Understanding Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis

✍ Scribed by John Covach, Graeme M. Boone

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Year: 1997
Tongue: English
Leaves: 238
Category: Library

No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.

✦ Synopsis

The previous reviewer was clearly expecting something that would be a bit more like music journalism. In reality, this is a true scholarly work, designed for mostly graduate students and professionals in the musicological fields. The title clearly implies a more academic nature because of the "musical analysis" tag. Some of these articles are more geared towards recording practices, some are more music theory, some ethnomusicological, and others in the greater scheme of music history. The previous reviewer commented "this ain't Mahler, y'know," but the point is that these essays are designed for people who do want to use the traditional studies used for the classics of music to apply to current rock too.

This is a great resource for anyone trying to get a sense of how one can write about rock music. It is also an excellent sourcebook with a typically accurate and extensive bibliography for rock scholarship. The field of rock and pop studies in music academia is growing, from Beatles to Beach Boys to Tori Amos to Radiohead. This is a great survey study on a number of broad aspects of music scholarship.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents......Page 16
Contributors......Page 18
1 Progressive Rock, "Close to the Edge," and the Boundaries of Style......Page 22
2 After Sundown: The Beach Boys' Experimental Music......Page 52
3 Blues Transformations in the Music of Cream......Page 78
4 "Joanie" Get Angry: k.d. lang's Feminist Revision......Page 112
5 Swallowed by a Song: Paul Simon's Crisis of Chromaticism......Page 132
6 "Little Wing": A Study in Musical Cognition......Page 174
7 Tonal and Expressive Ambiguity in "Dark Star"......Page 190
A......Page 230
B......Page 232
C......Page 233
G......Page 234
L......Page 235
S......Page 236
Y......Page 238