Abstract
In an attempt to take a fresh look at the analysis of form in rock music, this paper uses Susan McClary’s (2000) idea of ‘quest narrative’ in Western art music as a starting point. While much pop and rock adheres to the basic structure of the establishment of a home territory, episodes or adventures away, and then a return, my study suggests three categories of rock music form that provide alternatives to common combinations of verses, choruses and bridges through which the quest narrative is delivered. Labyrinth forms present more than the usual number of sections to confound our sense of ‘home’, and consequently of ‘quest’. Single-cell forms use repetition to suggest either a kind of stasis or to disrupt our expectations of beginning, middle and end. Immersive forms blur sectional divisions and invite more sensual and participatory responses to the recorded text. With regard to all of these alternative approaches to structure, Judy Lochhead’s (1992) concept of ‘forming’ is called upon to underline rock music forms that unfold as process, rather than map received formal constructs.
 
 Central to the argument are a couple of crucial definitions. Following Theodore Gracyk (1996), it is not songs, as such, but particular recordings that constitute rock music texts. Additionally, narrative is understood not in (direct) relation to the lyrics of a song, nor in terms of artists’ biographies or the trajectories of musical styles, but considered in terms of musical structure. It is hoped that this outline of non-narrative musical structures in rock may have applications not only to other types of music, but to other time-based art forms.
Highlights
The word narrative is often applied to studies of pop and rock music as an organising principle
At the risk of drawing the sorts of parallels to classical music that Walser and others have cautioned against, it is as if rock music might be said to be going through a process of exploration not dissimilar to that embarked upon by Western art music composers of the period 1920–1970
I am not suggesting that rock music is ‘behind,’ and ‘catching up to’ art music, or that art music is the sole bastion of innovation
Summary
The word narrative is often applied to studies of pop and rock music as an organising principle. I disagree with McClary’s reading of blues structure; I would say that the standard 12-bar form is a quest narrative in miniature, beginning and ending on the home chord (I) after venturing forth to chords IV and V.7 It is, missing the point to analyse blues songs solely in terms of their harmonic content, when the most important content is found (arguably) in the areas of timbre, gesture and groove, and these parameters’ interaction with the delivery of the lyric, I make this distinction because of the link between the blues form and the strophic nature of much rock music. One might argue that the gradual build of layers at the start of the recording, and the quick depletion of them at the end, constitutes a quest narrative articulated by the density of the sound-mass rather than by sections defined by contrasting harmonic progressions This is the most conspicuous example of those presented here of Lochhead’s formbuilding, the layers accreting gradually in such a way that they are relatively indistinguishable to the ear.. While it is important to acknowledge that quest narrative can emerge through the timbral and textural trajectory of the sound-mass (and, this often happens in tandem with the structural process of quest narrative form), the omission or obfuscation of verse-chorus-bridge or strophic structures in immersive forms leads us to experience rock recordings in an entirely different way
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