ABSTRACT
This chapter situates the activity of analytical musicology, and explores its use to date in discussions of 'rock'. It argues that the conventional bourgeois musicology cannot simply be applied to rock. The chapter suggests that many of the arguments concerning the relative merits of different musics can be resolved into arguments concerning the relative merits of different functions, which thus becomes an ethical rather than an explicitly musical issue. It considers many of the supposed distinctions between 'popular' and classical' music's in detail. Fortunately, since the early 1970s, few musicologists have begun to focus their attention on rock and its related musics. Musicologists have tended to ignore popular musics through a mis-equation of complexity with profundity. The chapter considers the difference between rock and classical musics, none of which necessitates the assertion of the superiority of either. In 1956, the influential musicologist Leonard B. Meyer described two modes by which meaning can be considered to be conveyed in music.
