Download or read book Form as Harmony in Rock Music written by Drew Nobile and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Overturning the inherited belief that popular music is unrefined, Form as Harmony in Rock Music brings the process-based approach of classical theorists to popular music scholarship. Author Drew Nobile offers the first comprehensive theory of form for 1960s, 70s, and 80s classic rock repertoire, showing how songs in this genre are not simply a series of discrete elements, but rather exhibit cohesive formal-harmonic structures across their entire timespan. Though many elements contribute to the cohesion of a song, the rock music of these decades is built around a fundamentally harmonic backdrop, giving rise to distinct types of verses, choruses, and bridges. Nobile's rigorous but readable theoretical analysis demonstrates how artists from Bob Dylan to Stevie Wonder to Madonna consistently turn to the same compositional structures throughout rock's various genres and decades, unifying them under a single musical style. Using over 200 transcriptions, graphs, and form charts, Form as Harmony in Rock Music advocates a structural approach to rock analysis, revealing essential features of this style that would otherwise remain below our conscious awareness.
Download or read book Form As Harmony in Rock Music written by Drew Nobile and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "There's a moment in Janis Joplin's rendition of "Piece of My Heart" that anyone who has heard the song even once will recall vividly. I'm referring of course to Joplin's explosive cry of "take it!" about a minute in, right at the beginning of the chorus. This moment seems to embody all of rock's essential elements: freedom, power, personal expression, heartache, rebellion, etc. But that moment, iconic as it is, is more than a moment. Its strength is completely lost if we remove it from its musical context. Imagine playing someone just that second or two of music and expecting an emotional reaction you will more likely be met with bewilderment than excitement. The powerful effect of Joplin's cry derives as much from the material surrounding it as from what happens at that particular point in time. To understand that moment we must therefore consider it in relation to the song's organization as a whole. That central question how a song is organized in time underlies the concept of musical form. Form is often presented in opposition to content, the latter referring to more tangible musical elements such as notes and rhythms. The two are not so easily separated, though; as the "Piece of My Heart" example attests, we perceive content through the lens of form, each moment's meaning dependent on its role within the song's temporal organization. Music builds its communicative capacity upon its formal foundation; studying form is thus not a matter of zooming in on one particular musical aspect, but rather sets the stage for understanding all of a song's various expressive elements. Form, in other words, is the gateway to interpretation. This book offers a comprehensive theory of form in rock music. My basic premise is that rock songs are cohesive entities, gradually unfolding through time a unified musical structure. Their formal components are not merely discrete elements arranged in succession but interdependent, dialogic utterances, each fulfilling a particular role in relation to the whole. Seen this way, rock form is inherently a process, an active, temporal journey, not a series of musical containers; "a self-realizing verb, unspooling itself through time, not a static noun," as James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy put it (2006, 616). In other words, form is something a song does, not something it is. A conception of form as process underlies much contemporary discussion of classical form (Schmalfeldt 2011, Hepokoski and Darcy 2006, Caplin 1998); discussions of form in rock, though, tend toward an object-oriented approach, focusing on dividing a song into labeled sections rather than describing its temporal development.1 Rock-oriented studies that reflect a more processual approach, such as Robin Attas's 2015 article on buildup introductions and Allan Moore's 2012 monograph Song Means, generally eschew large-scale thinking in favour of moment-to-moment interpretations; Moore specifically states that he \see[s] little to be gained from [discussing more global formal terms] . . . it implies a `god's-eye perspective,' which does not seem to be part of the popular song experience, where what matters is exactly where one is at a particular point in time" (84). I do not believe a focus on process is incompatible with large-scale thinking, though. My aim in this book is to bring a process-based approach to the study of rock's large-scale structures"--
Download or read book Hearing Harmony written by Christopher Doll and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2017-05-30 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original, listener-based approach to harmony for popular music from the rock era of the 1950s to the present
Download or read book The Musical Language of Rock written by David Temperley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In all of the books about rock music, relatively few focus on the purely musical dimensions of the style: dimensions of harmony and melody, tonality and scale, rhythm and meter, phrase structure and form, and emotional expression. The Musical Language of Rock puts forth a new, comprehensive theoretical framework for the study of rock music by addressing each of these aspects. Eastman music theorist and cognition researcher David Temperley brings together a conventional music-analytic approach with statistical corpus analysis to offer an innovative and insightful approach to the genre. With examples from across a broadly defined rock idiom encompassing everything from the Beatles to Deep Purple, Michael Jackson to Bonnie Raitt, The Musical Language of Rock shows how rock musicians exploit musical parameters to achieve aesthetic and expressive goals-for example, the manipulation of expectation and surprise, the communication of such oppositions as continuity/closure and tension/relaxation, and the expression of emotional states. A major innovation of the book is a three-dimensional model of musical expression-representing valence, energy, and tension-which proves to be a powerful tool for characterizing songs and also for tracing expressive shifts within them. The book includes many musical examples, with sound clips available on the book's website. The Musical Language of Rock presents new insights on the powerful musical mechanisms which have made rock a hallmark of our contemporary musical landscape.
