Abstract:

Heavy metal music is excluded from the common music theory textbooks used in the current undergraduate basic musicianship sequence. Metal is a genre of music designed as scary music that is heavy sonically. Metal is valuable as a tool for the preponderance of social issues and advocacy for social and environmental justice. Its compositional content samples across the common practice period through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In addition to providing enhanced perception and clarity in lecture examples, metal provides performance practice elements and metal-specific aesthetic characteristics that add new theoretical studies to the standard theory curriculum. Metal challenges students to consider contemporary music analysis techniques based on timbre, texture, orchestration and non-traditional performance methods that span the spectrum from popular to art music. A series of lessons derived from the learning objectives within the common music theory course curriculum has been created for reference and example.

Link: Metal Mayhem to Music Theory - Weston M-A Bernath (Masters Thesis)