After Relativism

DOI: 10.1111/musa.12005

DAI GRIFFITHS

AFTER RELATIVISM: RECENT DIRECTIONS LOW MUSIC

IN THE

HIGH ANALYSIS

OF

Readers of Music Analysis may recall that my essay ‘The High Analysis of Low Music’ set so-called popular music in an imaginary but bitter fight to the death with so-called contemporary classical music (Griffiths 1999). In the course of time, it was gratifying to find Richard Cohn ending a dictionary entry on harmony with these two sentences: Several developments in the late 20th-century academy – notably a suspicion of historicising teleologies and the re-evaluation of the distinction between classical and vernacular – stimulated a recognition of diatonic tonality as a living tradition. Perhaps the most important trend in practical harmony at the beginning of the 21st century is the reintroduction of contemporary music, in the form of folk music, jazz, show-tunes, rock, and so on, into manuals of practical harmony, in both Europe and North America, in the service of compositional and improvisational as well as analytical training. (Cohn 2001, p. 873)

That shift in the word ‘contemporary’ rings true. I have served on the board of Oxford Contemporary Music since 2003 and acted as its chairman between 2006 and 2011, and ‘contemporary’ was used throughout that period to include several types of interesting music and their mixture: sonic art, contemporary classical, folk, jazz, rock and world music. A rare letter arrives from a disgruntled supporter insisting that ‘contemporary’ means, or ought to mean, contemporary classical music, but this is a minority view: many people apparently accept ‘contemporary’ simply for its temporal connotations of the music of the present and recent past. The highs and lows have gone, replaced by tolerance, pluralism and inclusivity; but what next? So embedded now is popular music in the academy, indicated for example by the demand for its study and conversion into forms of academic validation which has for some time generated textbooks, that it has extended into music analysis itself. This condition provides the starting point of the current essay, in which I review two volumes, Allan F. Moore’s Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song (2012; hereafter SM),1 and Philip Tagg’s Everyday Tonality: Towards a Tonal Theory of What Most People Hear (2009; hereafter ET),2 but bring into the debate a third recent text, Walter Everett’s Foundations of Rock: from ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ to ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ (2009; hereafter FR). Moore was author of one of the first, and best-established, general textbooks in the field Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012) © 2013 The Author. Music Analysis © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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(1993; 2nd edn 2001). Its most important precursor was Richard Middleton (1990), its most direct competitor Ken Stephenson (2002); John Covach (2006) is also important.3 The titles of four of these texts mention rock music, while SM specifies ‘recorded popular song’, with the two important little transplantations of ‘popular’ for ‘rock’ and ‘song’ for ‘music’; ET has both ‘tonality’ and ‘tonal theory’, suggesting the abstractions of theory over the empirical detail of analysis, but also the provocation ‘what most people hear’. A final word of significance is Moore’s ‘interpreting’, which goes beyond ‘analysing’. After brief accounts of the three books, my essay will discuss their authors’ varied attitudes towards their material and their treatment of harmony; I will conclude with a substantial discussion of Moore’s innovative inclusion of interpretation in SM. All three authors are knocking on and are able to look back over a lifetime spent listening to popular songs; the sheer number of tracks referenced in all three books is impressive, comparable perhaps to the wide-ranging examples in classical harmony textbooks. My guess is that Moore and Tagg refer to around 900 tracks each, while Everett claims a total of ‘well over sixty-five hundred songs’ (FR, p. vi). Moore’s article ‘Patterns of Harmony’ (1992) was a significant precursor of large-scale data collection, with its appendix of around 24 pages containing hundreds of tracks organised by harmonic type. Given the quantity of records referred to in the three volumes, readers are urged to employ digital resources such as YouTube, iTunes, and so on (FR, p. xiii; and SM, p. 351), though Tagg is alone in discussing copyright issues (ET, pp. 12–13). Everett, then, emerges as the exception by virtue of his two organising principles. First, by date: the subtitle refers to the Carl Perkins track ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, recorded in 1955, and to ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’, recorded by Crosby, Stills and Nash in 1969, the book’s focus being on recorded popular music between these dates; these two tracks also feature prominently in the book’s conclusion (FR, pp. 389–99). Second, by selection process: Everett covers best-selling singles – the Top 20 hits of charts listed in the American trade magazine Billboard – as well as a large number of complete rock album releases, so that between the two sources he is able to demonstrate the ‘foundations of rock’ of his title. Only occasionally and with a light touch does Everett refer to music from before his period or hint at developments to follow, but he does make the reasonable if lavish claim that his principles might be useful for ‘practically ... any popular song of the past century and more’ (FR, p. x).4 Moore and Tagg both range more widely in their chosen repertories, with Tagg putting it comically in characteristic capitals as an alternative title for his book: ‘tonal elements in widely heard music diffused in mainly, but by no means exclusively English-language cultures in the late twentieth century, i.e. music that Philip Tagg has played, sung or heard’ (ET, p. 3). True to the broad title Tagg ends up with, the range of music in ET encompasses all sorts of tonal music, including jazz, folk, world and even so-called classical music. In a cautious explanation of his repertory, Moore reveals that his original focus was ‘the pop/rock of the late 1950s and 1960s’ (SM, pp. 16–17), signalling through a © 2013 The Author. Music Analysis © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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footnote its similarity to the repertory covered in FR (p. 16). However, Moore also occasionally draws on earlier sources, making curiously frequent reference to the singer Al Bowlly (1898–1941), and often with the aid of Allen Forte’s study (1995) of the American popular ballad. He also turns very often to post-1960s songs, with a particular expertise, familiar from his other work, in 1970s British rock music, progressive and otherwise, and a wide range of other pop and rock recordings, including many from the last decade. All three have much to say about the Beatles, in Everett’s and Moore’s cases building on previously published work (Moore 1997; and Everett 1999b and 2001) and offering yet more to ponder with regard to the Fab Four’s canonical status. The structure of FR is essentially twofold, with both sections punctuated by discussion of the same 25 representative tracks (pp. 81–92 and pp. 294–301). The first part is a five-chapter examination of instruments and voices (drums, guitars, keyboards, orchestral instruments and voices); the second, a sevenchapter overview of the elements of tonal music (form, melody, harmony [four chapters] and rhythm). Two concluding chapters cover recording technology and interpretation. ET recycles a series of dictionary entries (Shepherd, Horn, Laing, Oliver and Wicke 2003),5 which explains the expository nature of some of the material presented. These combine to form a three-part scheme: five chapters of rudiments (notes, tuning and intervals, modes, melody and polyphony), three chapters on harmony (classical harmony, non-classical harmony and chords) and five chapters on drones and repeated chord sequences (one-chord changes, shuttles, loops, modal loops and a final case study on ‘Yes We Can’).6 Finally, SM consists of the two parts of its title, analysis and interpretation. These are framed by an introductory methodological chapter (Moore casts his book as methodology, not theory); connected by a fifth chapter (‘styles’), which offers an historical model; and concluded by an eleventh and final chapter that consists of questions and keywords for further study. There are three chapters of musical description that cover, in turn, instrumentation and recording technology (shape); rhythm and harmony (form); and melody, voice and lyrics (delivery). After the historical interlude, there are five chapters on interpretation (friction, persona, reference, belonging and syntheses), to which I will return in my final section. Attitude Reflecting on the complex relationship between popular music and its intellectual discourse, including teaching, Middleton has written: A further issue debated in popular music studies – often prompted by attacks on the scholars by practitioners and critics, and sharpened by the impact of complex cultural theory – is the relationship between theory and practice. This was placed in even higher relief by the introduction in the 1980s of the teaching of popular music in some universities, conservatories and schools. While it can act as a catalyst to the opening up of issues concerning educational aims and relative

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These three books are aimed primarily at a school or university audience and should therefore be evaluated in terms of pedagogic usefulness. Certainly Moore and Tagg appear to have tried and tested their material in the classroom. However, Everett is the most direct teacher of the three, aiming to enhance the reader’s understanding through thousands of specific points backed up by examples on a supporting website that includes sound examples and photographs (some of which are also in the book);7 furthermore, the reader-listener is directed to examples in recordings, often to specific portions of the recording indicated by a digital clock. The book works in tandem with the website, and the recordings on it are most cheerful, with everything from comic texts to musical examples (for example, web example 8.13 has the words ‘this is a one chord, this is a six chord, back to the one chord, neighboured by the six chord’) and comic names for Everett as performer (Reg Le Crisp, Eleanor Mackenzie, Stig O’Hara-Smith, and so on). The reader has to go to the website for both track and artist indexes, but since both indexes are extremely long, author and publisher may be forgiven this decision. Everett refers to non-popular music only if he deems it necessary or interesting, and his presentation of harmony follows in outline the headings of a standard classical textbook. That said, one point needs underlining for anyone who would cast Everett as the arch-Schenkerian who takes too much for granted: the book is bereft of musical notation. Tagg also has pedagogic clarity in mind, and plenty of musical notation is provided, for which, in a phrase that may eventually strike the reader as ironic, ‘some acquaintance with the rudiments of music theory including conventional Western (classical) harmony is probably an advantage’ (ET, pp. 2–3). Tagg’s attitude towards the material is crucial in at least two ways. First is the nature of his book as a book: in fact, ET is a .pdf file that can be purchased from Tagg’s personal website,8 although it has subsequently appeared as a print book in Italian (Tagg 2011). A minimum (and cheap!) price is suggested, and the purchaser can then donate directly to Tagg as much as he or she likes. No doubt the book’s accessibility will appeal to the student, for whom the Internet is all and for whom print books are increasingly exotic adventures. By cutting out the © 2013 The Author. Music Analysis © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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publisher, Tagg has an immediate reach, and in fact some of the book is duplicated elsewhere on his remarkable website. Who knows how this issue of web-based publication will develop? On the one hand, I can point out that an indefinite article has been lost from the end of line 6 at page 7, and that the acknowledgements include two no. 5s (ET, p. 15), and that these glitches could be corrected in only the time Tagg takes so to do; whereas Moore’s reference to the keyboard player in Genesis as Peter Banks, presumably a close friend of the band’s singer, Tony Gabriel (SM, pp. 264 and 385 [in the index]) awaits the second edition of the book for its correction.9 On the other hand, Tagg’s approach is resolutely outside the world of peer review, with its blind readers; I will not go into the way that ties into that hot potato of the UK academy, the assessment of research. Tagg seems always to have set himself outside of the administrative structures of higher education in not one but three countries (Sweden, Great Britain and Canada), even while spending his working life inside those structures – a rare case perhaps of being inside the tent and pissing in. Documents galore can be found on his website testifying to this, including the fierce attack ‘Audititis’10 and a poignant if self-obsessed document in which Tagg answers the apparently ‘frequently-asked question, “Why did you leave ... ?” ’11 I mention all of this because an oppositional stance is fundamental for ET in content as well as context. For Tagg, popular music is people’s music, so that the term can encompass any music people enjoy – that blunt ‘what most people hear’ of his title.12 Yet this inclusive view of tonal music ends with an emphasis on repeated chord sequences, alongside the aesthetic claim of music’s consisting of ‘places to be’ rather than ‘a means to an end’ (see ET, p. 223, for one of very many versions of this dichotomy). The book’s proportions suggest a close relationship between ‘most people’ and ‘places to be’ that I doubt; but, anyway, his celebration of still life over story pales alongside the driving, negative, critical aspect of ET, and one can only admire the verve of Tagg’s characterisations of these unnamed and never-cited enemies. My guess is that he has in mind two types: the kind of historical musicologists who taught him and with whom he worked in various institutions over the years and, secondly, quite frankly, readers of this journal, you. So in ET we find, in order of appearance: ‘conventionally trained musos’ (p. 5); ‘conventional Euro-North-American music theory’ (p. 45); ‘teachers of European art music history’ (p. 81); ‘conventional historical musicology’ (p. 87); ‘seats of musical learning; that is, institutions rarely renowned for serious interest in the tonal elements of everyday life for the popular majority’ (p. 91); ‘conservatism’ (p. 91); ‘European art music (the repertoire on which the conventional teaching of harmony is almost exclusively based)’ (p. 91); ‘many institutions of musical learning’ (p. 94); those ‘seats of musical learning’ again (p. 95); ‘the rise and hegemony of the bourgeoisie in Europe’ (!) (pp. 96–7); something ‘ingrained and overtaught, ... established and unquestioned’ (p. 101); ‘music that conventional harmony experts have between them spent countless lifetimes avoiding or trivialising’ (p. 115); ‘some art music buffs’ (p. 159); ‘those who believe in hierarchically arranged tonal centres’ (p. Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

