Download or read book Pop Music and Easy Listening written by Stan Hawkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What defines pop music? Why do we consider some styles as easier listening than others? Arranged in three parts: Aesthetics and Authenticity - Groove, Sampling and Industry - Subjectivity, Ethnicity and Politics, this collection of essays by a group of international scholars deals with these questions in diverse ways. This volume prepares the reader for the debates around pop's intricate historical, aesthetic and cultural roots. The intellectual perspectives on offer present the interdisciplinary aspects of studying music and, spanning more than twenty-five years, these essays form a snapshot of some of the authorial voices that have shaped the specific subject matter of pop criticism within the broader field of popular music studies. A common thread running through these essays is the topic of interpretation and its relation to conceptions of musicality, subjectivity and aesthetics. The principle aim of this collection is to demonstrate that pop music needs to be evaluated on its own terms within the cultural contexts that make it meaningful.
Download or read book Hearing Luxe Pop written by John Howland and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Hearing Luxe Pop explores a deluxe-production aesthetic that has long thrived in American popular music. John Howland presents an alternative music history that centers on shifts in timbre and sound through innovative uses of media, orchestration, and arranging. He travels from symphonic jazz to the Great American Songbook; teenage symphonies of the Motown label and 1960s girl groups to the emerging "countrypolitan" sound of Nashville; the sunshine pop and baroque pop of the Beach Boys to the blending of soul and funk into 1970s disco; the hip-hop-with-orchestra events of Jay-Z and Kanye West to indie rock bands with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. The luxe aesthetic merges popular-music idioms with lush string orchestrations, big-band instrumentation, and symphonic instruments. This book attunes readers to hearing the discourses that gathered around the music and its associated images, and in turn examines pop's relations to aspirational consumer culture, spectacle, theatricality, glamour, sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and "classy" lifestyles"--
Download or read book Easy Listening Acid Trip written by Joseph Lanza and published by . This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pop music of the sixties and seventies embraced psychedelic youth culture yet appealed to listeners of all ages up and down the radio dial. Easy Listening Acid Trip explains the missing musical link between electric guitars and orchestral strings, from the Beatles to Lawrence Welk, and why we just can't help but liking songs we hear in the elevator.
Download or read book Switched on Pop written by Nate Sloan and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019-12-13 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pop music surrounds us - in our cars, over supermarket speakers, even when we are laid out at the dentist - but how often do we really hear what's playing? Switched on Pop is the book based on the eponymous podcast that has been hailed by NPR, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and Entertainment Weekly for its witty and accessible analysis of Top 40 hits. Through close studies of sixteen modern classics, musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding shift pop from the background to the foreground, illuminating the essential musical concepts behind two decades of chart-topping songs. In 1939, Aaron Copland published What to Listen for in Music, the bestseller that made classical music approachable for generations of listeners. Eighty years later, Nate and Charlie update Copland's idea for a new audience and repertoire: 21st century pop, from Britney to Beyoncé, Outkast to Kendrick Lamar. Despite the importance of pop music in contemporary culture, most discourse only revolves around lyrics and celebrity. Switched on Pop gives readers the tools they need to interpret our modern soundtrack. Each chapter investigates a different song and artist, revealing musical insights such as how a single melodic motif follows Taylor Swift through every genre that she samples, André 3000 uses metric manipulation to get listeners to "shake it like a Polaroid picture," or Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee create harmonic ambiguity in "Despacito" that mirrors the patterns of global migration. Replete with engaging discussions and eye-catching illustrations, Switched on Pop brings to life the musical qualities that catapult songs into the pop pantheon. Readers will find themselves listening to familiar tracks in new waysand not just those from the Top 40. The timeless concepts that Nate and Charlie define can be applied to any musical style. From fanatics to skeptics, teenagers to octogenarians, non-musicians to professional composers, every music lover will discover something ear-opening in Switched on Pop.
