Rock and Rhapsodies

Nick Braae is Principal Academic Staff Member in Music and Performing Arts at Waikato Institute of Technology in Hamilton, New Zealand. He has published widely on the music of Queen, New Zealand popular music, and conceptual understandings of style in popular music. He has taught music history, composition, performance, and musical theatre performance studies at Wintec since 2016. Outside of teaching, he works regularly as a session keyboardist, musical director, composer, and arranger.

• Notes on Musical ExamplesAcknowledgementsList of Tables and Figures 1. IntroductionThe BookThe Study of QueenIssues of Style 2. Queen's Idiolect: A PrimerHarmonic Structure and GesturesTextural Foundations and the Sound-BoxArrangement and Performance GesturesSounds Like Queen, and other Conclusions 3. Artistic Craft and Crafted Artistry: Queen's Structural ArchetypesIntroduction and DefinitionsConventional FormsVariations on Conventional FormsEpisodic SongsArtistic Craft and Crafted Artistry 4. Temporal Processes in Queen's Large-Scale SongsTime and Popular SongPhrase and Intra-Sectional LinearitySectional TemporalityClosureQueen's Temporal Processes and Exceptions 5. Brian May and Roger TaylorAnalyzing the VoiceThe Voices of Brian May and Roger TaylorMay, Taylor, and Rock Authenticity 6. Freddie MercuryThe 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 QueenA "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

Braae weaves music analysis, critical theory, and production techniques to investigate the band and their work from an impressively large range of angles. Not only is this book for those of us who think Queen is the greatest band to ever grace the world stage, but the ideas and methods herein are also incredibly useful to scholars interested in popular music analysis more generally.