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180); ‘a gullible harmony teacher’ (p. 188); something ‘off the conventional harmony teacher’s radar screen’ (p. 190), yes, ‘classical harmony’s radar screen’ (p. 198); and, finally, something that ‘you don’t have to be a musicology professor to work out’ (p. 210). One wearies of the onslaught, and it would be interesting to get a hint of exactly who or where these people and places are. Only in one final passage are a couple of culprits vaguely identified, and I’m not sure they themselves would have enjoyed sharing the taxi; note again the energy of Tagg’s negatives (‘not ... nor ... nor’): Any sense of overall tonal process, ‘narrative’ or ‘form’ in this Police song, and in countless others, derives not from modulation, nor from overriding tonal schemes, nor ‘deep structure’ à la Schenker or Riemann, but from the juxtaposition of distinct harmonic constellations and from the organization of those different tonal states in terms of repetition, change, reprise and relative duration, as well as from the order in which the distinct elements are presented. (ET, pp. 188–9)

Tagg often explores linguistic roots, often with an impressive array of languages other than English to hand. Where Everett speaks effortlessly – as you do – of the dominant function (FR, p. 222) or the deceptive cadence (FR, p. 135), Tagg seethes, viscerally certain that those words are exactly the sort of baggage that needs to be ditched in favour of a more precise and neutral terminology. ‘Deceptive cadence’ is thus the basis of a brief but ‘stern warning about harmonic cultural absolutism’ (ET, pp. 103–4), while for the iniquity and inappropriateness of ‘dominant’ he has at his website a filmed lecture of over twenty minutes’ duration.13 It is a curious paradox, then, that for all the shadow-boxing, Tagg’s presentation of musical categories is somewhat traditional and, as we shall see, occasionally not so far from the enemy as he might imagine. The name that often entered my mind as I was engaging with Tagg’s work was unexpected but important in the early days of Music Analysis: Hans Keller. Firstly, consider Keller’s attentiveness towards attitude: ‘There are three overlapping ways of writing about music. One is to write about music. The second is to write about performance. The third, most popular among writers and readers alike, is to write about oneself’ (Keller 1994, p. 3). Secondly, the claim that ‘Tagg was to British Higher Education as Keller was to the British Broadcasting Corporation’ would be an interesting topic at the pub. Finally, Tagg’s audiovisual correspondences to his written work may actually be just new-media, downmarket heirs to Keller’s functional analysis. Several passages of ET can be found in their audiovisual form at his website.14 Included in addition to the lecture on the dominant just mentioned are a sequence of Mixolydian loops, the ‘doo-wop’ progression to which I shall return and a suggestive set of harmonic variations of the melody ‘The Tailor and the Mouse’. At their best, as in the doo-wop montage, the audio examples hurtle along while the screen plays all sorts of images: chord sequences (which rise in pitch as the montage progresses); a piano playing chords; photos of the sheet music or record release; words from © 2013 The Author. Music Analysis © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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songs and other keywords; and photos of all description, often comic. All this is a long way from the motivic structure of a late Beethoven string quartet, the BBC Third Programme world of Keller’s wordless functional analysis, yet they may have the same motivation: to communicate the technical point directly through musical invention, bypassing words of explication. I’ve spent a long time on Tagg’s attitude, since I think the reader must expect to encounter and engage with it at length – imagine the student asking, ‘When Professor Tagg says “conventionally trained muso”, does he mean me, sir?’ – and something of the same applies to Moore, too. Moore is more complicated than the other two: he makes things more complex and can make the familiar seem unfamiliar. His book is a real summary of a lifetime’s work, and one feels there is a great deal at stake for him, a sense underlined by the touching discussion at the book’s very close of his own ‘autistic spectrum disorder’ (SM, p. 329). SM explores more deeply and widely a greater range of sources than the other two, including literature often outside the musical domain. Not for Moore Tagg’s do-it-yourself, available-on-my-website approach: chunks of Moore’s book underwent the grind of peer review or were commissioned for collections; much of it was aired at conferences and seminars; editorial positions on two very different journals, twentieth-century music and Popular Music, gave him an immediate gain on disciplinary trends; and in general, Moore’s commitment to public engagement is both inexhaustible and admirable.15 That said, there are in fact two types of books in SM.16 One is a kind of third edition of Moore (1993) and (2001), and fans will spot some duplication from these texts: the texture of Def Leppard’s ‘Love Bites’; the phrasing of the Kinks’ ‘Waterloo Sunset’; Nik Kershaw’s ‘The Riddle’ is like ‘a change of film shot’.17 The other, newer book is about interpretation and would likely be called ‘So What?’ (as in SM, p. 285), a question or charge to which Moore appears to be especially sensitive. Those two simple words, once voiced so memorably by the Anti-Nowhere League (WXYZ, 1981), can encompass anything, from something as localised as F.R. Leavis’s quip at the seminar, ‘This is so, isn’t it?’ (Sansom 1992, p. 86), all the way to the sense of life’s purpose – for example, one’s reaction to the realisation that one has spent a lifetime writing about popular music, only for most of its practitioners and consumers to regard the effort as entirely irrelevant.18 Moore is another devotee of the popular, feeling that ‘recorded popular’ music has its own processes and histories, so that, when Everett suggested (on the basis of much evidence [including Everett 1999a]) that the music of Billy Joel ‘should be understood not in the tonal tradition of Howlin’ Wolf, but in that of Brahms’ (Everett 2000, p. 303), Moore took umbrage at both the ‘political implications’ and the ‘implied value judgment’ of Everett’s comparison (Moore 2001, p. 62 n. 21). There is a certain tension between commitment to popular music in SM (even given its limitation to song) and attention to interpretation, since the latter is of a general nature. However, despite being tied up in all of this, Moore remains absolutely committed to the listening experience and the need to set up a meaningful connection between the primary text and real life. By Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

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comparison, in FR and ET, Everett and Tagg are concerned with explicating musical texts in their production and more or less leaving the matter there. However, Tagg draws substantially on musical semiotics (see Tagg and Clarida 2003), including aspects of ET’s concluding case study (see ET, p. 262), and has another book on music’s meanings (Tagg, 2012); ET must therefore be considered in that broader context. Moore’s emphases on interpretative theory and listening can be illustrated by the following four juxtapositions with FR. First, whereas Everett has a 38-page chapter entitled ‘Creating an Interpretation’, of which seven pages provide tips for further study, Moore requires 150 pages and four chapters. Secondly, Everett’s brief discussion of authenticity spans two pages (FR, pp. 381–2); Moore’s needs twelve (SM, pp. 259–71), including a three-part schema (SM, p. 269). Thirdly, whereas over the space of eleven pages Everett approaches words in songs through lists of topics and techniques found in several tracks, including an extended study of ‘China Cat Sunflower’ by the Grateful Dead (FR, pp. 364– 74), in a little more than nine pages Moore, surveying fewer tracks than Everett, finds space for numerous theorists (Will Durant, Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green, Charles J. Fillmore, Allen Forte, Simon Frith, Dai Griffiths, Albert Mehrabian, Richard Middleton, Gino Stefani, Leonard Talmy and Mark Turner) and their theories (among them semantic frame, conceptual structure, narrative, verbal space, euphonics and addressee) (SM, pp. 108–18). The contrast is best brought out in the two authors’ approaches to recording technology, demonstrated in Moore’s second chapter (SM, pp. 29–49) and as a chapter of FR entitled ‘Engineering the Master’ (pp. 333–61). Moore’s work in this area has been influential ever since his brief but masterly presentation of his ‘sound box’ (1993, pp. 105–10), and some of the presentation in SM is his evaluation of the considerable developments in the area since then. But his emphasis remains on the listener, and new work in SM gathers around imaginary photographs of the sound box, the visual image that the mind carries of a given recording. Some new ideas have been added, such as the ‘diagonal mix’ (SM, p. 32) and ‘proxemics’, the perceived distance between recorded voice and listener (SM, p. 187). Everett, on the other hand, simply explains what techniques were available to the engineer or producer so that, between book, musical examples and website, one gains a direct understanding of techniques such as reverb, echo, delay, filtering, compression, and so on. Moore doesn’t aim for Everett’s systematic clarity in the presentation of such technical terms, and Everett is happy to leave the sound box to listeners (and doesn’t use the term), although its constituent elements (stereo separation and the foregrounding of some sounds over others) appear at the appropriate points in his chapter. In 1999, my head full of Adorno, I had these three authors as different types: Moore was an earnest onlooker, Tagg a street-fighting man and Everett a manager, and elements of those caricatures remain (see Griffiths 1999). A veteran of the administrative structures of American music theory (Society for Music Theory, Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Spectrum and Music Theory © 2013 The Author. Music Analysis © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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Online), Everett carries out a job with great efficiency, in research method and in pedagogic communication; but he is a great wit as well, with little gags aplenty often achieved by mixing music-analytical observations with words and ideas derived from song titles or lyrics. Tagg is still certainly fighting the revolution, although, because so-called popular music is now firmly embedded in the academy, it is possible that the revolution has in fact moved on, not least in the sense that students may be trained in music-analytical methodologies that have moved on from the theoretical premises that Tagg assumes and describes. Traces of Moore’s earnestness are still there,19 in his classic pinched oxymorons or euphemisms – ‘rather extreme’ (SM, p. 55), ‘fairly extreme’ (p. 106), ‘pretty precise’ (p. 51) – and his judgement that John Lennon’s ‘Cold Turkey’ displays pain ‘in fairly convincing terms’ (p. 298). But there’s also a tremendous openness in SM to ideas of all stamps and complexities, so that his book opens up a different type of interdisciplinary pedagogic context. To use Middleton’s terms from the opening of this section, both Moore and Tagg carry the epistemological trace most visibly, Everett is more immediately tactical, and, as we shall see, Moore’s particular brand of relativism highlights the ethical dimension. However, I should make an important and quasi-ethical point (see Middleton’s parenthesis, ‘who is entitled to speak about this, and in what terms’): all three authors are great musicians, and there is a palpable sense in all three books of commitment to and love for the material. Harmony, and a Historical Model There it was, back in 1999: ‘how often do you see genuine, ordinary talk about harmony anymore?’ (Griffiths 1999, p. 399). More than I imagined, no doubt, but I had a sense of historical musicology as moving away from something so internal to the musical text as chords, and of course post-tonal music by definition used different techniques. Explicitly in the title of ET, harmony is an important element of all three books, in which we find a familiar tension between ‘harmony and voice leading’ on the one hand and chords assigned roman numerals on the other, while a more repertory-specific question arises over the degree of attention given to the old church modes (Aeolian, Dorian, and so on). However, these internal matters in turn also involve the extent to which one wants to think of so-called popular music as having its own history and set of techniques, and so this is an important area of tension and debate. Everett can again stand as the least contentious case, especially if the reader is familiar with the teaching of harmony to undergraduates. His four chapters on harmony (FR, Chs 8–11) build upon the model now established in textbooks such as those by Edward Aldwell and Carl Schachter (1989) or Robert Gauldin (1997; I shall often turn to this for comparison); an important element of this outlook derives from such work as that of Felix Salzer and Schachter (1989), with Heinrich Schenker strongly in the background. Thus, having already introduced scales and modes in his chapter on melody, Everett surveys chords Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

