Rock and rhapsodies : the music of Queen /

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Includes bibliographical references and index."Rock and Rhapsodies is the first book-length musicological study of British rock band Queen. It primarily addresses the material written, recorded, and released between 1973 and 1991. The text provides readers with a nuanced analytical account of the group's songs and illuminates the varied the stylistic and historical contexts in which Queen's music was created. The key conceptual basis for the analysis is an idiolect, which refers to the distinct musical style of a single artist. Having documented the key features of Queen's idiolect, the book further explores the nature of specific musical characteristic and uses them to respond to a range of wider analytical and discursive issues as pertaining to style, genre, form, time, voice, and historiography. Rock and Rhapsodies comprises twelve chapters. The introduction documents Queen's place in scholarly literature and unfolds the principal analytical methodology. The following three chapters address the structural details of Queen's idiolect and songs, before analyzing the voices of Queen's singers. The vocal techniques are related to discourses of authenticity and, in the case of Freddie Mercury, the queer voice. The five subsequent chapters identify the changing and myriad stylistic influences on Queen, as well as relate the band to the major rock movements of the 1970s: hard, glam, and progressive. The final chapter explores the replacement singers, Queen in wider popular media, and the influence of the band, since Mercury's death in 1991"--Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on July 20, 2021).Cover -- Rock and Rhapsodies -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Acknowledgements -- Notes on Musical Examples -- 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 SongsArtistic 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 -- Analysing 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 -- Coda7. 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 RacesThe 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 -- Appendix -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- 01_9780197526736_C01.pdf