Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgement
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Popular music analysis: ten apothegms and four instances
- 3 From lyric to anti-lyric: analyzing the words in pop song
- 4 The sound is ‘out there’: score, sound design and exoticism in The X-Files
- 5 Feel the beat come down: house music as rhetoric
- 6 The determining role of performance in the articulation of meaning: the case of ‘Try a Little Tenderness’
- 7 Marxist music analysis without Adorno: popular music and urban geography
- 8 Jethro Tull and the case for modernism in mass culture
- 9 Pangs of history in late 1970s new-wave rock
- 10 Is anybody listening?
- 11 Talk and text: popular music and ethnomusicology
- Bibliography
- Discography
- Film/Videography
- Index
1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgement
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Popular music analysis: ten apothegms and four instances
- 3 From lyric to anti-lyric: analyzing the words in pop song
- 4 The sound is ‘out there’: score, sound design and exoticism in The X-Files
- 5 Feel the beat come down: house music as rhetoric
- 6 The determining role of performance in the articulation of meaning: the case of ‘Try a Little Tenderness’
- 7 Marxist music analysis without Adorno: popular music and urban geography
- 8 Jethro Tull and the case for modernism in mass culture
- 9 Pangs of history in late 1970s new-wave rock
- 10 Is anybody listening?
- 11 Talk and text: popular music and ethnomusicology
- Bibliography
- Discography
- Film/Videography
- Index
Summary
How do we ‘know’ music? Although music has a variety of distinct audiences, one way of approaching a universally applicable response is by looking at the activities we undertake in its presence. Most widespread, of course, is listening. We may listen for pleasure, for identification, as an accompaniment to other activities (dancing, cooking), distractedly (as when watching a film) and in many other ways. In pre-modern societies, listening without any more active form of participation was rare indeed, whether that activity focused on performing itself, on some form of dance, or even on banter with the musicians: some would argue that in modern society too, the musical experience is impoverished without such participation. Many of us are either fortunate or wilful enough to insist on performing, and even composing. All of these activities may be defined as ways of ‘knowing’ music, even if that knowledge is not communicated verbally. We do, however, find verbal communication about music a seductive activity: the scholar Nicholas Cook even argues that words are indispensable in the process of our creating for ourselves meaning out of the music we listen to (Cook 1998a: 270). Verbal communication is certainly necessary for the remaining activity we undertake in respect of music – its study, the process of knowing it ‘better’.
Twenty years ago, it was difficult to find any institution where popular music (as a field distinct from ‘classical’ or ‘non-Western’ musics or jazz) could be found being taught to prospective musicians at undergraduate level.
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- Analyzing Popular Music , pp. 1 - 15Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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