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and notions of consonance and dissonance; the various seventh chords, ninths and elevenths; a cluster of elements such as pedals and suspensions; and the use of fourth-based chords that eventually border atonality (Frank Zappa, inevitably). The remaining three chapters divide up diatonic functions, principally in the major key; minor and other non-major modes (such as church modes and pentatonic patterns); and, finally, chromatic harmony. Gauldin, by way of comparison, has a similar expository structure, except that modes are consigned to a brief appendix (1997, pp. 627–33). Within Everett’s chapter on diatonic harmony is found another familiar organising principle: root motion by fifth, followed by root motion by third, the functions (dominant, pre-dominant and tonic) and, significantly, the contrapuntal element in harmony: auxiliary and passing chords (compare with Gauldin 1997, pp. 198–9, on ‘embellishing predominant chords within the phrase’). The chapter on minor and other modes is simply presented, organised in order of quantitative prevalence in Everett’s repertory. Under the heading of chromatic harmony, Everett includes aspects such as secondary dominants, the double plagal, the ‘cowboy cadence’ (VII–V), major II as endpoint, and modulation and tonicisation, including the ‘truckdriver modulation’.20 Principles are thus presented against the logical background of the harmony textbook, and it is important to recognise that every one of those categories has an array of examples drawn from recordings within Everett’s period. To take one example, the principle that ‘one of the more exceptional functions of chromatic chords is to serve as an unorthodox cadence point’ (FR, p. 278) generates references to records by Barry Mann, Bob Dylan, Otis Redding and Joan Baez. Keith Negus is of the reasonable view that Bob Dylan is rarely celebrated as a musician (Negus 2008, pp. 127–54), so he would do well to track through the many index references to Dylan in FR in which, by simply setting examples from Dylan alongside contemporaneous records, Dylan’s music emerges as full of common, simple and telling musical devices. Everett is also precise and eloquent on Dylan’s voice, one that ‘should be prized for its humanity and range’ (FR, p. 121), with Janis Joplin as his ‘female counterpart’ (FR, p. 122). Now, you might expect Tagg to oppose Everett’s presentation of harmony with great gusto, but that turns out not to be the case in a book in which traditional categories continue to operate despite the seemingly uncongenial context; indeed, the book contains many useful tables of chords and arrays of examples. Concerning the modes, for example, although Tagg makes much more of a song and dance about their ‘non-classical’ status, his presentation is in outline similar to Everett’s: the Ionian, Aeolian, Dorian and Mixolydian are found often, the Phrygian and Lydian less so, so that the progression I–II–IV, for example, is a ‘definite no-no for lydian harmony’ (ET, p. 123). However, he insists that we should replace the term ‘major scale’ with ‘heptatonic ionian mode’ (p. 45) and also makes the bizarre suggestion that, in an A minor context, C major be marked III (p. 138). Tagg gives weight to ‘quartal’ chords (pp. 125–36) but lists not only fourth chords in the manner of the latter reaches © 2013 The Author. Music Analysis © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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of Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre ([1911] 1978) but also chords clearly made of suspensions (‘sus 2’ for example); this makes for an interesting comparison with Everett, for whom ninths, elevenths and thirteenths have contrapuntal functions and some fourths have word-painting origins (FR, pp. 211–12). As observed earlier, Tagg eventually puts great emphasis on drones (such as in funk music, in which the band sits on the I chord and action happens at the level of rhythmic activity, voices, words, and so on) and repeated sequences (which are divided into shuttles [from one chord to another and back] and loops [longer sequences of repeated chords]).21 A clear diagram of a loop, its four chords labelled ‘tonic’, ‘outgoing’, ‘medial’ and ‘incoming’ (ET, p. 212), could be compared in its four-part neatness with Everett’s SRDC scheme for form: statement, restatement, departure and conclusion (FR, pp. 140–1). Tagg is most attentive to the duration of his loops, often measuring them by the clock. Drones and loops account for over 100 pages of ‘everyday tonality’ in a book that neglects to mention something as common as Everett’s ‘truck-driver modulation’ (see FR, pp. 283–4; and, briefly, SM, p. 226); and perhaps ET follows Middleton pre-eminently (Middleton 1990, pp. 117–19) in finding, in repeated chord sequences, historical connections and models that can encompass – my example – the ‘loops’ of Monteverdi’s ‘Beatus vir’ alongside those of Zappa’s ‘Joe’s Garage’. ET contains longer and interesting discussions of specific tracks by Pink Floyd, the Human League and the Police and concludes with a lengthy analysis of ‘Yes We Can’. However, it must be said bluntly: Tagg is some way behind the current professional literature. Everett, for example, would surely expect to find his work (1999b and 2001) referenced in Tagg’s short discussion of the Beatles’ harmony (ET, p. 214); in fact, a point concerning mode and cadence in the Beatles’ ‘Not a Second Time’ (With the Beatles, Parlophone, 1963) (ET, p. 228) is identical to one made in Everett (2001, p. 193). Although Tagg regards ‘counterpoint’ as consisting of imitations and canons (ET, pp. 88–90), I suspect it would have to be broken to him gently that some of his points head in a Schenkerian direction: for example, the section ‘G? Which G?’ (ET, pp. 164–71) contains some ‘composing-out’ (‘one chord can be tonally expanded’, p. 164), with examples that could be analysed in terms of expansion through passing or auxiliary notes (p. 165), and leads to the conclusion that chord ‘means at least two chords’ (p. 170), perhaps the beginnings of a foreground layer; the discussion of the mediant as mediator resembles Schenker’s third-divider (p. 239).22 Since his groundbreaking work on harmony in the 1990s, Moore has kept faith with a system that assigns priority to modes but then uses roman numerals to identify chords by root: the method is explained with some compression (see SM, p. 73 and its supporting footnote). Like Tagg, Moore pointedly refers to the major as Ionian and in some respects goes even further. For example, in labelling a passage from Howlin’ Wolf (SM, p. 92) as Mixolydian, its melodic seventh consistently flattened, Moore merrily removes one sharp from the notated key signature: ‘E mixolydian’ is thus the three sharps of A major.23 However, the roman numeral continues to refer to E (not A) as the I chord, and to A (not D) Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

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as the IV chord. With two of the abstractions of notation (key signature and roman numeral) not talking to each other, confusion ensues.24 Moore also has little time for voice leading or counterpoint as theoretical necessities (the lineage that underlies Everett’s presentation), so that SM reaches its voice-leading sketches – the Slade example can be taken as representative (SM, p. 88) – almost by accident rather than by a view of a tonal piece in which harmony and voice leading coexist from the start (see also Bernard 2003, p. 377). At two points in the book, indeed, traditional nomenclature for chord inversions is invoked – ‘Ic’ (SM, p. 88) and ‘VIId’, ‘Vd’ and ‘Ib’ (SM, p. 305) – alarmingly, perhaps, since inversions are key points for considering contrapuntal aspects of harmony.25 Tagg deals with inversions by taking another smack at ‘European textbook harmony’ (ET, pp. 140–1) and insists that textbooks should label the first inversion of the I chord as ‘iii6’ (p. 140). The question that arises, then, is the extent to which modes ought to be given priority, and this is an area of current debate. As David Temperley recently observed: Modality has also played a large role in my own work in popular music; in my book The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures, I argued strongly for modality as an organising concept in rock and listed ten well-known songs in Ionian, Mixolydian, Dorian, and Aeolian modes. I now believe, however, that the role of modal organization in rock has been somewhat overstated by these authors, myself included. (Temperley 2011)

