Popular music theory
Parent categories: popular music - music theory
Studying Popular Music (1990/2002) - Richard Middleton
Studying Popular Music (1990/2002) - Richard Middleton [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Synopsis
As interest in popular music has increased, so the need for better ways of studying it has become more urgent. It is the author's contention that popular music can be properly understood only through an interdisciplinary method, and this book aims to demonstrate this through a critical analysis of issues and approaches in a variety of areas, ranging from the political economy of popular music through its history and ethnography to its semiology, aesthetics and ideology. The focus of the book is on Anglo-American popular music of the last two hundred years, more especially of the 20th century. In Part One the author outlines a "historical map" of this field, offering on the way a constructive critique of existing musical histories, of T.W.Adorno's pessimistic picture of music in 20th century "mass culture", and of various theories of musical production and reproduction in contemporary capitalist societies. Part Two turns to the analysis of popular music, looking in turn at approaches drawn from musicology, from folkloristics, anthropology and cultural studies, from structuralism and semiology, and from aesthetics, ideological analysis and psychoanalysis. --via Amazon.co.uk
Richard Middleton is Staff Tutor and Senior Lecturer in Music at the Open University's Northern Region at Newcastle upon Tyne. He is also the founder and co-ordinating editor of the journal Popular Music.
Bibliography
- (1972). Pop Music and the Blues. Gollancz.
- (1990/2002). Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN 0335152759.
--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Middleton_%28musicologist%29 [Mar 2005]
Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture (1999) - Bruce Horner, Thomas Swiss
Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture (1999) - Bruce Horner, Thomas Swiss [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
About the Author
Bruce Horner has degrees in both music and English. His essays on song criticism have appeared in such journals as Mosaic, Writing on the Edge, and the Journal of Musicology. He is Associate Professor of English at Drake University, where he teaches courses on song criticism. Thomas Swiss has had essays published in Popular Music, Postmodern Culture, New England Review, and The New York Times Book Review. His most recent books are Rough Cut, a collection of poems (1997), and the co-edited Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory (Blackwell, 1997). He teaches courses on music and contemporary culture at Drake University, where he is Center for the Humanities Professor.
Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture presents eighteen original essays by leading scholars in the field of popular music studies. Each essay - drawing widely on work in feminist, postcolonial, and cultural studies and the disciplines of musicology and literary criticism - maps the competing perspectives on one of the key terms in ongoing debates on the meaning of popular music and culture, discusses the history of continuities and conflicts in its meaning, and presents the writer's own views on its meaning and how he or she has come to adopt such a position. These essays combine to form a valuable overview of the state of popular music discourse at the end of the twentieth century. They will prove invaluable both to those new to the study of popular music and those already well-versed in popular music and cultural studies. --Book Description via Amazon.com
The editors of this volume have isolated concepts and terms widely used in contemporary discourse on popular music and have assigned authors to an essay intended to explore the intellectual history of the term, examine a range of the term's uses in popular- music studies, and provide examples and case studies. Some essays-for example Paul Théberge's "Technology," Richard Middleton's "Form," David Sanjek's "Institutions," and Sara Cohen's "Scenes"-accomplish this admirably and more than make this volume worth reading. A few, however, hew a little too closely to the author's own research projects and may be of less general interest. Clearly indebted for inspiration to Raymond Williams's Keywords (CH, Jun'76; rev. ed., 1983) and less encyclopedic than Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies by Tim O'Sullivan et al. (2nd ed., 1994,), this collection attempts to introduce readers to a complex cultural studies terminology that is increasingly central to academic discourse in popular-music studies and more generally Important in the humanities and social sciences. The book features an excellent roster of authors and will make a valuable companion to popular-music studies, histories, and surveys. large collections at all levels. --G. Averill, New York University --Thomas Swiss via Amazon.com
Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music (1989) - Peter Van Der Merwe
Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music (1989) - Peter Van Der Merwe [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Product Description:
Analyzing popular music from a musical, rather than a sociological or political viewpoint, this book examines the nineteenth-century split between classical and popular music and surveys all styles of Western popular music to uncover the musical language uniting them. --via Amazon.com