Download or read book Musical Construction written by L. Henderson Williams and published by . This book was released on 1914 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Everything in Its Right Place written by Brad Osborn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than any rock artist since The Beatles, Radiohead's music inhabits the sweet spot between two extremes: on the one hand, music that is wholly conventional and conforms to all expectations of established rock styles, and, on the other hand, music so radically experimental that it thwarts any learned notions. While averting mainstream trends but still achieving a significant level of success in both US and UK charts, Radiohead's music includes many surprises and subverted expectations, yet remains accessible within a framework of music traditions. In Everything in its Right Place: Analyzing Radiohead, Brad Osborn reveals the functioning of this reconciliation of extremes in various aspects of Radiohead's music, analyzing the unexpected shifts in song structure, the deformation of standard 4/4 backbeats, the digital manipulation of familiar rock 'n' roll instrumentation, and the expected resolutions of traditional cadence structures. Expanding on recent work in musical perception, focusing particularly on form, rhythm and meter, timbre, and harmony, Everything in its Right Place treats Radiohead's recordings as rich sonic ecosystems in which a listener participates in an individual search for meaning, bringing along expectations learned from popular music, classical music, or even Radiohead's own compositional idiolect. Radiohead's violations of these subjective expectation-realization chains prompt the listener to search more deeply for meaning within corresponding lyrics, biographical details of the band, or intertextual relationships with music, literature, or film. Synthesizing insights from a range of new methodologies in the theory of pop and rock, and specifically designed for integration into music theory courses for upper level undergraduates, Everything in its Right Place is sure to find wide readership among scholars and students, as well as avid listeners who seek a deeper understanding of Radiohead's distinctive juxtapositional style.
Download or read book A Geometry of Music written by Dmitri Tymoczko and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-03-21 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking book, Tymoczko uses contemporary geometry to provide a new framework for thinking about music, one that emphasizes the commonalities among styles from Medieval polyphony to contemporary jazz.
Download or read book Hollywood Harmony written by Frank Lehman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Film music often tells us how to feel, but it also guides us how to hear. Filmgoing is an intensely musical experience, one in which the soundtrack structures our interpretations and steers our emotions. Hollywood Harmony explores the inner workings of film music, bringing together tools from music theory, musicology, and music psychology in this first ever book-length analytical study of this culturally central repertoire. Harmony, and especially chromaticism, is emblematic of the "film music sound," and it is often used to evoke that most cinematic of feelings-wonder. To help parse this familiar but complex musical style, Hollywood Harmony offers a first-of-its kind introduction to neo-Riemannian theory, a recently developed and versatile method of understanding music as a dynamic and transformational process, rather than a series of inert notes on a page. This application of neo-Riemannian theory to film music is perfect way in for curious newcomers, while also constituting significant scholarly contribution to the larger discipline of music theory. Author Frank Lehman draws from his extensive knowledge of cinematic history with case-studies that range from classics of Golden Age Hollywood to massive contemporary franchises to obscure cult-films. Special emphasis is placed on scores for major blockbusters such as Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Inception. With over a hundred meticulously transcribed music examples and more than two hundred individual movies discussed, Hollywood Harmony will fascinate any fan of film and music.
Download or read book On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements written by Nick Braae and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-21 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements comprises eleven essays that explore the myriad ways in which popular music is entwined within social, cultural, musical, historical, and media networks. The authors discuss genres as diverse as mainstream pop, hip hop, classic rock, instrumental synthwave, video game music, amateur ukelele groups, and audiovisual remixes, while also considering the music’s relationship to technological developments, various media and material(itie)s, and personal and social identity. The collection presents a range of different methodologies and theoretical positions, which results in an eclecticism that aptly demonstrates the breadth of contemporary popular music research. The chapters are divided into three major sections that address: wider theoretical and analytical issues (“Broad Strokes”), familiar repertoire or concepts from a new perspective (“Second Takes”), and the meanings to arise from music’s connections with other media forms (“Audiovisual Entanglements”).
Download or read book Counterpoint in Composition written by Felix Salzer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: -- Stanley Persky, City University of New York
Download or read book Anton n Dvo r k s New World Symphony written by Douglas W. Shadle and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prologue. The Big Problem -- The Welcome Arrival -- The Symphonic Premiere -- The Aesthetic Conflict -- The National Question -- The Brewing Storm -- The Fiery Debate -- The Racial Challenge -- The Spiritual Aftermath -- Epilogue. The New World -- Appendix. The Musical Tornado.
Download or read book Understanding Music written by N. Alan Clark and published by . This book was released on 2015-12-21 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music moves through time; it is not static. In order to appreciate music wemust remember what sounds happened, and anticipate what sounds might comenext. This book takes you on a journey of music from past to present, from the Middle Ages to the Baroque Period to the 20th century and beyond!