My own view is that what is specifically and conceptually lost in a modes-first approach is minor scales with sharpened sevenths (that awkwardly titled pair, the ‘ascending melodic’ and ‘harmonic’ minor) – although of course Moore’s roman-numeral system will simply convert a given v to V; at the same time, I acknowledge the usefulness of viewing the Mixolydian as a major scale with flattened seventh.26 My thinking also hinges on this question of whether one is speaking about rock music, for which there seems to be some evidence of mode centrality, or popular music (as does Moore), for which the case is more tenuous. An example is a passage of ‘The Happening’ by the Supremes (Motown, 1967) – in G major but including in a distinctive phrase chords built on B, E and A (first heard at 0′17″–0′26″), which Moore identifies as Phrygian (SM, p. 74). From a non-modal perspective, one reaches that phrase by a number of small and logical steps: a sequence with root movement by fifth (Gauldin 1997, p. 315), the mixture of major and minor to generate IIIb and VIIb (ibid., p. 397 ff.) and the use of ‘Neapolitan’ for IIb (ibid., pp. 408–21). Everett has already made the joke – ‘one might as well hear the Eroica Symphony in G Phrygian’ (Everett 2000, p. 307) – but it could also be said that the mode evokes the wrong kind of music-historical association, as though the pianist Bill Evans had entered for this one phrase amid light-hearted Broadway-style material for Diana Ross. Elsewhere, it is unfortunate that Moore’s reading of Richard and Linda Thompson’s ‘Calvary Cross’ (with Linda consigned to the discography) contains an error: the © 2013 The Author. Music Analysis © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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chord sequence of the verse is given as A minor–F major–G major, whereas the correct version is F major–A minor–G major, so that it isn’t the case that we find ‘G [major] constantly going to the a [minor]’ (SM, p. 75). Likewise, Moore’s suggestion that the interpretation turns on a choice between Ionian and Aeolian listening demands much of a simple and familiar shift from minor to relative major.27 There has been some dispute between Moore and Everett over the years, although Everett’s critical account (2000, pp. 302–7 and 339–40) of Moore’s harmonic system was all but excised from the revised version that appeared in Everett (2008).28 Moore’s suggestion that there is now only ‘minor disagreement between us’ may yet be wishful thinking (SM, p. 71), for, while Moore has an admirable awareness of current debates, rarely does he build upon examples that are offered elsewhere, preferring to supply seemingly endless examples of his own. A key reference point in the professional literature is Beck’s superb ‘Lonesome Tears’ (Geffen, 2002), which has already received a Schenkerian (Everett 2004) and neo-Riemannian (Capuzzo 2004) analysis,29 thus making it an ideal example for the harmony classroom. Moore intentionally avoids the Everett analysis, since elsewhere (SM, pp. 70–1) he refers to Everett’s typology of rock’s tonal systems (Everett 2004). The reasons for Moore’s deliberate oversight are not hard to imagine, for in his analysis Everett sounds not just like a Schenkerian but like Heinrich Schenker himself. With the subheading ‘A Complex Tonal Structure Yields Its Secrets’, the analysis is organised so that the track is first approached via the chords of a tablature site (OLGA, the Online Guitar Archive)30 and then via roman numerals, as though Moore should take note. Then Everett dons the guise of Schenker: ‘only a consideration of voice leading will lead to progress with this puzzle’, and ‘clearly, it would be senseless to try to evaluate the harmony of this song by studying its OLGA roots alone, which are nearly all of an illusory nature’ (Everett 2004). ‘Senseless’ is quite a charge for Everett to level at a reliance on roman-numeral harmony. Be that as it may, both Everett’s and Capuzzo’s accounts are convincing, Capuzzo’s for the way that the transformational network encloses the track’s chords, its sneaky (or parsimonious) slithering between one chord and the next helping to generate a ‘tears’ motive (6–6–5), while Everett’s contrapuntal graphs provide a literal visualisation of the relative weight of the chords and their linear progression. In teaching harmony over the years, and as part of my book on Elvis Costello, I get considerable mileage out of putting the mixture of tonic major and tonic minor close to the heart of things (Griffiths 2007, pp. 38–40),31 and mixture casts light on some of these examples too. Everett’s conclusion about ‘Lonesome Tears’ is that ‘the voice leading argues for a key of C-sharp major coloured by a touch of mixture in the chorus’ (2004); Moore’s example ‘The Happening’ starts with a groovy riff in G minor, which gives way (at 0′11″) to tonic major as a tierce de Picardie, repeated for the ‘truck driver modulation’ (up by a semitone) at 1′54″ (and mentioned by Moore in SM, p. 226); for Mott the Hoople’s ‘All the Young Dudes’ (Columbia, 1972), Moore’s ascription of Ionian Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

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and Mixolydian (SM, p. 230) seems to me to say little, but the song’s shift from major to minor (at 0′58″–1′04″) opens up the dominant parallel minor as the counterpart of the relative minor found earlier in the track (‘delinquent wrecks’, 0′40″–0′42″); and, finally, Tagg’s example of ‘Don’t You Want Me Baby’ by the Human League (Virgin, 1981) employs the ‘shuttle’ between F major and G major in both verse and chorus (ET, pp. 191–4), but this progression heads resolutely to A minor, which also calls up the (parallel) A major briefly at 1′11″. Everett includes a welcome reference to classical music in order to introduce the modes and is attentive again to sense: Many who have had classical training might think of the minor mode as the opposite of the major because most composers of the period roughly occupying the years 1725 to 1900 would indicate that this or that piece is in A major or F minor. But such an opposition makes no sense in rock music, because although the minor mode does appear regularly, other non-major modes occur with comparable frequency. (FR, p. 166)

I don’t dispute the point at all from the rock-music perspective, but, begging Everett’s tolerance of a point so simple, a classical piece in A major, for example, has varied ways of including minor-key passages, not least because it has a relative minor and a parallel minor. By virtue of its varied presentation in these three books, harmony emerges as a key issue for the study of popular music, and above the happily recondite issue of modal harmony lies the question of whether popular music needs its own analytical language or can be incorporated into a view of tonal music in general. All three writers make much of that most familiar of chord sequences, I–vi–IV–V: Everett has it as root motion by third (FR, p. 219) but moves on to an important distinction between the harmonic and contrapuntal domain (pp. 219–20) with examples from doo-wop, early 1960s pop music, garage-band hits and numbers by vocal soloists. In the context of intertextual links, Moore builds a remarkable historical schema around the sequence (SM, pp. 278–82), but he starts with Hoagy Carmichael in 1938 and places emphasis on its status as the ‘doo-wop progression’ (p. 278). For Tagg, of course, the sequence is a loop (ET, pp. 204–8); he christens it ‘milksap’ music32 and includes a couple of Mozart examples as a footnote (ET, p. 204 n. 7). There is little here to dispute and much to celebrate, but I would add that the sequence is there in Gauldin (1997) as a repeated sequence (p. 241, ‘the harmonic basis for innumerable popular songs’) and with vi as a voice-leading chord (pp. 239–40). In short, the progression belongs to both popular and classical repertories. I think that what is principally needed now is a harmony textbook that includes examples from both scorebased works and the so-called popular repertory, including recordings. Gauldin includes examples from Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, the Beatles and a few others (as indicated by copyright permissions listed in Gauldin 1997, p. 665), but there could be many more, copyright permitting, with further chapter or © 2013 The Author. Music Analysis © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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sub-section headings also possibly, after relativism, generated by the popular repertory. How this view might affect the theory textbook is a matter to which I shall return. Before I reach the interpretative chapters of SM, I have some critical comment to dispose of with respect to Moore’s Ch. 5, ‘Styles’, and I apologise in advance to reader and author for what will seem like a dark rainstorm before the clouds lift. I understood the chapter to provide a historical framework for the change in musical sound across the period in which recorded popular music is heard, as a counterbalance to the necessarily diverse provenance of examples throughout the book. This is achieved by small paragraphs and sentences in which selected tracks are briefly mentioned: here’s ‘Rigor Mortis’ by the Meters (SM, p. 141), there’s ‘Love Bites’ by Def Leppard (p. 156) and back there are versions of ‘A Foggy Day’ by Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald (p. 131). The problem is that a historical account necessarily adopts a historical framework, and too much of the chapter, which employs fewer footnotes than the others, recycles secondhand truisms, such as the following three examples. First, that rock ’n’ roll gave way to ‘a new generation of insipid material’ in the early 1960s while ‘black artists became even more marginalised, their essential contribution unrecognised’ (SM, p. 134; Tagg has a similar narrative in ET, pp. 212–13). Brian Ward (1998) has challenged the idea that the early 1960s presented the marginalising of black Americans: for example, ‘this was arguably the most racially integrated popular music scene in American history’ (p. 124), and who can forget the Shirelles and Ben E. King on the television series Dancing in the Street,33 while also reflecting on how their hard-earned place in the charts was jeopardised by, amongst other things, the covers of their own songs as performed by bands of the so-called British invasion of 1964?34 Meanwhile, Albin Zak III (2010) challenges the ‘insipid material’ thesis as a ‘historiographic cliché’ (p. 207). Ironically, given Moore’s position, Zak’s argument often turns on the proper integration of aspects of records other than chords and perceived authenticity, such as the way a record was put together as a record, for example by the producer Mitch Miller. Next, tucked away: ‘The Drifters, c. 1953, were probably the best rhythm ’n’ blues vocal group’ (SM, p. 133). Now, that’s an assumption that must explain why my CD collection includes their Let the Boogie-Woogie Roll: Greatest Hits 1953–1958 (Rhino, 1995), acquired years ago; but I haven’t checked the claim and should prefer to trust Robert Christgau on the Five Royales: ‘Competing double-discs by Clyde McPhatter’s Drifters and Harvey Fuqua’s Moonglows convince me that these guys were the shit’ (Christgau 1994). That is to say, with such a vast historical narrative to recount, it is better to avoid value judgements unless one is secure and supported. Finally, the description of Louis Jordan, ‘the first real example of African-American cross-over, full of sexual innuendo’ (SM, p. 132): where do we even begin with that? Full of fun? Full of provocative fun? Moore’s prose is especially unforgiving in this chapter, and not necessarily for the ‘gelidity’ he elsewhere identifies (p. 329), such that the quotation of four sentences from Simon Frith on David Bowie arrive as a breath of much-needed Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

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fresh air (p. 146). The final irony of ‘Styles’ is that at two subsequent points, it seems to me that Moore does a far more interesting music-historical job: one is a fascinating consideration of the term ‘authenticity’, with a lengthy but breathtaking single paragraph dipping in and out of five events in the term’s development (pp. 260–2), while another is his observation of how the word ‘here’ operates in examples in songs as diverse as those by Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Queen and Sparklehorse (pp. 240–2). A British emphasis is hinted at early in the chapter (p. 119) and may have been a good thing,35 but this would only underline how much social context is crucial for history (art schools, the music press, venues, the BBC, and so on).36 Analysts beware: writing history is a different game.37 Interpreting Popular Music Moore’s book now deserves special treatment, since in its interpretative chapters (Chs 6–10) SM operates at a more speculative end of research, producing a wide and impressively interdisciplinary bibliography. Ch. 6 introduces the useful term ‘friction’, which I took to mean the contradiction of expectation, or bending the rules. Three large chapters follow. Ch. 7, ‘Persona’, includes work on ‘proxemics’ and much interesting and pioneering material on the relationship between the singer and accompaniment. Ch. 8, ‘Reference’, includes a discussion of music semiotics, more on harmony and melody and two innovative theories – to use their sub-division headings, embodied cognition and ecological perception. Finally, Ch. 9, ‘Belonging’, divides neatly into two topics, authenticity and intertextuality. A final large chapter, ‘Syntheses’, is a personal trip through several tracks that grabs ideas from earlier in the book; arranged by song title, it covers at least, and probably more than, the following aspects: riffs, voice, backing voices, harmony again, texture, phrase structure and verbal space. Beginning with a review of this material, I shall go on to discuss in greater detail the problems of interpreting popular music in the manner suggested by SM and will conclude with my own reflections on developments in this area. Three points in brief. First to celebrate Moore’s dependability as a guide to theories, with three examples representative of many more: the brilliant little summary of six (Keith Swanwick, Nicholas Cook, Howard Gardner, David Elliott, Theodor Adorno and Mark DeBellis) theorised versions of Tovey’s naïve listener (but no Tovey!) (SM, pp. 4–5); the lucid summary of Tagg’s semiotics (pp. 217–24), put to terrific use in subsequent examples; and the summary of Mark Johnson’s work (pp. 239–40) – effortless, and leading to ‘All Along the Watchtower’ and the discussion of ‘here’, already mentioned. Secondly, with conspicuous use of interpretative theories, and partly as a matter of proportion, Moore nevertheless also brings out the limitations of Everett’s approach, and this I think again turns on using the word ‘song’ rather than ‘rock’. Everett covers lyrics in his chapter on interpretation (FR, pp. 364–74), but they surely deserve a chapter of their own, not least because the © 2013 The Author. Music Analysis © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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period 1955–69 sees a crucial shift, so that the ‘I’ of the Elvis record (written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman) differs immediately from the ‘my’ of Carl Perkins’s shoes, even when worn by Elvis, and significantly so from the postDylan ‘I’ of Stephen Stills in ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’. Moore is right to complicate and disentangle all those issues of persona and authenticity within the text, let alone among the listeners. There is much analytical work to be done on words in songs – for example, deeper inside rhyme and alliteration (Griffiths 2003 and Salley 2011) – and Moore’s presentation of euphonics is useful and suggestive (SM, p. 114–6). Thirdly, both Everett and Moore include discussion of ‘intertextuality’: ‘style and influence’ is included in Everett’s chapter on interpretation (FR, pp. 374–8), and the topic forms the second major sub-section (following ‘authenticity’) in Moore’s Ch. 9 (SM, pp. 271–84). Everett is on the case, I think, using two words, ‘influence’ and ‘intertextuality’, that have been usefully defined and discussed by Helen Regueiro Elam (1993a and 1993b); and, being of the view that the terms can together generate a productive tension, I have elsewhere summarised their difference: Influence suggests a search for stable meaning within the confines of a given form, where authorial intention is key. Intertextuality starts from a limitless range of potential connection with less regard for disciplinary boundaries, valuing the critic’s ability to form links between disparate works with no explicit reference to authorial intention. (Griffiths 2007, p. 13)