Download or read book Elevator Music written by Joseph Lanza and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2004-01-26 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVNoted music historian Joseph Lanza seriously appraises an American musical tradition /div
Download or read book On Popular Music written by Theodor W. Adorno and published by . This book was released on 1942* with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World Volume 8 written by John Shepherd and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-03-08 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: See:
Download or read book Pop Music Theory written by Michael Johnson and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2007-12-21 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of popular music composition is a new field in which the standard rules of traditional music theory do not apply. Learn how to write top 40 hits in every style from alternative rock to country pop. Discover the way chords are constructed and used in pop music, the Nashville numbers system and the role of scales in pop music harmony. Learn how to arrange a lead-sheet chart for a small ensemble so your entire band can learn a song in minutes. No more listening to a cd over and over to figure out a guitar riff when you can learn to recognize chord progressions and easily transcribe music from recordings. You will master the ability to play chord changes for self-accompaniment as well as composition. Finally you will learn how to use the scales for improvisation and "ad libbing" so you can become a soloist with your own unique sound.
Download or read book Major Labels written by Kelefa Sanneh and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Oprah Daily's 20 Favorite Books of 2021 • Selected as one of Pitchfork's Best Music Books of the Year “One of the best books of its kind in decades.” —The Wall Street Journal An epic achievement and a huge delight, the entire history of popular music over the past fifty years refracted through the big genres that have defined and dominated it: rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance music, and pop Kelefa Sanneh, one of the essential voices of our time on music and culture, has made a deep study of how popular music unites and divides us, charting the way genres become communities. In Major Labels, Sanneh distills a career’s worth of knowledge about music and musicians into a brilliant and omnivorous reckoning with popular music—as an art form (actually, a bunch of art forms), as a cultural and economic force, and as a tool that we use to build our identities. He explains the history of slow jams, the genius of Shania Twain, and why rappers are always getting in trouble. Sanneh shows how these genres have been defined by the tension between mainstream and outsider, between authenticity and phoniness, between good and bad, right and wrong. Throughout, race is a powerful touchstone: just as there have always been Black audiences and white audiences, with more or less overlap depending on the moment, there has been Black music and white music, constantly mixing and separating. Sanneh debunks cherished myths, reappraises beloved heroes, and upends familiar ideas of musical greatness, arguing that sometimes, the best popular music isn’t transcendent. Songs express our grudges as well as our hopes, and they are motivated by greed as well as idealism; music is a powerful tool for human connection, but also for human antagonism. This is a book about the music everyone loves, the music everyone hates, and the decades-long argument over which is which. The opposite of a modest proposal, Major Labels pays in full.
Download or read book Listening to Music written by Craig Wright and published by Schirmer Books. This book was released on 2007-01-25 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compact disc contains 25 tracks of music by different performers as listed in the text.
Download or read book Making easy listening electronic resource written by Tim J. Anderson and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studie over hoe de moderne opname- en geluidstechnieken van na de oorlog in de Verenigde Staten het idioom van de populaire muziek, inclusief beeldvorming en appreciatie, ingrijpend hebben gewijzigd.
Download or read book Pop Music Legends written by Hank Moore and published by Morgan James Publishing. This book was released on 2022-09-06 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Music affects every person. It is the soundtrack of our happiness, zest for achievement and relationships to others. Music brings great ideas and feelings. It soothes the soul. It creates and sustains memories.” – Hank Moore Pop Music Legends covers change and growth of the music recording industry. It is based on the Hank Moore’s involvement in music over the years, interviews with hundreds of music stars and his knowledge of pop culture. It is the only book that encompasses a full-scope music perspective and is designed to have high appeal mass appeal, historical, entertainment and is applicable to a broad audience.
