ABSTRACT
The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches widens the scope of analytical approaches for popular music by incorporating methods developed for analyzing contemporary art music. This study endeavors to create a new analytical paradigm for examining popular music from the perspective of developments in contemporary art music.
"Expanded approaches" for popular music analysis is broadly defined as as exploring the pitch-class structures, form, timbre, rhythm, or aesthetics of various forms of popular music in a conceptual space not limited to the domain of common practice tonality but broadened to include any applicable compositional, analytical, or theoretical concept that illuminates the music. The essays in this collection investigate a variety of analytical, theoretical, historical, and aesthetic commonalities popular music shares with 20th and 21st century art music. From rock and pop to hip hop and rap, dance and electronica, from the 1930s to present day, this companion explores these connections in five parts:
- Establishing and Expanding Analytical Frameworks
- Technology and Timbre
- Rhythm, Pitch, and Harmony
- Form and Structure
- Critical Frameworks: Analytical, Formal, Structural, and Political
With contributions by established scholars and promising emerging scholars in music theory and historical musicology from North America, Europe, and Australia, The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches offers nuanced and detailed perspectives that address the relationships between concert and popular music.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|1 pages
Establishing and Expanding Analytical Frameworks
chapter 7|19 pages
Interpreting Transmedia and Multimodal Narratives
part 2|1 pages
Technology and Timbre
chapter 10|15 pages
“What Music Isn’t Ambient in the 21st Century?”
part 3|1 pages
Rhythm, Pitch, and Harmony
part 4|1 pages
Form and Structure
chapter 20|9 pages
‘Silence in the Studio!’
chapter 21|15 pages
“Weed Crumbles into Glitter”
part 5|1 pages
Critical Frameworks: Analytical, Formal, Structural, and Political