Writing entries for the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World (EPMOW, forthcoming) is not an easy task. One recurrent problem is that concepts applied to the description of musical structure in the classical repertoire cannot always be used in the same way when denoting ostensible equivalents in the field of popular music. Terminological convention also varies in the classification of harmonic practices as well as in the meaning of basic terms like ‘beat’ and ‘chorus’. However, it is perhaps conventional musicology's notion of ‘the work’ that is the most awkward to use in the description of popular music. The problem can be illustrated by the following attempt to provide a definition of ‘turnaround’ for EPMOW.

The obvious difficulty here is one of terminology relating to what might or might not be called ‘the work’. Note the clumsy expression ‘song or instrumental number’ and the way in which ‘number’ and ‘piece of music’ are used as synonyms. The question is how to refer to something that, within a given musical culture or subculture, is generally perceived as a musical continuum of determinate duration and of sufficient internal structural cohesion to be understood as sonically identifiable in itself from whatever precedes or follows it, as well as from other similarly integral sets of sequences of musical sound. The concept is really quite simple, even self-evident. The problem is that I felt unable to use the word ‘work’ to denote this concept when defining ‘turnaround’, and that this notion is avoided also by most popular music scholars. Why?