Interpreting Popular Music

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 256 pages
• ISBN 10 Number: 0520225414
• ASIN: B000HWYKOI
• Book Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Weighs: 12 ounces

Product Description
There is a well-developed vocabulary for discussing classical music, but when it comes to popular music, how do we analyze its effects and its meaning? David Brackett draws from the disciplines of cultural studies and music theory to demonstrate how listeners form opinions about popular songs, and how they come to attribute a rich variety of meanings to them. Exploring several genres of popular music through recordings made by Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Hank Williams, James Brown, and Elvis Costello, Brackett develops a set of tools for looking at both the formal and cultural dimensions of popular music of all kinds. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Back Cover Copy
"[An] impressive and important contribution to popular music studies. . .[Brackett's] work could function not just as a model for popular music analysis but also as a very helpful introduction to popular music culture and history. Starting from a musicological perspective, Brackett addresses many of the problems raised by the sociological account of popular music that has so far dominated the field. . . . should become essential reading in any popular music course." (Simon Frith, author of Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: Interpreting Popular Music (Paperback) David Brackett's "Interpreting Popular Music" is a very valuable addition to the field of popular music scholarship. It self-consciously avoids a general theory of popular music scholarship, but rather makes the case that a wide variety of individual approaches, best tailored to 1) the music involved, and 2) the relative, changing stance of the interpreter to the kind of music at hand, provide the most honest and productive hermeneutic. Add this to a forceful defense of paying attention to popular music (take note, musicologists and ethnomusicologists!) and you have a brilliant, rigorous, but open-ended approach to an area of music until recently mostly ignored by musicology. Having said that, Brackett takes several subjects for analysis: Hank Williams "You're Cheating Heart," Billie Holiday and Bing Crosby's "I'll Be Seeing You", James Brown"s "Superbad," and Elvis Costello's "Pills and Soap." At each point he critiques and complicates some commonly-held notions, such as biographical relationships between artists and their music (Holiday), notions of immediate 'authenticity' (Williams), and the notions that one can't really write about music, or that musical difference and marketability are at odds (Costello). Drawing on the work of Richard Middleton, Simon Frith and other music scholars, Brackett builds his case at each turn with the help of speech-act theory, African-American literary theory, and "spectrum graphs"-- pitch vs time graphs that help the reader analyze and compare inflection, timbre, style and scope in a more tangible way that simple adjectives. But for the more casual reader, the writing itself is easy and unencumbered. This is a good introduction (without intending to be so) for the beginning scholar of cultural music studies, as the reader really gets a good look at the wide variety of tools available to examine music--not just formal analysis. Comment | Permalink | (Report this)