The integration of listener theories defines the innovative and pioneering aspect of SM. They are likely to be its most debated element, not least in the field of music analysis: this is the material that is going to keep the grad students busy, both bright ones who like numbered theoretical schemes and ambitious ones attracted to scholarly disputes. One important aspect for Moore is relativism,38 which provides SM with its provocative envoi: ‘if you encounter claims purporting to identify “the meaning” of a particular song, or claims as to “the way to hear” something, with the implication “the only way ...”, or “the right way ...”, disbelieve them’ (SM, p. 330). Moore is zealously committed to the idea that, owing to differing personal histories, any given interpretation can be assigned only to the particular person making that interpretation, as though there are as many meanings to be found in a song as there are inhabitants in a town. However, this could immediately be countered with the claim that a single song will generate only a limited number of possible meanings.39 Elsewhere a philosopher-wit comments: ‘relativism at the level of “good for me” has so little to recommend it that its popularity with ordinary people is truly astonishing’ (Coady 1995, p. 757). And of course Moore constantly presents his own truthful readings, if only then to defer to this insistence, à chacun sa vérité, reminiscent of an observation made by William Empson in 1949: ‘it is a familiar paradox; any serious attempt at establishing a relativity turns out to establish an absolute’ (Empson 1987, p. 212). Moore works hard, page upon page, example upon Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

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example, to integrate the listener into the musical text, with an interest in hermeneutic theory prepared early on (SM, pp. 10–14). Moore’s later discussion of the more recent theories of embodied cognition and ecological perception is both drawn out and tough going (pp. 243–8). However, it is decisive for the interpretative material of SM, as indicated by the heartfelt remark that ‘[f]or me this is absolutely crucial’ (p. 237). Noting in passing that a very fine version of Moore’s general approach informs his excellent study of Jethro Tull’s Aqualung (Moore 2004), I shall take just three examples from the very many that Moore provides, with subsequent discussion focused on my scepticism of the analytical gain offered by these theories, disagreement over which turns on song’s use of both words and music. The Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’ (Capitol, 1966) appears at three points in SM, but its chord sequence (given on p. 219) was discussed by Daniel Harrison, where ‘it marches through its transpositional structure in retrograde’ (Harrison 1997, p. 44), and labelled by Philip Lambert as a ‘step-mirror motif’ (2007, p. 258). Moore passes over these authors in his account, in another instance of his avoidance of American music theory. Moore does provide an interesting discussion of different versions of ‘Good Vibrations’, including Brian Wilson’s belated version on Smile (2004) and the wretched Troggs cover of 1974 (SM, pp. 276–7). However, Moore’s more innovative contribution is found immediately after ecological perception is presented (SM, pp. 248–50). In this passage of SM, there are some intertextual references: Moore has ‘Happy Together’, a 1967 record by the Turtles, for the opening descent (SM, p. 249), where Harrison by way of contrast has ‘the time-honoured ground-bass tetrachord’ (1997, p. 44) while, as befits his book’s premise, Lambert identifies references to the Beach Boys’ earlier work (2007, p. 255). The track’s famous theremin generates Tagg-related semiotics (SM, p. 249). We are left with these observations: There is no introduction, simply the announcement of the singer’s almost breathless identity, followed by an empty bar before we find out what this ‘I’ is all about. The ‘I’ specifies a source, an individual speaker, whom we encounter unplanned (that lack of introduction), suddenly, in a way (I would suggest) that will always be with some apprehension; the immediacy of the encounter is dependent on the metaphorical space that surrounds the ‘I’ ... . [I]n the competing melodic lines at the end, for example, we are given a choice as to which to identify with. Perhaps most importantly, we can choose to switch our identification from one time to another. Do we exult in the vibrations (‘good, good, good vibrations’) or do we keep an eye on the relationship (‘she’s giving me ...’)? (SM, pp. 248–9)

‘Metaphorical space’ and ‘identification’ are surely the key words, revealing personal involvements and psychological investments in the details of the track. Offering little significant gain in analytical wisdom, they seem to me like so much first-time listening, and I prefer the attentions to the musical properties of this and other Beach Boys’ tracks in Harrison and Lambert. The analysis of ‘Bridge of Sighs’ (Chrysalis, 1974) by Robin Trower is a most instructive example of how Moore’s method works and what its endpoint is (SM, © 2013 The Author. Music Analysis © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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pp. 299–302). Moore is inspired especially by the governing riff or melodic motive of the track, played by guitar and first heard at 0′15″–0′25″, and ends his discussion with the italicised phrase ‘what the track I am listening to teaches me about my own actions and responses’. Between the riff and the italics are a few germane points, starting (as Moore always does) with the track’s musical detail. There follows a presumption that the track is concerned with ‘resistance’, which (following Talmy 2003, p. 416) requires two forces; this leads Moore to seek a ‘causative relationship’ between ‘the cold wind which “blows”, and the track’s persona, who spends time “crossing” ’ (SM, p. 301). Moore now ponders the image of the cold wind and its effect, whereupon the memory of seeing the band on television leads him to contemplate the desert and ideas about the way strong winds work in reality. Indeed, actual recorded wind enters at 2′30″ on a track that lasts more than five minutes (Everett would include the sound effect in his list in FR, p. 348). Now here comes the body: ‘one’s body leans into the wind. It is that sense of leaning that is so crucial, that specifies the action of walking in the wind, and it is that action that, it seems to me, is captured by Trower’s opening riff that subsequently is heard through (i.e. despite) the whirling wind’ (SM, p. 301). But Moore’s still not finished: he spells out precisely the relationship between the bodily action of leaning into the wind and Trower’s riff. Finally Moore goes off into his perennial concerns – that he’s only one reader, and that every listener might have his or her own reading, that there’s no accounting for taste – but spelling out this time the order of service: ‘what is objectively present in the music’, followed by ‘my own response’ and ending with that italicised passage. What are we to make of that? Moore really believes all of this, so we need to consider it seriously too. Moore’s attention to the ‘objective’ musical detail is exemplary: whatever one makes of his harmonic theory, his close listening is always accurate and germane. I like the integration of memoir and feel that this could inspire writers both in the scholarly world and in the blogosphere: a Music Analysis that includes music hermeneutics may be no bad thing. I’m entertained by the deserts and strong winds, although I can imagine Middleton, the author of Voicing the Popular, grumpily exclaiming, ‘He (Moore) should (at p. 9) accuse me of being “too prone to flights of fancy”!’ However, I stop well short of the direct connection between musical material and metaphor, partly because I understand the words differently; but also, and more important, I’m simply not engaging in those bodily performances. Finally, Moore’s discussion (1992) of Annie Lennox’s ‘Walking on Broken Glass’ (Arista, 1991) is another great lesson for the reader. Such richness of observation: the rhythmic interaction of piano and strings (or their synthesised equivalents), Lennox’s voice doubled at the octave in the opening, the many precisions of the sound box. But again, I’m not sure I commit to the idea of embodiment sufficiently to come up with this: ‘it is easy to creatively imagine walking across a floor, reaching broken glass, treading very carefully so as not to injure oneself’ (SM, p. 254). With this Moore is referring to the interaction of Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

