Full Description
Since 1973, Queen have captivated listeners through the intense sonic palette of voices and guitars, the sprawling and epic journeys of songs, and charismatic splendour of their live performances. Rock and Rhapsodies is the first book to undertake a musicological study of the band's output, with a fundamental aim of discovering what, exactly, gave Queen's songs their magical and distinct musical identity. Focusing on the material written, recorded, and released between 1973 and 1991, author Nick Braae provides readers with an in-depth and nuanced analytical account of the group's individual musical style (or "idiolect"), and illuminates the multifaceted stylistic and historical contexts in which Queen's music was created. Aspects of Queen's songs are also used as a springboard for exploring a range of further analytical and discursive issues: the nature of a musical style; the conceptual relationship between an artist, style, and genre; form in popular songs; and the character and identity of a singing voice.
Following an introduction and "primer" on Queen's idiolect, Rock and Rhapsodies presents ten further chapters, each of which offers a snapshot of a particular musical element (form, the voice), a particular subset of repertoire (Freddie Mercury's large-scale 1970s songs), or a particular era (post-1991), thus painting a rich overall picture of both the band's history and their ongoing presence in popular culture. Along the way, there is an underlying focus on interrogating and substantiating the themes and ideas that emerge from the writing, documentaries and other media on Queen, using a variety of analytical tools and close readings of songs, to demonstrate how aspects of critical reception align (or not) with musical details. Rock and Rhapsodies will reward any reader who has been enchanted by the myriad and complex musical components that make up any Queen song.
Contents
Notes on Musical Examples
Acknowledgements
List of Tables and Figures
1. Introduction
The Book
The Study of Queen
Issues of Style
2. Queen's Idiolect: A Primer
Harmonic Structure and Gestures
Textural Foundations and the Sound-Box
Arrangement and Performance Gestures
Sounds Like Queen, and other Conclusions
3. Artistic Craft and Crafted Artistry: Queen's Structural Archetypes
Introduction and Definitions
Conventional Forms
Variations on Conventional Forms
Episodic Songs
Artistic Craft and Crafted Artistry
4. Temporal Processes in Queen's Large-Scale Songs
Time and Popular Song
Phrase and Intra-Sectional Linearity
Sectional Temporality
Closure
Queen's Temporal Processes and Exceptions
5. Brian May and Roger Taylor
Analyzing the Voice
The Voices of Brian May and Roger Taylor
May, Taylor, and Rock Authenticity
6. Freddie Mercury
The Voices
Structural Dynamics
Stylistic Incongruities, Queer and Camp Voices, and the "Real" Freddie
Mercury, Rock Authenticity, and Interpretation
Coda
7. Hard Rock, Glam Rock and Progressive Rock in the 1970s
Commentary and Conceptual Considerations
Queen's "Dominant Voice": The Hard Rock Connection
The Glam Rock Connection: Exaggeration, Irony, and Play
Progressive Rock, and Interplay
8. The Musical World(s) of Queen
A "Unique" Sonic Fingerprint and Pastiche in the 1970s
Queen's Sonic Patterns and Stylistic Connections
The Musical World(s) of Queen
9. A Day at the Races and the Gestural Unity of Queen
Queen in 1976 and the Ideal of Evolution
The Notion of Gestural Unity: Idiolect Revisited
A Day at the Races
The Gestural Unity of Queen
10. Was It All Worth It? Queen in the 1980s
A Decade of Changing Fortunes
From "Save Me" to "Staying Power"
The Rock Ballads Revisited
Hard Rock by Numbers
Was It All Worth It?
11. Queen's Jubilee: The Late Style of Innuendo
Introduction
"Innuendo"
"The Show Must Go On"
A Late Style of Queen
12. Legacy
Post-1991
Replacing Freddie
"No One But You"
We Will Rock You
The Influence of Queen
The End of the Story
Bibliography
Appendix A
