Analysing Popular Music

Author: David Machin
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1446241343
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
Popular music is far more than just songs we listen to; its meanings are also in album covers, lyrics, subcultures, voices and video soundscapes. Like language these elements can be used to communicate complex cultural ideas, values, concepts and identities. Analysing Popular Music is a lively look at the semiotic resources found in the sounds, visuals and words that comprise the ′code book′ of popular music. It explains exactly how popular music comes to mean so much. Packed with examples, exercises and a glossary, this book provides the reader with the knowledge and skills they need to carry out their own analyses of songs, soundtracks, lyrics and album covers. Written for students with no prior musical knowledge, Analysing Popular Music is the perfect toolkit for students in sociology, media and communication studies to analyse, understand - and celebrate - popular music.

Analyzing Popular Music

Author: Allan F. Moore
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139435345
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
How do we know music? We perform it, we compose it, we sing it in the shower, we cook, sleep and dance to it. Eventually we think and write about it. This book represents the culmination of such shared processes. Each of these essays, written by leading writers on popular music, is analytical in some sense, but none of them treats analysis as an end in itself. The books presents a wide range of genres (rock, dance, TV soundtracks, country, pop, soul, easy listening, Turkish Arabesk) and deals with issues as broad as methodology, modernism, postmodernism, Marxism and communication. It aims to encourage listeners to think more seriously about the 'social' consequences of the music they spend time with and is the first collection of such essays to incorporate contextualisation in this way.

Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song

Author: Allan F. Moore
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131705265X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 463

Book Description
The musicological study of popular music has developed, particularly over the past twenty years, into an established aspect of the discipline. The academic community is now well placed to discuss exactly what is going on in any example of popular music and the theoretical foundation for such analytical work has also been laid, although there is as yet no general agreement over all the details of popular music theory. However, this focus on the what of musical detail has left largely untouched the larger question - so what? What are the consequences of such theorization and analysis? Scholars from outside musicology have often argued that too close a focus on musicological detail has left untouched what they consider to be more urgent questions related to reception and meaning. Scholars from inside musicology have responded by importing into musicological discussion various aspects of cultural theory. It is in that tradition that this book lies, although its focus is slightly different. What is missing from the field, at present, is a coherent development of the what into the so what of music theory and analysis into questions of interpretation and hermeneutics. It is that fundamental gap that this book seeks to fill. Allan F. Moore presents a study of recorded popular song, from the recordings of the 1920s through to the present day. Analysis and interpretation are treated as separable but interdependent approaches to song. Analytical theory is revisited, covering conventional domains such as harmony, melody and rhythm, but does not privilege these at the expense of domains such as texture, the soundbox, vocal tone, and lyrics. These latter areas are highly significant in the experience of many listeners, but are frequently ignored or poorly treated in analytical work. Moore continues by developing a range of hermeneutic strategies largely drawn from outside the field (strategies originating, in the most part, within psychology and philosophy) but still deeply r

The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis

Author: Ciro Scotto
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134830858
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 412

Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches widens the scope of analytical approaches for popular music by incorporating methods developed for analyzing contemporary art music. This study endeavors to create a new analytical paradigm for examining popular music from the perspective of developments in contemporary art music. "Expanded approaches" for popular music analysis is broadly defined as as exploring the pitch-class structures, form, timbre, rhythm, or aesthetics of various forms of popular music in a conceptual space not limited to the domain of common practice tonality but broadened to include any applicable compositional, analytical, or theoretical concept that illuminates the music. The essays in this collection investigate a variety of analytical, theoretical, historical, and aesthetic commonalities popular music shares with 20th and 21st century art music. From rock and pop to hip hop and rap, dance and electronica, from the 1930s to present day, this companion explores these connections in five parts: Establishing and Expanding Analytical Frameworks Technology and Timbre Rhythm, Pitch, and Harmony Form and Structure Critical Frameworks: Analytical, Formal, Structural, and Political With contributions by established scholars and promising emerging scholars in music theory and historical musicology from North America, Europe, and Australia, The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches offers nuanced and detailed perspectives that address the relationships between concert and popular music.

A Guide to Musical Analysis

Author: Nicholas Cook
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198165088
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Book Description
This extremely practical introduction to musical analysis explores the factors that give unity and coherence to musical masterpieces. Having first identified and explained the most important analytical methods, Nicholas Cook examines given compositions from the last two hundred years to show how different analytical procedures suit different types of music.