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piano and strings at the opening, their little shared silences providing a literal correspondence to the words of the title. After close observation of the track’s often fussy textural details, Moore is happy to note the consistent textural positioning of details that sustain his metaphor so that, again, the groove ‘represents the placing of the protagonist’s feet on broken glass’ (p. 255) and, yet again, ‘our own actions if we were walking, carefully, on broken glass’ (p. 256). While this may seem like so much high-class word-painting and onomatopoeia, Moore nevertheless grasps the metaphor as a unifying element, not unlike the way that Rudolph Réti finds motivic unity (1962), that David Lewin focuses on the word ‘Rinde’ in a Schubert song (2006, p. 112) or that Lawrence Kramer sees ‘imitation’ as ‘the creation of sonorous images that mimic the mimetic quality of a feeling or a natural process’, the second of a three-part schema of text setting as rewriting (1984, p. 148). Be that as it may, my own enjoyment from listening to this track is nevertheless concerned with the unity of pitch and harmony; and in this brief discussion I leave aside Lennox’s vocal contribution, which is far from saying that it is of little importance. However, the opening material in piano and strings presents at least three melodic lines in counterpoint: the piano provides the melodic notes 3ˆ – 4ˆ – 3ˆ – 2ˆ – 1ˆ at the very top of the texture, with a rising 5ˆ – 6ˆ – 7ˆ – 8ˆ in the strings (gaining a little eighteenth-century decorative turn between 7ˆ and 8ˆ at 2′30″–2′38″) and the bass strings providing 3ˆ – 4ˆ – 5ˆ as support. The material gravitates towards the section that I think matters, at 0′42″–0′58″, in which Lennox has the space to be a Nobly Suffering Diva; chords turn to the relative minor, with the melodic notes 3ˆ – 4ˆ from the opening material composed out (as 3ˆ – 3ˆ – 4ˆ – 3ˆ ) within the plagal cadence Amin– C–F–C, and the 3ˆ – 4ˆ – 5ˆ motion of the opening bass strings composed out into the chords iii–IV–V towards the cadence (followed later, at 3′10″–3′18″, by a great big dominant). In passing, a disappointing bridge section – four dull repetitions, at 1′56″–2′30″ – sometimes ensured that the track was turned off. Moore has already spotted this return to the inner workings of the track as talking of music, familiar in ‘positivist musicology’, in ‘internal, formally relational terms’, in a ‘hermetic aestheticised space’,40 and that trying to go beyond all of that ‘carries a morally imperative charge’, no less (SM, pp. 214–15). Embodiment and ecology appear not only as a way forward, but as the answer, its celebration instigated as early as p. 14 (‘that evidence, that justification, it seems to me, we finally have’). So where does the divergence occur? Attitude again, perhaps. At Moore’s italicised endpoint, I don’t especially like ‘teaches me about my own actions and responses’ because it sounds too much like church or primary school. Over-affected as I was at a decisive time by the Clash and the Gang of Four (Griffiths 1999, p. 393), I would say that the words ‘letness’ (SM, p. 250), ‘thirdness’ (p. 250), ‘ecological perception’ (p. 243), ‘embodiment’ (p. 238), ‘affordance’ (p. 243) and ‘blended space’ (p. 251) are a bunch of hippies gathered inside a yurt. More important, where Moore wants to bring together words and music through a unifying metaphor, I keep them as separate strands in a song’s analysis (Griffiths 2007). With the last point in mind, here are two © 2013 The Author. Music Analysis © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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differing directions, one to do with political criticism, the other with thinking through the next stage of attention to what I call the ‘singer-song’. Firstly, criticism in general and political criticism in particular. Having praised and pinpointed Dylan as a great singer, Everett goes on immediately to castigate Art Garfunkel (‘the voice is tiny next to Dylan’s’) and Rick Nelson (‘an empty voice with no vibrato, no support’) (FR, p. 121), acting like an examiner marking a parade of singers for their technique. But the readiness to evaluate the material, deftly and sometimes wittily done, is a feature of FR that I enjoyed and admired: here the doubling of voice by trombone ‘works out rather disastrously, to my ear’ (p. 105), there a song is ‘so simple and repetitive it’s dull’ (p. 184, and a verb. sap. for Tagg’s ‘milksap’), while elsewhere a particular truck-driver modulation is ‘an overblown attempt to compensate for a weak formal structure’ (p. 283). Though Tagg is full of seething contempt for music theorists and musicologists, his many examples emerge critically unscathed, no doubt for being ‘what most people hear’; similarly, once a track has merited Moore’s attention, it can do no wrong – and, of course, even if it is faulty, 30,000 potential truth claimants in the town of Earley in Berkshire have every right to protest otherwise. Moore downplays the role of critics as mediators, whereas I would defer in the first instance to the critic’s track record rather than disbelieve a truth claim. I don’t suppose I ever agreed with the great critic Steven Wells (1960–2009), who died too young, but I enjoyed immensely the quality of his writing in the NME, and I recognised his critical consistency – strict admiration of only the most commercial teen-oriented pop music and the most forbidding hardcore rock music and dislike of everything in between.41 Moore the relativist is consistent and patient in insisting that any statement can be taken only as one person’s standpoint, and an important run of pages starts (SM, pp. 206–7) as the culmination of work on the persona and subject position, leads to a discussion of intention that stars Amy Winehouse (pp. 208–10) and ends with, among other things, a phrase sure to concern scholars in popular music’s sociological or cultural-studies wing: ‘I do believe the market to be pretty irrelevant in terms of the interpretations we make’ (p. 214). Well, ‘Walking on Broken Glass’ was a hit single on the Arista label, so whatever glass-avoiding subtlety is found in the opening seconds is firmly trounced by a rhythm arrangement that (starting at 0′16″), far from gingerly avoiding the glass, positively struts right across it. But this is also where words come with special properties, offering scope for critical and political engagement found, to be sure, firmly inside the text. There is a kind of pinched detachment in Moore’s further-study questions (SM, pp. 334–5), such as question 7.12, which might in this sense be the Big One: ‘[h]ow does the environment relate to the persona? With what consequences?’ What is missing here is history and its struggles and gains. I don’t see that feminism, anti-racism or homophobia has to be sneaked in only as an aspect of ‘ecology’ or ‘environment’. Here for example is Christgau at his even-by-his-standards best, talking about two tracks on an album by Toby Keith (I hadn’t heard of him, either) and torn in the grading as rarely before:42 Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

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CRITICAL FORUM Toby Keith: Unleashed [DreamWorks, 2002] With America lighting up one too many places like the Fourth of July, I went back and tried to hate ‘Courtesy of the Red[,] White and Blue’ like I oughta, but it was still too pithy and heartfelt, and the album still gave up a colloquial aptness and easy masculinity I’d overlooked. But obscured by the uproar is a piece of work as immoral as ‘One in a Million’ or ‘Black Korea’ – no, worse. I can forgive duet partner Willie Nelson almost anything, but I’m appalled that he lent his good name to ‘Beer for My Horses’, which not only naturalises lynching but makes it seem like fun on a Friday night. True, the horses the mob rides evoke Hollywood westerns. Right, there is ‘too much corruption’, though somebody should tell these yokels that ‘crime in the streets’ dropped in the good old days when we had an economy. But the racial coding of the ‘gangsters’ the song sends to their maker needs no explanation. And those ‘evil forces’ who ‘blow up a building’ ain’t bomber pilots, now are they? B/E (Christgau 2002)

Here I admire the critic full-on in the moment of writing, and thus, over in Moore’s summary questions and italicised keywords (SM, pp. 334–5), there is to my mind a set of questions and answers that goes like this: Do the words to the track contain material offensive to any social group (race, class, religion, gender, sexuality, age, nation)? If so, criticise that offence. Are there contradictions between real life and the views contained in the words to the song? If so, criticise that contradiction. Does the industrial context (for example, producer, label, publisher) suggest contradictions between real life and views contained in words to the song? If so, criticise that contradiction.

Second is the question of where so-called popular-music studies goes now that the battles are won. I think that Tagg wants more attention given to lots of other contexts – world music, music in different media, music for different ages, and so on – while Moore aims to establish and celebrate a common truth of listener response by integrating research in psychology and cognition. I’m with Bob Dylan: Of course, most of my ilk that came along write their own songs and play them. It wouldn’t matter if anybody ever made another record. They’ve got enough songs. To me, someone who writes really good songs is Randy Newman. There’s a lot of people who write good songs. As songs. Now Randy might not go out on stage and knock you out, or knock your socks off. And he’s not going to get people thrilled in the front row. He ain’t gonna do that. But he’s gonna write a better song than most people who can do it. You know, he’s got that down to an art. Now Randy knows music. He knows music. But it doesn’t get any better than ‘Louisiana’ or ‘Cross Charleston Bay’ [‘Sail Away’]. It doesn’t get any better than that. It’s like a classically heroic anthem theme. He did it. There’s quite a few people who did it. Not that many people in Randy’s class. (Cited in Zollo 1997, pp. 73–4)43

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Gauldin (1997) includes as case studies three works: the Minuet and Trio of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 2 No. 1; Wagner’s old chestnut, the Prelude to Tristan and Isolde; and the four songs of Alban Berg’s Op. 2 (pp. 333–46, 545–58 and 605–20). My question is: what does it take for popular music to occupy a chapter in such a book, and in what way (and not as ‘tokenism’, as we used to say)? The harmony textbook is a good spot where theory meets analysis, and a context in which music analysis meets its educational mass market. As Cohn could be said to suggest, the great achievement of writers like Moore, Everett and Tagg is the relativism of tonal harmony, as though that point even needed to be made. A strong case could be made for popular music’s becoming part of the theory book of the future in which recordings are described, while any textbook presentation of rhythm surely needs examples from rock, funk and jazz. I also suggest that popular music’s chief claim, with the relativism battles ended, is to the creation of poetic worlds, and that this depends on exactly Moore’s insistence that the words and voice in song bring their own baggage. In passing, Moore claims that ‘we are more interested in the actions of the performer than the composer, at least with this repertory’ (SM, p. 91), but I’m not so sure, since our interest also concerns precisely the blurring of that distinction. One of the hardest things to do is to come up with a term to describe a deeply established aspect of this repertory, and I find myself tending these days towards ‘singer-songs’, in order to evoke the singer-songwriter, but freed from ‘singersongwriter’ as a kind of 1970s sub-genre, a representative of which is likely to perform sensitively at an open-mic night near you this evening. Van Morrison was only one extraordinary example among several at the time, especially in Great Britain, emerging from a band of competent musicians convinced that he was also a poet of sorts, making up the words; Elton John is less compelling in this sense, since his words are provided by someone else, often Bernie Taupin, and thus closer to Schubert-via-Müller or Eisler-via-Brecht.44 The singer-song is triumphant and can therefore enable Moore’s iPod selection (King Crimson Slade, Ray Davies and Kathy Kirby), but its triumph centrally concerns Bob Dylan’s influence, longevity and hegemony, as well as the hegemonic Beatles as both song writers and performers of cover versions.45 As well as all the people who were influenced directly by Dylan, brilliantly captured in Loudon Wainwright III’s ‘Talking New Bob Dylan’ (History, Charisma, 1992), so Dylan in that Bloomian way ‘influenced’ the ones who’d gone before, with Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, Buddy Holly and Jimmie Rodgers only in the front line (see Bloom 1973). What defined this particular repertory was a bringing together of two strands that reside in words-in-music: a collection of technical innovations usually borrowed from unpredictable aspects of poetry and the creation and even discovery of poetic worlds, for which the word ‘poetics’ might suffice (see Lewin 2006, p. 101; and Krims 2003, pp. 203–5). Christgau has the best paragraph on this development, especially the list of no fewer than eleven adjectives in the penultimate sentence: Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

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CRITICAL FORUM It’s folkies, whether they call themselves that or not, who are forever revitalising outmoded musical resources they discover on old records. And bigger than that, folkies turn out to care a lot about words. Bob Dylan sold out faster than swing, and trailing behind him came a multitude of troubadours manqué who turned out their own thousands of great songs – sometimes with bridges and changes attached, sometimes strophic versifying, sometimes three-chord rants, laments, or anthems. The urbane wit and commonplace succinctness prized by classic pop never died out, but rock’s vernacular was more all-embracing – slangy or raunchy or obscene, earnest or enraged, confessional or hortatory, poetic or dissociative or obscure or totally meaningless. Some lyricist is recombining a personalised selection of those qualities as you read this sentence. (Christgau 2000)

