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"All Shall Scream!": Transposable Lessons from Pierre-Luc Senécal’s Hate.Machine for Growler's Choir

  • Eric Smialek (Speaker)

Activity: Talk or presentation types › Oral presentation

Description

Pierre-Luc Senécal composed Hate.Machine (2020), a nine-minute work for metal band and growler’s choir, in response to a Fox news report on the violence of internet culture. Like many metal songs, its lyrics represent a social commentary on crisis, “portray[ing] a horrible machine, dedicated to the corruption of everything that exists” (Senécal 2020). Its unusual format for growling choir introduces an experimental context that draws on Senécal’s university training in composition. The Bandcamp website for Hate.Machine acknowledges contributions from Emploi-Québec and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. This common lyrical inspiration and unusual sponsorship thus scrambles the traditionally countercultural and the radically institutional in ways that metal scholars have recently argued represent a white-collar aesthetic within the genre (Smialek and St-Laurent 2019).

My presentation uses Hate.Machine’s experimental approach to learn about vocal expression in extreme metal. I show how Senécal’s written score functions both as instructions for vocalists and as his artistic interpretation. His wordless text demonstrates the importance of vowel acoustics and his techniques of varied repetition in the chorus show how combinations of voices in different registers interact with song form to create a sense of musical rhetoric. These lessons transpose to metal more generally.
Period26 Jun 2023
Event titlePopular Music in Crisis: XXII Biennial IASPM International Conference
Event typeConference
Conference number22
LocationMinneapolis, United States, MinnesotaShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational

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