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Popular music analysis too often neglects the analysis of popular music

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The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches. Edited by CiroScotto, KennethSmith, and JohnBrackett. New York: Routledge, 2019. 441 pp. ISBN 978-1-138-68311-2.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2020

Trevor de Clercq*
Affiliation:
Department of Recording Industry, Middle Tennessee State University, USA

Extract

For more than two decades, a trend in popular music scholarship has been the publication every few years of an edited collection of analytical essays (e.g., Covach and Boone 1997; Moore 2003; Everett 2008). These multi-author volumes sometimes have a specific analytical concern, such as intertextuality (Burns and Lacasse 2018), but more typically they simply bring together a variety of essays written by a variety of authors using a variety of methods to analyse music from a variety of styles. Strategically, the editors of these volumes will pitch this lack of any strong unifying theme as an advantage, asserting that the broad range of approaches gives the reader a sense for the diversity of current perspectives (as in, for example, the preface to Spicer and Covach 2010 or the introduction to von Appen et al. 2015). To be fair, the exclusive focus on analysis, particularly close readings of the ‘text’ itself, makes the chapters of these collections hold together more than, say, the articles in any regular issue of Popular Music. However, with typically only a dozen or so contributions in each volume, these multi-author works often seem like scattershot glimpses into the vast universe of possible analytical approaches and musical styles.

Type
Review Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

Burns, L., and Lacasse, S. 2018. The Pop Palimpsest: Intertextuality in Recorded Popular Music (Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press)10.3998/mpub.9755813Google Scholar
Covach, J., and Boone, G. 1997. Understanding Rock: Essays in Music Analysis (Oxford, Oxford University Press)Google Scholar
Everett, W. 2008. Expression in Pop-Rock Music: Critical and Analytical Essays (New York, Routledge)Google Scholar
Moore, A. 2003. Analyzing Popular Music (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press)10.1017/CBO9780511482014CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spicer, M., and Covach, J. 2010. Sounding Out Pop: Analytical Essays in Popular Music (Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press)Google Scholar
von Appen, R., Doehring, A., Helms, D., and Moore, A. 2015. Song Interpretation in 21st-Century Pop Music (Burlington, VT, Ashgate)Google Scholar