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Analyzing Popular Music.

Article Excerpt
Analyzing Popular Music. Edited by Allan F. Moore. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. [ix, 279 p. ISBN 0-521-77120 X. $60.] Music examples, analytical charts, bibliography, discography, index.

With this ten-essay volume, editor Allan Moore can be proud of a significant contribution to the field of popular music analysis, a field that is enjoying a period of burgeoning development in both the U.K. and North America. There now exist a growing cohort of scholars whose principal musical preoccupation is the close consideration of analytic methods and interpretive frameworks for popular music. The articles in this volume demonstrate that popular music as a studied repertoire is becoming increasingly broad. We find here interpretive commentary on music from 1970s rock and new wave, soul, country, metal, jazz, rap, hip-hop, dance and house music, as well as music for television. The music-analytical approaches are no less varied, as we hear from ten authors on as many ways to listen, receive, analyze, interpret, evaluate, and respond to the music as text. The question of what constitutes the text itself is asked in virtually every contribution, with (gratefully) no single conclusion emerging, but rather a plurality of possibilities based on the various contexts that inform the creation and reception of an artwork.

Despite the individual nature of the contributions, as well as some disciplinary and interdisciplinary tensions, the authors share considerable common ground: they all pay heed to the historical, social, and cultural specificities of the music they have...

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