What happens when folk music—a genre known for its constructions of authenticity—collides with collage, a compositional strategy whose hybridity destabilizes such constructions? This collision characterizes recent albums by indie-folk collective Bon Iver. The borrowed sonic materials of Bon Iver’s collages both distance the newer music from the band’s old style and coalesce into musical structures that are at once wholly coherent and richly intertextual. While collage has been extensively studied in twentieth-century art music (Burkholder 1995, Losada 2009) and in relation to explicitly intertextual popular music forms like mashups (Boone 2013), relatively little music-theoretical attention has been paid to it in other popular musics. This paper examines the multiple affordances of collage in Bon Iver’s 2016 album, 22, A Million. Centering the album’s fourth track, “33 GOD,” as a case study, I analyze how samples and quotations simultaneously underscore its formal trajectory and gesture toward a web of interrelated narrative and harmonic contexts.

In the first part of my analysis, I trace how samples and quotations interact with original material to form a coherent narrative and harmonic shape. Adapting Catherine Losada’s concept of harmonic saturation (Losada, 2009), I first examine how layers of borrowed material complement harmonic and semantic content present in Bon Iver’s newly composed music. I then zero in on the meaningful interactions in the song’s first section between sung verses and samples from Jim Ed Brown’s 1971 country hit, “Morning.” Finally, I consider borrowed materials in “33 GOD” in relation to their original contexts, analyzing how they radiate outward toward related harmonic areas and texts. Drawing upon Christine Boone’s definition of the paint palette mashup, I argue that the obscurity of the references invites the tracing of materials back to their sources—a challenge taken up in internet spaces like YouTube and Genius.com. “33 GOD” therefore both models a kind of intersubjectivity and becomes a site for collaborative encounter. This democratized aspect of Bon Iver’s music takes on an additional layer of meaning vis-à-vis frontman Justin Vernon’s pro-democracy activism. The new aesthetic signals a shift from solitary singer-songwriter to relational network.

Popular-music choruses have undergone enormous stylistic changes over the past several decades. Music scholarship has thoroughly explored many aspects of the chorus, including its historical emergence, its neighbors the pre-, post-, and dance chorus, its relatives “hooks” and “risers” and “drops,” and its harmonic, metric, and textural characteristics. Persistently, one defining feature of “chorus” is its repetition—often lyrically, melodically, harmonically, and texturally. However, the different choruses of a song often change slightly, adding variety and contrast to reprise. Perhaps because the chorus becomes more familiar with each reprise, the last chorus in particular often stands out with respect to the previous iterations. I begin by framing last choruses in terms of “bigger” or “smaller” paradigms. “Bigger” last choruses amplify the rhetoric using changes in key, register, melody, texture, meter, repetition, formal overlap, and/or timbre. “Smaller” last choruses, which are significantly less common, diminish the impact of the chorus using register, length, texture, timbre, and/or tempo. Taken alone, the “bigger” and “smaller” categories are relatively intuitive, colloquial, and descriptive. However, features from the two types can also be combined to produce other effects, categorized by how abruptly/gradually songs transition between “bigger” and “smaller” last choruses. Of these variants, the most common is the “drop-in” paradigm, where a “smaller” beginning abruptly leads to a “bigger” version on the second measure, line, half, or repetition of the chorus. Finally, I observe some historical and genre associations in how “bigger” and “smaller” last choruses are expressed. Far from being a detached set of descriptors, these paradigms are inextricably linked to genres, trends, and time periods: A last chorus made “bigger” primarily by modulation and infinite-fadeout repetition sounds more 1980s, while a drop-in last chorus that isolates the vocals before dropping the drums and instrumentals back in sounds more 2010s. In today’s nostalgia-saturated media landscape, artists can and do use last-chorus paradigms to evoke certain eras. As a result, highlighting the difference(s) between reprised sections within a single song can tell us just as much about style, rhetoric, and form as comparisons between sections, songs, genres, and decades.

Recent scholarship on Electronic Dance Music (EDM) has focused on rhythm and meter (Butler 2001; 2006), repetition (Garcia 2005), continuous processes (Smith 2021), the genre’s influence on pop music (Peres 2016; Barna 2020; Adams 2019; Nobile 2022; Osborn 2023), dynamic range processing (Brøvig-Hanssen, Sandvik, and Aareskjold-Drecker 2020), and form delineated by sonic processes (Butler 2006; Iler 2011; Osborn 2023). One topic has received considerably less attention: harmony.

In this paper, I explore how harmony contributes to formal structure in music composed and produced by Joel Zimmerman, an influential EDM artist known as deadmau5. I transcribe, analyze, and diagram music from deadmau5’s career including “Strobe” (2009), “Right This Second” (2010), “Aural Psynapse” (2011), “Saved” (2016), “Polaris” (2017), “10.8,” (2018), and other tracks. I find three kinds of harmonic loops—prolongational, progressive, and non-repeating—and detail how deadmau5 uses these loops with the kick drum to build his tracks. Finally, I develop a set of harmony-focused formal functions inspired by Caplin 2000 with deadmau5’s loop-based harmonic language that adapt Butler’s (2006) sonic-energy defined formal-functions and terminology.