Download or read book Rock and Rhapsodies written by Nick Braae and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Rock and Rhapsodies is the first book-length musicological study of British rock band Queen. It primarily addresses the material written, recorded, and released between 1973 and 1991. The text provides readers with a nuanced analytical account of the group's songs and illuminates the varied the stylistic and historical contexts in which Queen's music was created. The key conceptual basis for the analysis is an idiolect, which refers to the distinct musical style of a single artist. Having documented the key features of Queen's idiolect, the book further explores the nature of specific musical characteristic and uses them to respond to a range of wider analytical and discursive issues as pertaining to style, genre, form, time, voice, and historiography. Rock and Rhapsodies comprises twelve chapters. The introduction documents Queen's place in scholarly literature and unfolds the principal analytical methodology. The following three chapters address the structural details of Queen's idiolect and songs, before analyzing the voices of Queen's singers. The vocal techniques are related to discourses of authenticity and, in the case of Freddie Mercury, the queer voice. The five subsequent chapters identify the changing and myriad stylistic influences on Queen, as well as relate the band to the major rock movements of the 1970s: hard, glam, and progressive. The final chapter explores the replacement singers, Queen in wider popular media, and the influence of the band, since Mercury's death in 1991"--
Download or read book The Music Lesson written by Victor L. Wooten and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-04-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Grammy-winning musical icon and legendary bassist Victor L. Wooten comes an inspiring parable of music, life, and the difference between playing all the right notes…and feeling them. The Music Lesson is the story of a struggling young musician who wanted music to be his life, and who wanted his life to be great. Then, from nowhere it seemed, a teacher arrived. Part musical genius, part philosopher, part eccentric wise man, the teacher would guide the young musician on a spiritual journey, and teach him that the gifts we get from music mirror those from life, and every movement, phrase, and chord has its own meaning...All you have to do is find the song inside. “The best book on music (and its connection to the mystic laws of life) that I've ever read. I learned so much on every level.”—Multiple Grammy Award–winning saxophonist Michael Brecker
Download or read book Music Theory for Computer Musicians written by Michael Hewitt and published by Course Technology Ptr. This book was released on 2008 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many DJs, gigging musicians, and electronic music producers understand how to play their instruments or make music on the computer, but they lack the basic knowledge of music theory needed to take their music-making to the next level and compose truly professional tracks. Beneath all the enormously different styles of modern electronic music lie certain fundamentals of the musical language that are exactly the same no matter what kind of music you write. It is very important to acquire an understanding of these fundamentals if you are to develop as a musician and music producer. Put simply, you need to know what you are doing with regard to the music that you are writing. Music Theory for Computer Musicians explains these music theory fundamentals in the most simple and accessible way possible. Concepts are taught using the MIDI keyboard environment and today's computer composing and recording software. By reading this book and following the exercises contained within it, you, the aspiring music producer/computer musician, will find yourself making great progress toward understanding and using these fundamentals of the music language. The result will be a great improvement in your ability to write and produce your own original music!
Download or read book Rock Tonality Amplified written by Brett Clement and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-28 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rock Tonality Amplified presents an in-depth exploration of rock tonality. Building on several decades of research, this book develops a comprehensive music theory designed to make sense of several essential components of tonality. Within, readers learn to locate the chords they hear through various methods, to understand and predict harmonic resolution tendencies, and to identify the functions of chords as they appear in musical contexts. Further, the book offers a conceptual framework to describe tonal relations that are played out through entire songs, allowing readers to recognize the features that contribute to tonal unity in songs and the ones that are employed to create musical drama. The book contributes to a wealth of methodologies in music theory, making it of broad interest to music scholars and students. Further, it balances speculative and practical approaches so that it has clear applications for analysis and pedagogy. It includes numerous musical figures and cites hundreds of songs from a wide variety of artists. Each chapter concludes with additional practice activities, allowing for easy adaptation to various pedagogical purposes.
Download or read book A Theory of Harmony written by Ernst Levy and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2024-01-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ernst Levy was a visionary Swiss pianist, composer, and teacher who developed an approach to music theory that has come to be known as "negative harmony." Levy's theories have had a wide influence, from young British performer/composer Jacob Collier to jazz musicians like Steve Coleman. His posthumous text, A Theory of Harmony, summarizes his innovative ideas. A Theory of Harmony is a highly original explanation of the harmonic language of the modern era, illuminating the approaches of diverse styles of music. By breaking through age-old conceptions, Levy was able to reorient the way we experience musical harmony. British composer/music pedagogue Paul Wilkinson has written a new introduction that offers multiple points of entry to Levy’s work to make this text more accessible for a new generation of students, performers, and theorists. He relates Levy's work to innovations in improvisation, jazz, twentieth-century classical music, and the theoretical writings of a wide range of musical mavericks, including Harry Partch, Hugo Riemann, and David Lewin. Wilkinson shows how A Theory of Harmony continues to inspire original musical expression across multiple musical genres.
