Rockin’ Out: Expressive Modulation in Verse-Chorus Form

Example 1. "Jailhouse Rock," Elvis Presley (1957)(click to enlarge and listen )[1] Example 1 offers a snippet from the opening of Elvis Presley's original recording of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller's 1957 classic "Jailhouse Rock." An essential expressive moment in this excerpt comes at the onset of the chorus, which differs notably from the verse in a number of ways. As regards texture, the verse features solo voice accompanied only by instrumental punctuations, whereas the chorus elicits strong, steady statements from the rhythm section. As regards pitch, the entire verse sits on just one main chord-an ornamented tonic sonority-creating anticipation for a harmonic shift at the chorus, which is delivered in the form of a refreshing IV chord as part of a 16-bar blues progression (or a 12-bar blues progression, depending on whether one interprets the stop-time verse as four or eight bars long). As regards the vocal line, the chorus provides less activity, with longer and more frequent gaps; however, this less is actually more: Elvis focuses our attention on the task at hand, succinctly summing up the entirety of this expressive moment with only two words-"let's rock."[2] Leiber and Stoller's song makes good use of what some musicians would call an instance of "rockin' out," and which I will refer to more specifically as a breakout chorus.(1) Such a chorus contrasts with its preceding verse (or preceding transition or prechorus, in some cases) by conveying an increase in intensity with respect to various parameters, including loudness, lyrical content, pitch level (both melodic and harmonic), rhythmic and textural activity, and timbral noise.(2) I employ no hard rule as to how many or by how much elements must intensify in order for a chorus to qualify as a breakout, and only rarely are all parameters in play. Suffice it to say, not all choruses are breakout choruses; for example, Little Willie John's "Fever" (1956) and the Kingsmen's "Louie Louie" (1963) both feature non-breakout choruses. But enough choruses are breakout choruses to consider them a standard compositional option. What's more, a breakout quality can be the primary motivation for identifying a section as a chorus; this was in fact the case with my analysis of "Jailhouse Rock." Elvis's so-called chorus, without the breakout, would perhaps be better described as an "extended refrain within the verse," but with the breakout, we get two clearly delineated, alternating sections.(3)[3] In this article I will focus specifically on a sophisticated subcategory of breakout choruses in rock, one that entails an intensification of pitch level.(4) More exclusively, I will address cases involving a full-scale change of tonal center, resulting in a phenomenon that Guy Capuzzo (2009) terms "sectional tonality" or "sectional centricity," wherein certain portions of a song feature distinct centric pitch classes. With analogous changes occurring in other musical parameters, the centric relocations themselves can easily be understood as expressing some sort of extramusical meaning, especially when read against lyrics. From this perspective, we could call these centric shifts examples of "expressive modulation."(5)Example 2. "Down Under," Men at Work (1982)(click to enlarge and listen )[4] A typical example of this practice is Men at Work's "Down Under" from 1982, given in Example 2.(6) The song modulates from the verse's Bm to the chorus's DM by simply substituting the latter triad for the former, with all other chords remaining the same.(7) Men at Work's modulation is simple but effective, as well as expressive; the relocation to the relative major accompanies the lyrics' reference to the band's Australian motherland, no doubt intended as a celebratory textual image conveying a sort of tongue-in-cheek national pride. There are three such verse-chorus exchanges total in the song, and for each one of these we are greeted with not only a modulation and the titular refrain but also an intensification in texture, with the chorus consistently adding new backing vocals. …