The Routledge Handbook to Metal Music Composition

The Routledge Handbook of Metal Music Composition: Evolution of Structure, Expression, and Production examines metal music composition as a distinct practice that combines a complex array of formal musical, expressive, and technological elements.

The Routledge Handbook to Metal Music Composition: Evolution of Structure, Expression, and Production examines metal music composition as a distinct practice that combines a complex array of formal musical, expressive, and technological elements. Reaching beyond the limitations of applying common-practice theories of tonality to metal, this volume brings together a wide range of established and emerging scholars to address the building blocks of metal composition in the context of metal's subgenres and evolution over time. Together, the chapters provide a holistic theoretical framework for understanding the distinctive compositional features of metal.

With contributions from an international group of experts, the handbook is organized into four parts around major themes:

• Structures, including form, riff, harmony, rhythm, and meter
• Expressions and Techniques: Instruments
• Expressions and Techniques: Voices

• Productions, addressing the role of gear, capturing, processing, and mixing technologies.

  The contributors examine and discuss these elements with the goal of building an understanding of metal music composition that can also function as a manual for composing metal music. Providing a comprehensive overview of the unique musical elements of metal, this handbook is an essential resource for scholars and students across popular music studies, musicology, creative music performance and composition, songwriting, and production studies, as well as for anyone interested in understanding metal from the perspective of composition.

  Autorentext

  Lori Burns is Professor of Music at the University of Ottawa. Her interdisciplinary research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, merges musical analysis and cultural theory to explore representations of gender and sexuality in the lyrical, musical, and visual texts of popular music. She co-edited The Pop Palimpsest (2018), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis (2019), Analyzing Recorded Music (2022), and the Routledge Handbook of Progressive Rock, Metal, and the Literary Imagination (2025).

Ciro Scotto is Professor of Music Theory and Chair of the Music Theory Department at Ohio University. His research in music theory includes creating compositional systems, producing analyses and theoretical models of the music of the 20th and 21st centuries, and rock music, especially in the area of timbre studies. He edited The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches (2019). Besides his theoretical work, he is an active composer, and is currently composing a series of works titled Between the Hammer and Anvil for electric guitar and percussion, to be released by Ravello Records.

Inhalt

List of Contributors

List of Figures

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

Contents

Introduction: Appreciating, Understanding, and Interpreting Metal Music Composition

Lori Burns and Ciro Scotto

Part I. Structures

1. Perspectives on Harmony in Early Heavy Metal: Chords, Modes, Functions, and Texture

Esa Lilja

2. Recognizing Tonal Momentum and Echoes of Past Styles in Riff Turnarounds
   Stephen S. Hudson

3.What is a Riff? A Structural Definition and its Analytical Consequences for Process and Form in Heavy Metal
Ciro Scotto

4. Mutually Exclusive Two- and Three-Part Forms in Heavy Metal Songs
   Nolan Stolz

5. Compound Bridge Sections in Rock and Metal
   Michael Dekovich

6. Unfulfilled Expectations: Theorizing on Terminally Anti-Climactic Form
   Zach Simonds

7. Conceived Through an Act of Catharsis: The Phenomenological Allure of the Breakdown
   Owen Morawitz

8. More than Moshing: Structure, Convention, and Innovation in Extreme Metal Breakdowns
   John Muniz

9. Half-Time, Standard-Time, and Double-Time Feels in 1980s Crossover Thrash
   David Easley **

10. Systematic Onslaught: The Aesthetics and Functions of Blast Beats in Contemporary Extreme Metal
    Dennis William Lee

11. Blackened Textures: Black Metal's Sonic Complexity During the Second and Third Waves
    Wolf-Georg Zaddach

Part II. Expressions and Techniques: Instruments

12. Traditional Instruments in Global Folk Metal
    Olivia R. Lucas

13. Primordial Percussion: Drumming in Six Influential Metal Albums
    Jose M. Garza, Jr.

14. Paradigms of Guitar Performance Practice and the Language of Metal Music
    Mark Marrington

15. Metal Guitar Techniques as Timbre, Form, and Speed
    Calder Hannan

16. The Evolution of the Bass Guitar in Metal Music: Its Function in Performance and Compositional Structure
    Shvan Kaban

17. Keys to Hell: Synthesizers from Early Death Metal to Deathcore
    Tyler Osborne

Part III. Expressions and Techniques: Voices

18. "All Shall Scream": Transposable Lessons from Pierre-Luc Senécal's Hate.Machine for Growlers Choir
    Eric Smialek

19. Song of the Siren, Cry of the Warrior: An Exploration of Song Structures and Female Vocal Techniques in Power Metal
    Suzanne Strauss

20. Thine Voice is Oh So Sweet: Gothic Metal and Vocal Timbre Diversity
    Vik Squires Donnelly

21. Nu Metal's Influential Vocal Composition: Tension and Release in the Music of Korn, Incubus, and Machine Head
    Clare King

22. Beyond "Beauty and the Beast": The Evolution of Gendered Clean-Harsh Vocal Pairings in Metal Music
    Lori Burns

Part IV. Productions

23. Imagining Future Extremes on the Record Player: Time Axis Manipulation as a Theory of Extreme Metal Creativity and History
    Florian Walch

    *24. Masters of Reality: The (De)construction of Reality in the Production of Metal Music
    Niall Thomas*

24. Fragmented and Distributed Production Practices in 21st Century Metal Music: From the Studio to the Bedroom (and Back Again?)
    Steven Gamble and Lewis Kennedy

25. Electronic Drums in Industrial Metal and Continuing Practices in Contemporary Metal Music
    Neyssensas Manuel

26. Guitar Pro or DAW-based Software for Metal Composition
    Fulya Celikel

27. Black Metal and the Sonic Search for Nature
    David Hemery

28. Contemporary Approaches to Metal Music Production: Traditional Heavy Metal, Death Metal, and Metalcore
    Jan Herbst and Mark Mynett