonic object with expanded functional range. Circa 1970, V7sus signaled a future-looking grammar that promoted fresh voice-leading tendencies and participated in increasingly complex progressions, ultimately fulfilling a range of diatonic and modal/chromatic functions in 70s and 80s pop/R&B.

With a musical career spanning more than five decades, the “Piano Man” Billy Joel (b. 1949) epitomizes what we might call the “Classical-Romantic ethos” of the popular sphere. Although Joel’s musical activities are primarily in a pop-rock vein, the artist was raised playing classical piano and has always expressed his love for the “classics” of the European canon from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To be sure, his pop numbers are infused with elements that link them strongly to this tradition, as studies by Everett (2000), Schönberger (2006), Duchan (2015), Atkinson (2018), Traut (2021) and Aziz (2022) have shown.

This paper will look at another side of Joel’s musical output—namely, his 2001 Fantasies & Delusionscomposed for solo piano and intended as an homage to the Classical-Romantic tradition. In contrast to the mainly album-oriented studies of Joel, this paper will take Joel’s improvisatory impulse as a source of analytical insight. Drawing on recent studies by Burnham (2018) and Rabinovitch (2022) on the classical fantasy, the paper will highlight the many techniques that transform into classically based improvisatory gestures in Joel’s live performative movements, both in select pop numbers and in the first piece he conceived for Fantasies & Delusions, the “Soliloquy.” In this work Joel was particularly fond of the chromatically descending tetrachord—it functions as a structuring device and provides an extra programmatic element, the “concealed lament.”

The paper will close by interrogating the politics of classical music legitimacy in the popular music world. I argue that, despite his fear of not being “classical” enough and by hiring bone fide (“legit”) classical pianists to finish the job on the Fantasies & Delusions, Joel actually neglects his own classical improvisatory impulses that he acquired as a child and developed through his years of concertizing, which have served both him and his audiences as a source of wonderment and renewed musical inspiration.

Metal music has garnered significant scholarly attention from both cultural and music theorists. The genre’s antithetical position to mainstream culture reflects the scene’s historical predisposition to anti-fashion, anti-commercialism, and authentic performance (Straw 1984). Music theorists described the adherence to the AABA form in metal (Hudson 2021) along with thorough-composed forms while identifying riff-based module energetic build-up in line with Pillsbury’s description of metal music (Pillsbury 2016) and verse-chorus teleological structure (Nobile 2022). Various extreme metal genres, however, such as death, doom, and thrash metal, are identified with various markers, including an association with looser formal structures (Purcell 2003; Smialek 2015; Elflein 2016). Despite this association with loose formal structures, this paper argues that traditional verse-chorus structures are essential to understanding various techniques that form loose formal structures that define extreme metal genres.

Exploring formal deviations relating to verse-chorus structures allows for alternative readings of through-composed works functioning as functional verse-chorus subversions. This paper explores two subversions that reinterpret the functional chorus: R-integration and the double rise. The R-integration functions as a chorus subversion that replaces the climactic moment of the verse-chorus cycle with the initiating riff or bassline progression that simultaneously concludes the verse-chorus energetic teleology while initiating a new formal section. The double rise subverts the chorus's arrival by transforming the initiation of the chorus into a secondary pre-chorus material that may lead to an authentic chorus or another riff integration.

This paper uses these two chorus subversions to analyze recent extreme metal songs that transgress formal boundaries and establish their authentic voices while striving for new methods to create increasingly intense musical forms and disturbing sounds.