Genuine technical innovators are of course few (for instance, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Mark E. Smith, the Last Poets, the Watts Prophets and Chuck D), as are song writers who rise to the challenge and carve out the space in languages other than English (for example, Meic Stevens or David R. Edwards in the Welsh language; see Hill 2007). Beyond that, the ones who remain are those who create compelling musicopoetic worlds and expand our sense of what the song could contain. For example, Loudon Wainwright III has a poetic world as distinctive as Philip Larkin’s – it is that good – although I prefer Larkin’s tough self-editing (one volume per decade) to Wainwright’s prolixity (an album every two years). Wainwright’s theme46 is the family – the dad he argued with, the wife he divorced, the daughter whose birthday he misses – all played through tiny details in which the persona and authenticity of which Moore writes are nicely blurred: the persona ‘Loudon Wainwright III’ is often teasingly and exactly the same as Loudon Wainwright III the person. The musical tricks are easily heard and often turn on a simple but distinctive formal device, which is to repeat the first verse as the song’s conclusion – a kind of meta-formal device that gently reminds us of the song’s construction while recalling the song’s subject matter. In ‘White Winos’ (Last Man on Earth, Evangeline, 2001), Wainwright recalls how his mother used to enjoy ending her day with a glass of white wine, and one of the immediate things is that even though it seemed so true, I’d never spotted that in a song: who wouldn’t want to end the day with a chat over a glass of white wine? In this case the opening line (‘mother liked her white wine’) returns and, on the recording,47 eventually provides a hearty conclusion. The trick is that when Wainwright broaches dark memories, the deceptive cadence appears, followed by a cut in the sentence, either back to the first line or to the instrumental opening: these cadence-cut pairs are found at 0′27″–0′33″ (first line); 0′51″– 0′57″ (instrumental) and 1′23″–1′29″ (first line); 1′47″–1′52″ (instrumental); 2′22″–2′28″ (first line); and 2′45″ (first line as cadence). In the sense that all three books are centrally concerned with song, we argue about poetic worlds, in a canon-forming game, as much inside as outside the academy (Wyn Jones 2008, pp. 109–17), and I’d be at least louder than everyone else in insisting on the inclusion of Randy Newman, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, © 2013 The Author. Music Analysis © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, Robert Wyatt and Morrissey, who offer poetic worlds as distinctive, sustained and convincing as those of Larkin, Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell and August Kleinzahler. No doubt this has something to do with a relationship to ‘real life’, but it also concerns an interest in what the song could or even should contain in the future. The work is going to be inside the words as they relate to music.48 In my version of how things move on, selection is all; and as ‘all things must pass’, to borrow the George Harrison title (Apple, 1970), one should never underestimate how significant the death of Paul McCartney will be for even the Beatles, and the subsequent, eventual conclusion of copyright issues. Note too that my view is, riskily no doubt, far less affected by downloading’s decisive shift towards the isolated track, and that I still think in terms of the oeuvre and the work, including the album as a determined sequence of tracks. To summarise, SM is a tremendous work, a lifetime achievement (as they say in award ceremonies), meandering like a great river or the first movement of the last Schubert piano sonata. It will set agendas for some time to come and, in its integration of literatures on embodiment and ecological perception, will be much used and debated. I’m not convinced, though, that these theories merit the space given to them, so to me the book overly compresses what I see as its most valuable material: the detailed attention to words and music in song. I do hope that the book gets used, especially its syntheses, as there is every chance that it could inspire new kinds of writing that integrate creative work and memoir alongside analysis. FR is the one to find space for in the curriculum, since it provides the basis for systematic work on popular music before and after its stated period. ET is a rich source of ideas and material, often provocative, and a useful foil to the other two books. The varieties of relativism found in these three books and their thousands of examples are now the end of an era, following which the hardest questions arise about popular music’s place in the musical curriculum: not the curriculum of popular music, just that of music. When a track by Beck that uses a major–minor mixture can appear alongside an example in a Schubert song, one job is done. However, the singer-song and its poetic worlds valued so highly that the distribution of chapters in the music-history book needs to be reconfigured? We’ll see.

NOTES 1. Allan F. Moore, Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012). xvi + 412 pp. £70.00 (hb) £19.95 (pb). ISBN 978-1-4094-2864-0 (hb) 978-1-4094-3802-1 (pb). 2. Philip Tagg, Everyday Tonality: Towards a Tonal Theory of What Most People Hear (New York and Montreal: Mass Media Music Scholars’ Press,

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2009). iv + 334 pp. Suggested Donation £8.50. ISBN 978-0-9701684-4-3 (e-book). 3. Griffiths (1999) was a review of another useful volume, Brackett (1995). 4. Everett does include an important limit with regard to recording technology with reference to ‘the digital age’; FR, p. 361. 5. Duplications between ET and Shepherd, Horn, Laing, Oliver and Wicke (2003) include in the latter most of the entries in the chapter ‘Harmony’ at pp. 521–59, the entry for ‘melody’ at pp. 567–84 and some others. 6. A track by will.i.am produced during the U.S. presidential election campaign of Barack Obama in 2008. 7. See http://www.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780195310245. 8. See www.tagg.org. 9. Moore also hears the chorus of the Mott the Hoople track as ‘All the young dudes, carry the nudes’, finding it a ‘striking image’ (SM, p. 230), but I’m quite sure it is ‘the news’ that they carry. That said, both Moore and Everett maintain a high level of error avoidance, and as for Tagg, who presumably did all his own copy editing, errors are remarkably rare. 10. See http://tagg.org/rants/audititis/audititis.html. 11. See http://tagg.org/zmisc/WhyLeave.html. 12. Quite where Tagg’s political stance originated is one for the detached biographer. I see to my surprise from his CV (http://tagg.org/ptcv.html) that he attended an expensive school (the Leys) in Cambridge and stayed in that city to attend its prestigious university. 13. See http://tagg.org/ptavmat.htm#Dominants. 14. See http://tagg.org/ptavmat.htm. 15. For example, younger or non-British readers may not remember Moore’s series of radio programmes on songs, with the poet Simon Armitage, for BBC Radio 4. 16. Here are three editorial suggestions for a better second edition of Song Means: more use of clock timing inside tracks (a consistent virtue of both FR and ET), more precise cross-reference across the text (there’s too much ‘see chapter x’ rather than ‘see p. y’) and considerably more precise pagination in the footnotes. 17. Found respectively on pp. 108, 39–40, and 170 of Moore (1993), and on pp. 156, 57, and 169 of SM. © 2013 The Author. Music Analysis © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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18. A rare case of positive endorsement from a practitioner is the tribute from Robert Fripp (cited in Green 2002, pp. ix–x); perhaps more typical is the critical comment by Tom Constanten, of the Grateful Dead, made of Boone (cited in Boone 1997, p. 205). 19. Moore has the distinction of being pilloried by the novelist Nick Hornby for attending a concert by Jethro Tull in 1996: ‘But even so! Jethro Tull! In 1996!’ (Hornby 2003, p. 18), a comment made in a review of ‘the hilariously dry Analyzing Popular Music’ in which ‘almost none of the essays has been written with a view to being read’, and including chapters by both Moore and myself; see Moore 2003. 20. ‘Truck-driver modulation’ is the name used consistently by Everett for the process by which songs, be they on record or in performance, modulate usually by a semitone or tone and usually upwards. Such modulations happen most frequently towards the end of the song. See Everett (1997), p. 151 n. 18. 21. A helpful analogy is used to distinguish between them: ‘swimmers swim lengths to and fro (shuttles) while runners run laps (loops)’ (ET, p. 200). 22. See for example Drabkin (2002), pp. 818–21, for a definition of ‘layer’ (Schicht), and pp. 821–9 for ‘composing-out’ (Prolongation and Auskomponierung); see Forte and Gilbert (1982), p. 105, for ‘third-divider’. 23. This point was also made in Bernard (2003), p. 377, in a review of Moore (1997). 24. Better the system of Boone in a study of ‘Dark Star’ of the Grateful Dead, in which A Mixolydian has the key signature F, C and G; Boone (1997), pp. 179–81. 25. For example, Gauldin (1997), pp. 211–24: ‘the 6/4 and other linear chords’. Moore’s use of ‘Ic’ (etc.) is consistent with the system employed in the traditional theory exams of the Associated Board for the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM). 26. Tagg covers Mixolydian harmony in ET at pp. 124–5 (the ‘cowboy cadence’), Mixolydian loops on pp. 221–6 and yet more Mixolydian melodies on pp. 274–5. The example I use in teaching is the remarkable essay in Mixolydian invention that is ‘Marquee Moon’ by Television (Elektra, 1977), where almost all of the guitar improvisations are in that mode and rendered as octaves at 8′13″–8′41″. 27. A less significant error is found in the Inspiral Carpets example on p. 88, where Moore has ‘iv–VI’ for ‘vi–IV’. 28. See also Lori Burns’s chapter in Burns and Lafrance (2002), pp. 31–61. Moore is cheerleader for the back cover of Everett (2008). Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

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29. The publication dates presumably explain why the readings do not refer to each other. 30. The Online Guitar Archive (OLGA) was closed down in 2006 for reasons relating to copyright. 31. See Gauldin (1997), pp. 390–407. Everett employs mixture in FR (pp. 244–6), Tagg only in passing (ET, p. 118). 32. See also the discussion of his audiovisual examples above. 33. First broadcast in the UK in 1996. 34. A classic example is ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’, recorded by the Exciters in 1963 and a hit single when covered by Manfred Mann the following year. 35. Moore (1993), it will be remembered, first appeared in a series entitled ‘Popular Music in Britain’. 36. One more small complaint: in SM (p. 14), Moore writes that sheet music ‘transcriptions can be notoriously inaccurate’. I tend to find published transcriptions not ‘notoriously inaccurate’ but impressively accurate, and examples that I regularly use include full scores of the Bill Evans Trio and Steely Dan and the note-for-note vocal transcriptions of the Carpenters, all published by Hal Leonard. The accuracy of a transcription also depends on when it was made; there is a world of difference between the old Northern Songs collections of Beatles songs and recent full-score versions. 37. See Griffiths (2004) for my attempt to do so. 38. This has been the case for many years: ‘[t]he extreme relativism that this implies is both unavoidable and to be embraced, for it asserts that not only music’s meaning, but its values too, are the preserves of listeners’; Moore (1993), p. 185. 39. Interesting similarities with SM can be found in John Carey’s energetic book What Good Are the Arts? Carey the relativist: ‘if this seems to plunge us into the abyss of relativism, then I can only say that the abyss of relativism is where we always have been in reality – if it is an abyss’; Carey (2005), p. 30. Carey with Moore: ‘[a] work of art is not confined to the way one person responds to it. It is the sum of all the subtle, private, idiosyncratic feelings it has evoked in its whole history’; ibid., p. 31. Carey and Moore on analysis: ‘those particular words in that particular order’; ibid., p. 174. Moore: ‘the issuing of an invitation to hear a particular sample of music in a particular way’; SM, p. 2. But Carey on repertory: ‘[i]f it is asked how, in this relativist world, one decides which artists or writers or musicians to pay attention to, my own view is that Dr Johnson’s argument carries weight: “What mankind have long possessed they have often © 2013 The Author. Music Analysis © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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examined and compared: and if they persist to value the possession, it is because frequent comparisons have confirmed opinion in its favour.” In other words, if you stick to the canon you are less likely to waste your time’; Carey (2005), p. 252. Exit Moore, high analyst of low music. 40. To find a perfect visual image of ‘hermetic aestheticised space’, look no further than the cover of SM, where a woman lies on the floor listening through headphones to a collection of CDs (long since ripped and traded on eBay). Fundamental in SM, the sound box relies on headphone listening for its precision so that, in ‘Walking on Broken Glass’, Moore has ‘at 1′38″, three cymbal crashes to the extreme right’; SM, p. 255. In fact there appear to be two separate cymbals, panned right and left, and played in the sequence right–left–both right and left–right, with the drummer imitating or reinforcing the piano in its descent from the I chord to vi (at 1′39″–1′40″). ‘So much for these small portions of one song’, Moore eventually observes (p. 255), reflecting in the phrase’s insouciance that the sound box presents that familiar analytical problem of not seeing the wood for the trees. 41. At the time of writing, see http://www.thestevenwells.com. 42. Christgau began awarding grades to record releases as early as 1969. In the case of this record, the B grade indicates ‘an admirable effort that aficionados of the style or artist will probably find quite listenable’, while records that gain the E grade ‘are frequently cited as proof that there is no God’; Christgau (1982), pp. 21–2. On Christgau’s grades, see Frith (2002), pp. 66–7. 43. The interview dates from 1991. 44. A distinction could be made between Britten’s setting the long-dead poet John Donne and the living poet W.H. Auden in the 1930s, the latter connected to Carole King and Gerry Goffin as inventors of, respectively, music and words, working in collaboration. In contemporaneous collaborations and inventions, a shared aesthetic between words and music constitutes the point of connection. 45. McCartney proves an enduring master of the cover version on Back in the USSR (Melodiya, 1988) and Run Devil Run (Parlophone, 1999). 46. The subject matter of a song is only one of its important aspects, and Moore makes the point that an attention to syllabic proportion within the sung line may be as valuable as ‘any amount of content analysis’; SM, p. 114. 47. David Mansfield’s string arrangement for Last Man on Earth (2001) is tasteful and brings out the formal cuts, but I’d recommend a performance found in an interview with an enthusiastic and most likeable Dutch journalist on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQHs8HJmzmM), where Wainwright performs ‘White Winos’, there and then, at 11′55″– 15′00″. Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

