Marrington, Mark ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5404-2546 (2025) Paradigms of Guitar Performance Practice and the Language of Metal Music. In: Burns, Lori and Scotto, Ciro, (eds.) The Routledge Handbook to Metal Music Composition : Evolution of Structure, Expression, and Production. Taylor & Francis

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Abstract

It is not an overstatement to suggest that the guitar has been central to the evolution of the language of popular music since the 1950s, with developments in the latter often being directly attributable to the employment of the former as a medium of musical expression. In this regard the guitar is a framework whose unique characteristics afford particular strategies for harmonic and melodic design that come to constitute the essential building blocks of musical genres. Metal music is a particular case in point, a musical genre whose harmonic and melodic material owes much to the centrality of the guitar to its performance practice. Moreover, as guitar-led metal performance practices have changed, so too has the music’s harmonic and melodic language, the former thereby becoming implicated in questions of musical progressivism. To elucidate these ideas, this chapter surveys a range of examples of metal music from the early 1970s to the 1990s, with a view to highlighting the ways in which particular paradigms of metal guitar performance practice have at given moments shaped the genre’s musical identity. In addition to offering useful analytical perspectives on the evolution of metal’s guitar-led musical style per se, the chapter also aims to provoke consideration of the role that technological media in general terms play in conditioning compositional outcomes.

Item Type:	Book Section
Status:	Published
School/Department:	School of the Arts
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/12356

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