Brad Osborn Responds

Abstract

When I began researching terminally climactic forms (TCFs), I didn't have a particular genre of pop or rock music in mind, only a formal structure.1 I solicited lists of songs from hundreds of friends and colleagues without specifying genre. The resulting body of music found in my dissertation and recent Spectrum article just happened to be post-1990, befitting a pop-to-hard rock continuum more than a hard rock-to-heavy metal continuum. Among the submissions of potential terminally climactic songs I received, two outliers from unrelated genres—early twentieth-century gospel music and traditional Cuban music—were particularly intriguing because they presented something syntactically analogous to TCFs. Not unlike the concept of convergence in biology, in which genetically and geographically unrelated organisms display similar features to adapt to similar ecosystems, each of these songs ends with something that, while not a rigorously defined terminal climax (TC), functions analogously to a TC in TCFs. Just as I was thankful to receive these submissions, so was I pleased to listen to Garrett Schumann's extensive list of songs from 1970s and 80s heavy metal. However, Schumann goes one step further than merely suggesting that these are analogous forms. He insists that these “104 heavy metal songs featur[e] TCFs.” The difference may seem at first blush pedantic, but Schumann's central argument—that “TCFs did not disappear from rock music during 1970–90”—rests entirely on these heavy metal songs actually being TCFs.