Download or read book Easy Listening and Film Scoring 1948 78 written by Jack Curtis Dubowsky and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-27 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Composers, arrangers, conductors, session musicians, and executives worked in easy listening and scoring, complicating an academic focus that lionizes film music while ignoring or deriding easy listening. This book documents easy listening’s connections with film music, an aspect overlooked in academic and popular literature. Fueled by the rise of the LP and home entertainment, easy listening became the largest midcentury commercial music market, generating more actual income for the record business than 7- inch singles. Easy listening roped in subgenres including classical, baroque, jazz, Latin, Polynesian, "exotica," rock, Broadway, and R&B, appropriated and reinterpreted just as they were for cinema. Easy listening provided opportunities in orchestral music for conservatory- trained composers. Major film composers such as Henry Mancini and Michel Legrand had a prodigious output of easy listening albums. Critics fault easy listening for structural racisms, overlooking its evolution and practitioners. Easy listening helped destabilize a tripartite record business that categorized product as race records, old time records, or general popular music. Charlie Parker’s with Strings records altered the direction of jazz, profoundly influencing other performers, encouraging bold crosspollinations, and making money. The influence of technology and historical contexts of music for work and leisure are explored. Original interviews and primary sources will fascinate scholars, historians, and students of cinema, television, film scoring, and midcentury popular music.
Download or read book How The Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll written by Elijah Wald and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-10 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll is an alternative history of American music that, instead of recycling the familiar cliches of jazz and rock, looks at what people were playing, hearing and dancing to over the course of the 20th century, using a wealth of original research, curious quotations, and an irreverent fascination with the oft-despised commercial mainstream.
Download or read book Precious and Few written by Don Breithaupt and published by St. Martin's Griffin. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Precious and Few is a lively and nostalgic look back at the forgotten era of pop that gave us "Hooked on a Feeling", "Dancing in the Moonlight", "I Am Woman", "Seasons in the Sun", and more. The early 1970s brought a "Convoy" of popular rock music--everything from cheesy to the classic. The authors of Precious and Few, Don Breithaupt and Jeff Breithaupt, true-blue '70s fanatics, have put together this irresistibly readable book to transport readers back to a time when people wore smiley-face buttons, went to singles bars, and heartily sang along with Mac Davis. Illustrations throughout.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Popular Music written by Norman Abjorensen and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-05-25 with total page 695 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book seeks to trace the rise of popular music, identify its key figures and track the origins and development of its multiple genres and styles, all the while seeking to establish historical context. It is, fundamentally, a ready reference guide to the broad field of popular music over the past two centuries. It has become a truism that popular music, so pervasive in the modern world, constitutes a soundtrack to our lives – a constant though changing presence as we cross thresholds and grow from children to teenagers to adults. But it has become more than a soundtrack; it has become a narrative. Not just an accompaniment to our daily lives but incorporating our lives, our sense of identity, our lived experiences, into it. We have become part of the music just as the music has become part of us. The Historical Dictionary of Popular Music contains a chronology, an introduction, an appendix, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1000 cross-referenced entries on major figures across genres, definitions of genres, technical innovations and surveys of countries and regions. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about popular music.
Download or read book Queerness in Pop Music written by Stan Hawkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-07 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the phenomenon of queering in popular music and video, interpreting the music of numerous pop artists, styles, and idioms. The focus falls on artists, such as Lady Gaga, Madonna, Boy George, Diana Ross, Rufus Wainwright, David Bowie, Azealia Banks, Zebra Katz, Freddie Mercury, the Pet Shop Boys, George Michael, and many others. Hawkins builds his concept of queerness upon existing theories of opacity and temporality, which involves a creative interdisciplinary approach to musical interpretation. He advocates a model of analysis that involves both temporal-specific listening and biographic-oriented viewing. Music analysis is woven into this, illuminating aspects of parody, nostalgia, camp, naivety, masquerade, irony, and mimesis in pop music. One of the principal aims is to uncover the subversive strategies of pop artists through a wide range of audiovisual texts that situate the debates on gender and sexuality within an aesthetic context that is highly stylized and ritualized. Queerness in Pop Music also addresses the playfulness of much pop music, offering insights into how discourses of resistance are mediated through pleasure. Given that pop artists, songwriters, producers, directors, choreographers, and engineers all contribute to the final composite of the pop recording, it is argued that the staging of any pop act is a collective project. The implications of this are addressed through structures of gender, ethnicity, nationality, class, and sexuality. Ultimately, Hawkins contends that queerness is a performative force that connotes futurity and utopian promise.
