Beyond Verse and Chorus: Experimental Formal Structures in Post-Millennial Rock Music

Abstract

Rock songs are generally considered formally simplistic, based around alternation of verse and chorus, the latter functioning as the song’s selling point—an easily identifiable advertisement for the song-as-commodity. However, many rock songs composed in the last ten to fifteen years are not structured in this way. Pieces composed by artists in the genres known as “post-rock,” “art rock,” “math-metal,” and “neo-prog” often feature forms that, instead of treating a repeated chorus as the dramatic high point, emphasize a single moment of climactic material at the end; and some present new material from beginning to end, resulting in an entirely through-composed formal structure. This dissertation explores the link between these post-millennial experimental rock genres and the experimental song forms used by artists in those genres. Chapter One includes a literature review, identifies a mode of thought I call the “Verse/Chorus Paradigm,” and then presents a concise rock historiography that casts certain artists and genres on either side of that paradigm, either as conventional or experimental. In Chapter Two, I suggest revisionist theories of conventional rock form, present new models of climaxes and endings, and define experimental formal structures that will be used throughout the analyses in later chapters. “Terminally-Climactic Form”—a formal type I have identified throughout post-millennial rock music—is the topic of Chapter Three. In this form, a single moment of new material at the end acts as the song’s focal point, rather than the chorus, the de facto focal point in conventional rock. I construct archetypes and provide analyzed examples for three classifications of Terminally-Climactic Form: two-part, three-part, and extended. In Chapter Four, I explore the more radical departure from conventional rock forms made possible by through-composition. Toward this aim, I construct a genetic taxonomy of four through-composed types based on an analogy to formal alleles; just as in Chapter Three, each of these types is supported with analyzed examples from the post-millennial experimental rock corpus. My dissertation concludes by considering some formally ambiguous pieces, and suggests how my formal theories might be adapted to analysis of more familiar, conventional rock music.