I got something really exciting in the mail recently: my complimentary copy of The Routledge Handbook to Metal Music Composition, which features my latest publication about metal, a chapter about metal’s tonal roots in the blues and the evolution of a common musical structure I call a “riff turnaround.” This new edited volume is really an important moment for the musicological study of metal, featuring a who’s-who of folks currently writing on the topic.
The editors put in a fanatical amount of work to put this collection together—especially Lori Burns, who has several such collections that have either just come out or are in process. This one is really a huge service to metal studies, giving tons of early-career scholars a chance to get their work published and helping those of us who are already published get a boost to our citation counts. And the collaboration between the editors and the individual chapter authors are drawing a huge web of scholarship into coherent field rather than a bunch of disconnected one-shot publications. I can’t wait to read the other chapters!
Here’s some more information about my chapter:
Title: “Recognizing Tonal Momentum and Echoes of Past Styles in Riff Turnarounds”
Abstract: Riffs are often described in terms of their propulsive rhythm, but they also create a sense of forward motion through tonal momentum. This is especially true in “riff turnarounds,” figures added after multiple repetitions of a riff to create additional momentum, which often demarcate sections within a song’s form. One factor that contributes to this impression of momentum is when a listener recognizes a riff turnaround as a recurrence of a melodic motion they have heard before. This recognition of similarity allows a “transference” (Scotto 2019) of scale degree functions and tonal momentum from one song to another. Through this recognition and transference, each listener can hear echoes of older styles of blues, rock, and metal in newer music-even in styles like progressive metal which substantially depart from those traditions.
Here are some of the songs I discuss in this chapter. You might recognize a few of them from previous posts on this blog (linked).
- “Wanton Song” by Led Zeppelin
- “Crazy Train” by Ozzy Osbourne
- “Amerika” by Rammstein
- “Pisces” by Jinjer
- “Demiurge” by Meshuggah
- “The Rumbling” by SiM
While the whole book is fairly expensive, I’m happy to share a pre-print version of my chapter, which you can access for free over at my Academia.edu profile or at the link below.
https://www.academia.edu/120233272/Recognizing_Tonal_Momentum_and_Echoes_of_Past_Styles_in_Riff_Turnarounds