Reading Pop : Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music

Author: Richard Middleton
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0191588210
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 406

Book Description
Reading Pop collects together key essays on the interpretation of pop songs previously published in the journal Popular Music. In sixteen varied studies by many of the best-known scholars, all the most influential approaches are represented. An introduction by leading pop academic Richard Middleton puts them into context and outlines the main debates. A select bibliography of other writings on pop music analysis adds to the usefulness of the book, which will become a central text in popular music studies. - ;Reading Pop collects together key essays on the interpretation of pop songs previously published in the journal Popular Music. In sixteen varied studies by many of the best-known scholars, all the most influential approaches are represented. An introduction by leading pop academic Richard Middleton puts them into context and outlines the main debates. A select bibliography of other writings on pop music analysis adds to the usefulness of the book, which will become a central text in popular music studies. - ;extensive introduction is particularly valuable ... the paperback price is worth it for the introduction, and the Bjornberg and Tagg essays, alone. - Allan More, British Journal of Music Education

Song Interpretation in 21st-Century Pop Music

Author: Dr Ralf von Appen
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1472428005
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
Existing books on the analysis of popular music focus on theory and methodology and normally discuss parts of songs briefly as examples. In this book the obverse is true: songs take centre stage. The authors analyse them from a variety of theoretical positions, compare their different hearings and discuss the ways in which they make sense of specific songs. By concentrating on 13 well-known and recent songs, this book offers some model analyses that can be studied at home or used in seminars and classrooms for students of popular music at all academic levels.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis

Author: Lori A. Burns
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501342347
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Book Description
Music videos promote popular artists in cultural forms that circulate widely across social media networks. With the advent of YouTube in 2005 and the proliferation of handheld technologies and social networking sites, the music video has become available to millions worldwide, and continues to serve as a fertile platform for the debate of issues and themes in popular culture. This volume of essays serves as a foundational handbook for the study and interpretation of the popular music video, with the specific aim of examining the industry contexts, cultural concepts, and aesthetic materials that videos rely upon in order to be both intelligible and meaningful. Easily accessible to viewers in everyday life, music videos offer profound cultural interventions and negotiations while traversing a range of media forms. From a variety of unique perspectives, the contributors to this volume undertake discussions that open up new avenues for exploring the creative changes and developments in music video production. With chapters that address music video authorship, distribution, cultural representations, mediations, aesthetics, and discourses, this study signals a major initiative to provide a deeper understanding of the intersecting and interdisciplinary approaches that are invoked in the analysis of this popular and influential musical form.

Trends in World Music Analysis

Author: Lawrence Beaumont Shuster
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000535509
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Book Description
This volume brings together a group of analytical chapters exploring traditional genres and styles of world music, capturing a vibrant and expanding field of research. These contributors, drawn from the forefront of researchers in world music analysis, seek to break down barriers and build bridges between scholarly disciplines, musical repertoires, and cultural traditions. Covering a wide range of genres, styles, and performers, the chapters bring to bear a variety of methodologies, including indigenous theoretical perspectives, Western music theory, and interdisciplinary techniques rooted in the cognitive and computational sciences. With contributors addressing music traditions from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, this volume captures the many current directions in the analysis of world music, offering a state of the fi eld and demonstrating the expansion of possibilities created by this area of research.

Popular Music and Society

Author: Brian Longhurst
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745631622
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
This new edition of Popular Music and Society, fully revised and updated, continues to pioneer an approach to the study of popular music that is informed by wider debates in sociology and media and cultural studies. Astute and accessible, it continues to set the agenda for research and teaching in this area. The textbook begins by examining the ways in which popular music is produced, before moving on to explore its structure as text and the ways in which audiences understand and use music. Packed with examples and data on the contemporary production and consumption of popular music, the book also includes overviews and critiques of theoretical approaches to this exciting area of study and outlines the most important empirical studies which have shaped the discipline. Topics covered include: • The contemporary organisation of the music industry; • The effects of technological change on production; • The history and politics of popular music; • Gender, sexuality and ethnicity; • Subcultures; • Fans and music celebrities. For this new edition, two whole new chapters have been added: on performance and the body, and on the very latest ways of thinking about audiences and the spaces and places of music consumption. This second edition of Popular Music and Society will continue to be required reading for students of the sociology of culture, media and communication studies, and popular culture.