ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the intersection of multimodality, aesthetics, and gender in Song Reader. Song Reader is inherently multimodal, and many of its semiotic meanings were explored in Maxwell. The term 'aesthetics' is multifaceted, and here we understand it broadly as the appreciation of beauty and artistic taste. Gender has long been significant in popular music see for example Whiteley, 1997; Hawkins, 2009, and most recently Hawkins, 2017, and popular music has also been considered from a multimodal perspective. Song Reader is styled as a reminder of the cultural practice of music in the parlour room, which was gendered female. Song Reader sets the focus on music that is open to all as a hands-on, material affair in an age when listeners are increasingly remote from the physical product. It is an act that is even more powerful because of Beck's comparable absence in Song Reader.
