Braae, Nick - Rock and Rhapsodies

What, exactly, gave Queen's songs their magical and distinct musical identity? Rock and Rhapsodies answers this question through a fascinating musicological study of the band's output.

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CONTENTS

Notes on Musical Examples
Acknowledgements
List of Tables and Figures
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 Songs
Artistic 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
Analyzing 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
Coda
7. 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 Races
The 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
Bibliography
Appendix A