The Routledge Handbook to Metal Music Composition: Evolution of Structure, Expression, and Production

The Routledge Handbook to Metal Music Composition: Evolution of Structure, Expression, and Production examines metal music composition as a distinct practice that combines a complex array of formal musical, expressive, and technological elements. Reaching beyond the limitations of applying common-practice theories of tonality to metal, this volume brings together a wide range of established and emerging scholars to address the building blocks of metal composition in the context of metal’s subgenres and evolution over time. Together, the chapters provide a holistic theoretical framework for understanding the distinctive compositional features of metal.

With contributions from an international group of experts, the handbook is organized into four parts around major themes:

- Structures, including form, riff, harmony, rhythm, and meter
- Expressions and Techniques: Instruments
- Expressions and Techniques: Voices
- Productions, addressing the role of gear, capturing, processing, and mixing technologies.

The contributors examine and discuss these elements with the goal of building an understanding of metal music composition that can also function as a manual for composing metal music. Providing a comprehensive overview of the unique musical elements of metal, this handbook is an essential resource for scholars and students across popular music studies, musicology, creative music performance and composition, songwriting, and production studies, as well as for anyone interested in understanding metal from the perspective of composition.

Lori Burns is Professor of Music at the University of Ottawa. Her interdisciplinary research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, merges musical analysis and cultural theory to explore representations of gender and sexuality in the lyrical, musical, and visual texts of popular music. She co-edited The Pop Palimpsest (2018), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis (2019), Analyzing Recorded Music (2022), and the Routledge Handbook of Progressive Rock, Metal, and the Literary Imagination (2025).

Ciro Scotto is Professor of Music Theory and Chair of the Music Theory Department at Ohio University. His research in music theory includes creating compositional systems, producing analyses and theoretical models of the music of the 20th and 21st centuries, and rock music, especially in the area of timbre studies. He edited The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches (2019). Besides his theoretical work, he is an active composer, and is currently composing a series of works titled Between the Hammer and Anvil for electric guitar and percussion, to be released by Ravello Records.