All by Myself by Steve Hamelman

Author:Steve Hamelman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

An Anatomy of Queen’s Idiolect and Taylor’s Individual Fingerprints

Queen’s idiolect comprises a number of musical traits, several of which are important in this context. To start, most of the group’s songs feature a vocal arrangement consisting of three or four parts singing in close-position harmony. Brian May was renowned for arranging guitar tracks in a similar structure—he would record individual guitar lines that would coalesce to create a three- or four-part chord. A number of May’s other techniques are important components of Queen’s idiolect; notably, he often doubled the bass lines on the electric guitar (e.g., the second verse of “Bohemian Rhapsody”) or played ringing and sustained power chords (also in the second verse of “Bohemian Rhapsody”), a trait he undoubtedly picked up from Pete Townshend of the Who. These various vocal and guitar features are so ubiquitous throughout Queen’s songs that they act like sonic markers or stamps that provide any track with a Queen-like flavor.

Queen’s idiolect is also defined by several approaches to songwriting. These traits are less specific musically, insofar as they are not sonic markers, but they are equally important in distinguishing the group’s output. One of these songwriting approaches was to expand upon the formal conventions of rock music. It may be considered a “less specific” feature because the group found multiple ways of subverting such conventions—“Love of My Life” follows the standard AABA model, but with extra sections interpolated into this structure; “The March of the Black Queen” unfolds nine musical episodes with only some repetition of ideas; “In the Lap of the Gods” may be considered “through-composed” (no repetition of ideas), and so forth.[1] What is crucial about this formal experimentation is that the group never actually abandoned the general principles of pop songwriting. Even “Bohemian Rhapsody” has verse-like sections, as well as differing levels of intensity. It is just that choruses do not succeed these verses in a neat and tidy order. Thus, the formal ingredients of popular music remain present in Queen’s output even if the overarching structure does not line up with existing conventions.

The second important element of Queen’s output is their treatment of musical style. This is where the distinction between style and idiolect becomes murky. What defines Queen’s tracks, particularly through the 1970s, was their reluctance to remain tied to one single musical style. Granted, one might point to a number of hard rock and progressive rock tracks in the early phase of their career, but the group was constantly searching for new music ground, either from the past, such as the Dixieland imitation of “Good Company,” or from the present, such as their brief turn to disco and funk rock styles in the late 1970s. Again, we may regard this as a generalized principle of their songwriting; they experimented with each new style briefly before looking further afield for uncharted territory. What this means for listeners is that each stylistic step is fresh and unique, and yet we can still understand such steps as the type of thing Queen would do.

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