Speakers
Calder Hannan
Calder Hannan is a PhD student in Music Theory at Columbia University in New York City. His research interests include popular music (especially extreme and progressive metal), rhythm and meter, and transcription. He has written and/or presented on the music of Meshuggah, Between the Buried and Me, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Car Bomb, Bell Witch, Anomalous, clppng., and many others. His dissertation will provisionally focus on techniques of rhythmic and metric transformation in recent metal, jazz, and hip hop. He also recently started a YouTube channel, "Metal Music Theory," on which he shares ideas from his research for a general audi
Circular Telos - Hearing form through motivic return in Between the Buried and Me’s Parallax II: Future Sequence
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Calder Hannan
In this paper, I explore the details of motivic reuse in the 2012 album Parallax II: Future Sequence by the American progressive metal band Between the Buried and Me. The album is long, complex, and overflowing with material, and this paper seeks to begin to engage with ways of hearing form on the scale of individual riffs, across songs, and over the course of the whole album (and, in one case, beyond). As such, this paper addresses a conspicuously underemphasized topic in metal scholarship by engaging analytically with the details of song- and album-length form, and the analytical techniques through which I do so have relevance for the wider progressive metal genre.
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I begin with the centrality of the recapitulation of material to this music, survey how this happens in the album, and posit that recognizing and listening for the return of previously presented material (from short guitar gestures to full song sections), across various scales of time, is fundamental to hearing this music.
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Taking Gregory McCandless’s idea of the ABAC Additive Metrical Process as a starting point, I then explore two more specific trends in how musical materials are reused. First, I theorize a more general way of thinking about these constructions, based on rotations through cycles of material with static and variable parts, which is ubiquitous in the album and progressive metal more broadly and extends the concept’s usefulness. Second, I look at a more specific case, what I call the ABABB additive formal process, and its loose extension, the concept of expanding repetition. My broader claim is that material on this album, when it returns, tends to be expanded in some way. I close by linking these structures to the concept album’s narrative, and specifically to the band’s environmental politics.
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Keywords: progressive metal, Between the Buried and Me, analysis, form, recapitulation, motive