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48. The worst thing that could possibly happen is that a book be produced with examples of ‘lyrics’ by all of these songwriters – not least because such a book is going to make the words look like poems rather than respecting their place in the melodic line, ‘line’ being the element consistent between poem and song (see Griffiths 2003, p. 43), the ‘verbal space’ suggested by the music’s hypermetrical structure and the words that occupy that space. REFEENCES Aldwell, Edward and Schachter, Carl, 1989: Harmony and Voice Leading, 2nd edn (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Bernard, Jonathan W., 2003: Review of Allan F. Moore, The Beatles: Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Walter Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: ‘Revolver’ through the ‘Anthology’, Music Theory Spectrum, 25/ii, pp. 375–402. Bloom, Harold, 1973: The Anxiety of Influence: a Theory of Poetry (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). Boone, Graeme M., 1997: ‘Tonal and Expressive Ambiguity in “Dark Star” ’, in Covach and Boone, Understanding Rock, pp. 171–210. Brackett, David, 1995: Interpreting Popular Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Burns, Lori and Lafrance, Melissa, 2002: Disruptive Divas: Feminism, Identity and Popular Music (New York: Routledge). Capuzzo, Guy, 2004: ‘Neo-Riemannian Theory and the Analysis of Pop-Rock Music’, Music Theory Spectrum, 26/ii, pp. 177–99. Carey, John, 2005: What Good Are the Arts? (London: Faber & Faber). Christgau, Robert, 1982: Christgau’s Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (London: Vermilion). ______, 1994: Review of ‘Monkey Hips and Rice: The “5” Royales Anthology’, www.robertchristgau.com. ______, 2000: ‘Let’s Get Busy in Hawaiian: a Hundred Years of Ragged Beats and Cheap Tunes’, Village Voice, 11 January 2000, www.robertchristgau. com. ______, 2002: Review of Toby Keith: Unleashed, www.robertchristgau.com. Coady, C.A.J., 1995: ‘Relativism, Epistomological’, in Ted Honderich (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 757. Cohn, Richard, 2001: ‘Harmony: §6. Practice’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan), vol. 10, pp. 872–3. Covach, John, 2006: What’s That Sound? an Introduction to Rock and Its History (New York: Norton). Covach, John and Boone, Graeme M. (eds), 1997: Understanding Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). © 2013 The Author. Music Analysis © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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Drabkin, William, 2002: ‘Heinrich Schenker’, in Thomas Christensen (ed.), The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Elam, Helen Regueiro, 1993a: ‘Influence’, in Preminger and Brogan, The New Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics, pp. 605–8. ______, 1993b, ‘Intertextuality’, in Preminger and Brogan, The New Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics, pp. 620–2. Empson, William, 1987: ‘A Doctrine of Aesthetics’, in Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press), pp. 211–15; originally published in Hudson Review, 2 (Spring 1949), pp. 94–7. Everett, Walter, 1997: ‘Swallowed by a Song: Paul Simon’s Crisis of Chromaticism’, in Covach and Boone, Understanding Rock, pp. 113–53. ______, 1999a: ‘The Learned vs. the Vernacular in the Songs of Billy Joel’, Contemporary Music Review, 16, pp. 105–30. ______, 1999b: The Beatles as Musicians: ‘Revolver’ through the ‘Anthology’ (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). ______, 2000: ‘Confessions from Blueberry Hill, or, Pitch Can be a Sticky Substance’, in Walter Everett (ed.), Expression in Pop-Rock Music: a Collection of Critical and Analytical Essays (New York: Garland), pp. 269–345. ______, 2001: The Beatles as Musicians: the Quarry Men through ‘Rubber Soul’ (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). ______, 2004: ‘Making Sense of Rock’s Tonal Systems’, Music Theory Online, 10/iv, http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.04.10.4/mto.04.10.4.w_everett. html. ______, 2008: ‘Pitch down the Middle’, in Walter Everett (ed.), Expression in Pop-Rock Music: Critical and Analytical Essays, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge), pp. 111–74. ______, 2009: Foundations of Rock: from ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ to ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). Forte, Allen, 1995: The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Forte, Allen and Gilbert, Steven E., 1982: Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis (New York: Norton). Frith, Simon, 2002: ‘An Essay on Criticism’, in Tom Carson, Kit Rachlis and Jeff Salamon (eds.), Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough: Essays in Honor of Robert Christgau (Austin, TX: Nortex Press), pp. 65–9. Gauldin, Robert, 1997: Harmonic Practice in Tonal Music (New York: Norton). Green, Lucy, 2002: How Popular Musicians Learn: a Way Ahead for Music Education (Aldershot: Ashgate). Griffiths, Dai, 1999: ‘The High Analysis of Low Music’, Music Analysis, 18/iii, pp. 389–435. ______, 2003: ‘From Lyric to Anti-Lyric: Analysing the Words in Popular Song’, in Allan F. Moore (ed.), Analyzing Popular Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 39–59. Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

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______, 2004: ‘History and Class Consciousness: Pop Music towards 2000’, in Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople (eds), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 557–83. ______, 2007: Elvis Costello (London: Equinox). Harrison, Daniel, 1997: ‘After Sundown: the Beach Boys’ Experimental Music’, in Covach and Boone, Understanding Rock, pp. 33–57. Hill, Sarah, 2007: ‘Blerwytirhwng?’ the Place of Welsh Pop Music (Aldershot: Ashgate). Hornby, Nick, 2003: ‘Word Up, Dog’, Times Literary Supplement, 5239, 29 August, p. 18. Keller, Hans, 1994: Essays on Music, ed. Christopher Wintle with Bayan Northcott and Irene Samuel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Kramer, Lawrence, 1984: Music and Poetry: the Nineteenth Century and After (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press). Krims, Adam, 2003: ‘What Does It Mean to Analyse Popular Music?’, Music Analysis, 22/i–ii, pp. 181–209. Lambert, Philip, 2007: Inside the Mind of Brian Wilson: the Songs, Sounds and Influences of the Beach Boys’ Founding Genius (New York: Continuum). Lewin, David, 2006: Studies in Music with Text (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). Middleton, Richard, 1990: Studying Popular Music (Buckingham: Open University Press). ______, 2001: ‘Popular Music: I, Popular Music of the West’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan), vol. 20, pp. 128–51. Moore, Allan F., 1992: ‘Patterns of Harmony’, Popular Music, 11/i, pp. 73–106. ______, 1993: Rock: the Primary Text (Buckingham: Open University Press). ______, 1997: The Beatles: ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ______, 2001: Rock: the Primary Text, 2nd edn (Aldershot: Ashgate). ______ (ed.), 2003: Analyzing Popular Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ______, 2004: Aqualung (New York: Continuum). ______, 2012: Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song (Aldershot: Ashgate). Negus, Keith, 2008: Bob Dylan (London: Equinox). Preminger, Alex and Brogan, T.V.F. (eds), 1993: The New Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Réti, Rudolph, 1962: The Thematic Process in Music (New York: Macmillan). Salley, Keith, 2011: ‘On the Interaction of Alliteration with Rhythm and Metre in Popular Music’, Popular Music, 30/iii, pp. 409–32. Salzer, Felix and Schachter, Carl, 1989: Counterpoint in Composition: the Study of Voice Leading (New York: Columbia University Press). © 2013 The Author. Music Analysis © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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Sansom, Anne, 1992: F.R. Leavis (Buffalo, NY and Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Schoenberg, Arnold, ([1911] 1978): Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter (London: Faber & Faber). Shepherd, John; Horn, David; Laing, Dave; Oliver, Paul; and Wicke, Peter (eds.), 2003: Continuum Encyclopaedia of Popular Music of the World, Vol. 2, Performance and Production (London and New York: Continuum). Stephenson, Ken, 2002: What to Listen For in Rock Music: a Stylistic Analysis (New Haven: Yale University Press). Tagg, Philip, 2009: Everyday Tonality: towards a Tonal Theory of What Most People Hear (New York and Montreal: Mass Media Music Scholars’ Press). ______, 2011: La tonalità di tutti i giorni (Milan: Saggiatore). ______, 2012: Music’s Meanings (New York and Montreal: Mass Media Music Scholars’ Press). Tagg, Philip and Clarida, Bob, 2003: Ten Little Title Tunes (New York and Montreal: Mass Media Music Scholars’ Press). Talmy, Leonard, 2003: Toward a Cognitive Semantics, Vol. 1, Concept Structuring Systems (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press). Temperley, David, 2011: ‘Scalar Shift in Popular Music’, Music Theory Online, 17/iv, http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.11.17.4/mto.11.17.4.temperley. html. Ward, Brian, 1998: Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations (London: UCL Press). Wyn Jones, Carys, 2008: The Rock Canon: Canonical Values in the Reception of Rock Albums (Aldershot: Ashgate). Zak, Albin J., III, 2010: I Don’t Sound like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press). Zollo, Paul, 1997: Songwriters on Songwriting, expanded edn (New York: Da Capo Press). NOTE ON CONTRIBUTOR DAI GRIFFITHS is Senior Lecturer in Music at Oxford Brookes University and the author of monographs on Radiohead and Elvis Costello. His research is now mostly on words in songs, while his teaching is mostly in tonal harmony and analysis.

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