Fulya maintains a performance and music production career as a progressive metal artist, and an instructor at Sabancı University. She studied classical piano and composition at Bilkent University in Ankara, followed by two Master's Degrees from the Netherlands and ITU. After working in Europe for several years, she returned to Turkey to study musicology in the Center for Advanced Studies in Music and completed her PhD on metal musicians in 2019. She has been teaching Western Art music and opera at Sabancı University since 2008, and she's been a Roland Turkey Artist since 2014 and she is working for the software synthesizer company KV331 Audio since 2018 as a product manager. Her research interests include 19th and 20th century art and popular music, metal music pedagogy and synthesizers and sound design. 

BEHIND THE KEYBOARD RIG: DISCUSSIONS ON THE EXPERIENCE OF BEING A PROGRESSIVE METAL KEYBOARDIST

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Hale Fulya Çelikel

Many distinguish progressive metal as a metal music subgenre by the presence of a keyboardist who is often regarded, by practitioners and audience alike, equally as important as the ‘guitar hero”, central for any type of metal music. Nowhere across the metal music spectrum do keyboard parts, regarded equally important as guitar parts, contribute to texture and timbre as heavily as in progressive metal. The formal, harmonic and/or rhythmic complexity and the emphasis on virtuosity further enhances the keyboardist’s role in both production and performance of this subgenre.

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Although much academic and colloquial writing has been centered on the metal guitarist, very few studies have been made on the metal keyboardist. The proposed paper, based on two recorded, structured interviews made during Summer 2019 with Jordan Rudess, the keyboardist of the American progressive metal band Dream Theater and Einar Solberg, keyboardist and singer of the Norwegian progressive metal band Leprous, seeks to fill this gap. The interviewees represent two generations of progressive metal keyboardists: thus both the viewpoint of the veteran who has been there all along during the emergence of progressive metal, shaping the mainstream of the subgenre, and the newcomer who has the daunting task to reinvent the established sound in order to make his project distinguishable from the next Dream Theater- influenced stereotype, will be presented. 

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The author, herself a progressive metal keyboardist and composer, thus seeks to validate her own experience through the lens of these prominent protagonists, comparing and contrasting their perspectives along with her own. The highlighted themes include musical background, thematic and discourse content, compositional procedures, aesthetics, performance practice, the music industry and audience response in order to map out a tentative paradigm of being a progressive metal keyboardist.

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Keywords: Progressive Metal, Keyboards, Keyboardist, Composition, Virtuosity, Dream Theater, Jordan Rudess, Leprous, Einar Solberg

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