Boss, JackDekovich, Michael2022-10-262022-10-262022-10-26https://hdl.handle.net/1794/27779This dissertation investigates the operationalization verse-chorus-bridge form in heavy metal music. Spread by the popular music industry and media, verse-chorus-bridge form became the most prominent form in rock music from the 1970s onward (Stephenson 2002). At the same time, heavy metal emerged as an international cosmopolitan subculture, freely adopting and modifying the syntax of popular music while negotiating its consumerist trappings (Weinstein 2001, Hudson 2021). I demonstrate that metal transformations of verse-chorus-bridge form enhance its value by contributing a vocabulary of section types and reorient its teleology to make for more flexible song structures. Drawing on a wide variety of examples from various metal subgenres, I show that verse-chorus-bridge form—usually appearing as a compound AABA form (Covach 2005)—is used as the template for expanded and truncated formal types (collectively called rotational form with bridge (Hudson 2021)) and that bridge sections are accorded greater importance in heavy metal as compared to other genres of commercial popular music. Bridge sections play a special role in signifying the metal genre and provide a means to diverge from referential models. By creating moments of expectation in bridge sections with instrumental passages and dance sections, metal artists divert the usual chorus teleology of verse-chorus-bridge form. These new methods of organization reinvigorate the possibilities of song form within metal and artists influenced by metal (Osborn 2011). Avant-gardism in metal composition therefore functions to produce new technologies within the dialectic of the popular music industry.en-USAll Rights Reserved.FormenlehreHeavy MetalMetal Music StudiesMusical FormPopular MusicElectronic Thesis or Dissertation