Last week I said a contemporary choral piece we’re working on “sounds kind of metal to me.”
I got pushback: this isn’t a metal piece by any stretch of the imagination, and moreover, it’s being sung a cappella – metal has thumping bass, distorted guitars, massive drums.
But I stand by my assessment (my student later agreed, but said, it’s more grunge than metal…). The quality of the beat, the driving rhythm, the harmonic motion. These things feel like metal interpolated in an oblique way.
It gets me thinking about what constitutes a genre. Is it instrumentation? Is it form? Is it literature? Is it the decade of creation?
For me, genres are more flexible than that. You might think of jazz as drawing from the Great American Songbook, but when Kurt Elling sings American Tune or Sara Gazarek sings Jolene – that’s still jazz singing. When Eric Whitacre writes, it often feels as if he’s writing ambient pop or movie music – even when he’s writing for concert choir. I heard a new Christmas song today, and said almost at once, “That’s not a Christmas song.” Even though the lyrics were about Christmas, the song didn’t feel like part of the genre.
Genre, of course, is made up – some argue it’s made up by marketing companies to help sell records. And it is helpful when you want to look for more things that are like the things you like. But genre only takes you so far, and it’s worth remembering that it’s not always so cut and dry.
And if you come across an a cappella choral piece that feels metal, by all means – let that inform your interpretation.