Speakers
Lori Burns
Lori Burns is Professor of Music at the University of Ottawa. Her interdisciplinary research merges musical analysis and cultural theory to explore representations of gender in the lyrical, musical and visual texts of popular music. She has published articles in edited collections published by Ashgate, Bloomsbury, Cambridge, Garland, Oxford, Routledge, and the University of Michigan Press, as well as in leading journals (Popular Music, Popular Music and Society, The Journal for Music, Sound, and Moving Image, Studies in Music, Music Theory Spectrum, Music Theory Online and The Journal for Music Theory). She is co-editor of The Pop Palimpsest with Serge Lacasse (2018) and The Bloomsbury Handbook to Popular Music Video Analysis with Stan Hawkins (2019). Her book on popular music, Disruptive Divas: Critical and Analytical Essays on Feminism, Identity, and Popular Music (Routledge Press, 2002) won the Pauline Alderman Award from the International Alliance for Women in Music (2005). She was a founding Co-Editor of the Tracking Pop Series of the University of Michigan Press and is now Co-Editor of the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series and Associate Editor of Music Theory Spectrum.
Gendered Cotextuality in Progressive Metal: Floor Jansen’s Vocal Collaborations
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Lori Burns
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Progressive metal affords opportunities to female singers in a range of stylistic contexts. The acclaimed vocalists of the “female-fronted metal” domain (representing an array of subgenres) are frequently invited to collaborate as guest artists with melodically-driven metal bands. This paper examines Floor Jansen’s work in a range of collaborative contexts: with female-fronted symphonic metal band Epica (“Sancta Terra,” Retrospect, 2013); with her own progressive metal project ReVamp, featuring progressive metal artist Devin Townsend (“‘Anatomy of a Nervous Breakdown’: Neurasthenia,” Wild Card, 2013); with symphonic metal band Nightwish (“Shoemaker,” Human :II: Nature, 2020); with melodic death metal band Soilwork (“Let This River Flow,” Live in the Heart of Helsinki, 2015) and with progressive metal band Evergrey (“In Orbit,” The Storm Within, 2016). This gathering of musical works reveals Jansen in a variety of expressive contexts and formal roles, especially in relation to the other performing singers and instrumentalists.
I analyze these song collaborations to reveal how Floor Jansen accommodates her vocal techniques to suit the given musical context and to inject her own style into the sonic world of the band, exploring a number of issues: the singer’s role in the musical form and delivery of structural materials; the impact of vocal style upon genre expression and song meaning; and the representations of gender and sexuality in recorded performances and music videos.
For this analysis, I will mobilize the concept of “cotextuality” (Burns, Dubuc & Lafrance 2010) to consider the coexistence and interaction of the discursive attributes of the female artist’s text within the host text of the band. The analytic approach responds to scholarly writings on gender and sexuality in metal performance (e.g, Walser 1993; Weinstein 2000; Heesch & Scott 2016; Berkers & Schaap 2018).
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Keywords: Progressive Metal; Collaboration; Vocal performance; Gender; Cotextuality
Steven Wilson’s Hand. Cannot. Erase. (2015): A Contemporary Extension of Progressive Rock
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​Lori Burns & Ryan Blakeley
Steven Wilson is acclaimed for his contributions to the genre of progressive rock, through his band Porcupine Tree and his solo Steven Wilson project, as well as through his collaborations with progressive rock artists (e.g., King Crimson and Jethro Tull). His body of work reveals not only an attachment to the musical and extra-musical values of progressive rock, but also a strong sense of experimentation and desire to extend the boundaries of the genre. Wilson asserts his resistance to genre categorization, challenging the prog listener-analyst with tributes to 70s prog values in some instances and surprising departures from genre conventions in others.
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While his music explores progressive forms, arrangements, and production strategies, his stories reveal a preoccupation – in keeping with the genre of progressive rock – with human experience. Declaring himself to being strongly committed to writing “conceptual rock music,” Wilson’s albums explore narrative concepts not only in music and text, but also through artwork and multimedia materials. The resulting works invite the spectator to interact with a collection of materials that offer dynamic perspectives on musical narrative and storytelling.
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This paper analyzes Wilson’s album Hand. Cannot. Erase. (2015) as the crystallization of his efforts to diversify and extend progressive rock expression. With this album, he explores a poignant narrative of human loss through a deluxe edition album book, representational artifacts, an internet blog, and several music videos. To convey this complex narrative in musical form, he employs a wide range of musical styles and genres. Wilson describes the album as a “65-minute musical continuum” that avoids alignment with a single, particular genre (Wilson 2015). His infusion of metal, pop, jazz, and electronic parameters into a larger context of progressive rock (or, as he would indicate, “conceptual rock”) calls upon the listener-analyst to grapple with a complex and multi-dimensional musical narrative.
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