Return to Metal (part 2)
Last Friday, I wrapped up a stint as a guest instructor at Louisiana State University, teaching a handful of classes in Olivia Lucas’s graduate music theory seminar. The course is about heavy metal music, as Olivia is one of the leading music theorists working with that genre in the field today. I was honored to receive Olivia’s invitation, not only for the chance to interact with a fabulous cohort of graduate students at an excellent music school, but also because this teaching marked my return to heavy metal in a conservatory setting for the first time in three years.
As I noted in the first post in this series on my re-engagement with heavy metal music, this genre is enormously significant to my artistic point of view. Heavy metal was the first music I fell in love with and continues to passionately inspire me as a composer. I also owe my career in music scholarship, to the extent that I have one, to heavy metal, as my first international publications and conference presentations all centered around new analyses of heavy metal music. In fact, Olivia and I first met at a heavy metal conference in Finland back in the summer of 2015.
Of all the work I’ve been up to this winter and look forward to this spring and summer, my teaching at LSU this month epitomizes the theme of this blog series, as it marked the first time I’ve focused on heavy metal in a classroom setting since 2017. That November, the fantastic music theorist Guy Capuzzo invited me to his graduate seminar at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, where I presented research on meter in heavy metal, including a full transcription and analysis of Meshuggah’s song, “By The Ton”, which was relatively new at the time.
For Olivia’s classes, I prepared two lessons apiece covering the topics of “Heavy Metal & Identity” and “Form in Heavy Metal Music”. These connected my most recent research interests with the concepts at the heart of my earliest scholarship in this area. I was particularly excited to incorporate cultural studies and sociology readings that I have used in my liberal arts music classes at the University of Michigan over the last couple, such as bell hooks’ landmark 1992 essay, “Eating The Other: Desire and Resistance”, into this heavy metal seminar.
Above is the full-length lecture video I created to prime the class for our intensive analytical sessions on various structures in heavy metal music. Olivia’s students did a spectacular job digesting and applying techniques and concepts that were new to them. The style of analysis we used is based on the system I learned working with Lisa Coons and Chris Biggs on the music faculty at Western Michigan University from 2016-2019. Focused on listening and prose descriptions of specific categories of music content and their transformations and interactions in a given example, I also use it to great success with my liberal arts students.
Although the classes I teach at the University of Michigan touch on heavy metal music as much as I can get away with it, it is thrilling to teach this incredible music without any limitations and I’m so grateful to Olivia and her students for giving me the opportunity to do that again.
