Artistic Craft and Crafted Artistry

This chapter presents three common strategies that account for the structures of Queen’s songs: conventional templates (such as AABA or Verse-Chorus), conventional templates with added material (such as Verse-Chorus with two bridge sections), and episodic (irregular sequence of multiple sections). These types of forms appear in relatively equal measure and with relative consistency across Queen’s output. Beyond these strategies, it is argued that Queen’s approach to form may be understood as balancing ‘artistic’ and ‘craft’ techniques, drawing on Covach’s analysis of The Beatles. Songs with simple structures are often imbued with modulations or other rich harmonic devices; songs with more complex structures still retain a strong sense of tonal security and phrase regularity. Queen is thus positioned in the middle of pop and progressive compositional aesthetics from the 1970s.