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Notes 60.4 (2004) 953-955



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Analyzing Popular Music. Edited by Allan F. Moore. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. [ix, 279 p. ISBN 0-521-77120 X. $60.] Music examples, analytical charts, bibliography, discography, index.

With this ten-essay volume, editor Allan Moore can be proud of a significant contribution to the field of popular music analysis, a field that is enjoying a period of burgeoning development in both the U.K. and North America. There now exist a growing cohort of scholars whose principal musical preoccupation is the close consideration of analytic methods and interpretive frameworks for popular music. The articles in this volume demonstrate that popular music as a studied repertoire is becoming increasingly broad. We find here interpretive commentary on music from 1970s rock and new wave, soul, country, metal, jazz, rap, hip-hop, dance and house music, as well as music for television. The music-analytical approaches are no less varied, as we hear from ten authors on as many ways to listen, receive, analyze, interpret, evaluate, and respond to the music as text. The question of what constitutes the text itself is asked in virtually every contribution, with (gratefully) no single conclusion emerging, but rather a plurality of possibilities based on the various contexts that inform the creation and reception of an artwork. [End Page 953]

Despite the individual nature of the contributions, as well as some disciplinary and interdisciplinary tensions, the authors share considerable common ground: they all pay heed to the historical, social, and cultural specificities of the music they have chosen to study and offer their analyses with such contexts in evidence. The jacket's claim that this is the "first collection of such essays to incorporate contextualization" is presumptuous, since other such collections have appeared and are of value in the development of the field. That claim may reveal something of the polemical and political nature of the climate for popular music studies, which can be guilty of exclusionism. The most notable exclusion that I find here—especially in light of the "context-claim"—is that of feminist or gender studies, a significant element in the popular music literature. Indeed, there is only one female author out of the ten contributors and the contributions of female authors are seemingly invisible in the bibliography to the collection. More perplexing perhaps is the fact that although some of the contributing authors (especially Stan Hawkins and John Covach) address the subjects of gender and sexuality, these terms do not appear in the index to the volume, and thus are not apparent as valuable social and historical contexts.

The collection is book-ended by articles that reflect on the methodology and goals of writers involved in the project of situating popular music in social contexts. Robert Walser opens the collection by worrying about the concept of analytic "purpose" and listener values. He regrets studies that leave sound out of the analysis, but on the other hand, has grave concerns over the ways in which sound is interpreted by musicologists and theorists. The notion of evaluation is pertinent here, as he explores how to account for musical taste, finding ways to specify how a "song invokes and appeals to [a listener's] emotions and values" (p. 29). Offering ten instructive statements and four case studies chosen from a variety of styles and genres, he delimits his own theoretical and analytical position, carefully drawing lines in the sand that he believes ought not to be crossed. Although he deliberately avoids using theoretical tools such as formal diagrams or chord labels, he worries about the analyst who would "stop short of reaching [a] level of analysis" that would "explain why people have been moved by it" (p. 29). The collection closes with an article that contributes another perspective on analytic values and musical knowledge. Martin Stokes, as the only ethnomusicologist contributor to the volume, interrogates analytic practices in the fields of theory, cultural anthropology, and ethnomusicology. Stokes questions the understood distinction between theoretical discourse and cultural expression, demonstrating how the line between theory and culture is no longer fixed. Through his studied example...

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