Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song

Allan F. Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409428640
• eBook ISBN: 9781317052654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The musicological study of popular music has developed, particularly over the past twenty years, into an established aspect of the discipline. The academic community is now well placed to discuss exactly what is going on in any example of popular music and the theoretical foundation for such analytical work has also been laid, although there is as yet no general agreement over all the details of popular music theory. However, this focus on the what of musical detail has left largely untouched the larger question - so what? What are the consequences of such theorization and analysis? Scholars from outside musicology have often argued that too close a focus on musicological detail has left untouched what they consider to be more urgent questions related to reception and meaning. Scholars from inside musicology have responded by importing into musicological discussion various aspects of cultural theory. It is in that tradition that this book lies, although its focus is slightly different. What is missing from the field, at present, is a coherent development of the what into the so what of music theory and analysis into questions of interpretation and hermeneutics. It is that fundamental gap that this book seeks to fill. Allan F. Moore presents a study of recorded popular song, from the recordings of the 1920s through to the present day. Analysis and interpretation are treated as separable but interdependent approaches to song. Analytical theory is revisited, covering conventional domains such as harmony, melody and rhythm, but does not privilege these at the expense of domains such as texture, the soundbox, vocal tone, and lyrics. These latter areas are highly significant in the experience of many listeners, but are frequently ignored or poorly treated in analytical work. Moore continues by developing a range of hermeneutic strategies largely drawn from outside the field (strategies originating, in the most part, within psychology and philosophy) but still deeply r

Chapter 1
Methodology

Introduction

Who are you? How do you define yourself, your identity? The chances are that who you believe yourself to be is partly founded on the music you use, what you listen to, what values it has for you, what meanings you find in it. You may not at present be conscious of this (few are), you may not wish to be. If that’s the case, then don’t waste your time by reading any further …

So, unless you’re just idly perusing, that’s clearly not the case. What meanings can experiencing a song have, and how does it create those meanings? That, broadly speaking, is what this book is about. Note, though, that it’s not about what songs ‘actually’ seem to mean, it’s about how they mean, and the means by which they mean (which is my excuse for the strange title). And, although I would hope you find in it much that is accessible, if you find reading about musical detail difficult, then you may need to be prepared to put it down from time to time. Listening to songs is as easy as driving a car – easier, probably. Understanding how they work is as hard as being a mechanic (or so I believe – it’s as much as I can do to understand how and why to check the oil in mine). The reason I focus on the ‘how’ is that I believe that, as a listener, you participate fundamentally in the meanings that songs have. As a listener, you’re not fed these meanings on a plate, and if someone (particularly someone in a position of power, a music journalist, a musician, a teacher or parent) insists a song’s meaning is such and such, you have every right to disagree (yes, even with the musicians who wrote and sang the song). Indeed, much of the book is effectively a series of arguments and demonstrations as to the value of doing this. Your disagreement will be most effective, of course, and most convincing to yourself, if you understand how it is that a song means for you, and it is particularly in order to develop those tools of understanding that this book was written. The rest of this chapter concerns its academic background and rationale. It’s not essential reading – you may want to skip straight to Chapter 2 – but the context has some importance in developing more fully the necessity of the task.

Analysis

In the past 25 years, perhaps since the launch of the journal that bears the discipline’s name, music analysis has taken its place at the centre of the body of techniques with which scholars of music can address their subject. And, although it may have been assailed by post-structuralists, by post-modernists, and by cultural theorists within the field, this has only served to refine the methods that music analysts employ to make them more suitable to the object at hand, or to the analytical imperative that begins the process of analysis itself. The academic study of ‘popular music’ is a newer phenomenon, beginning from such disciplines as sociology, literary and cultural studies, and has only far more recently been addressed within the academic field of music. Bringing these two together, ‘music analysis’ and ‘popular music’, is an undertaking that has been addressed a number of times1 but not yet, to my mind, at sufficient length and in sufficient detail. That observation was a secondary motivation for this study. For O’Donnell, the time is not yet ripe for a thorough theoretical treatise even on the workings of rock music alone, a subset of the repertory I address here: ‘we need many more close analytical readings of specific songs … before attempting to generalize the musical properties of fifty years of rock’.2 Because I have some sympathy with this view, I offer in this book a methodology, rather than a theory proper.3 For all its minor uncertainties, and despite its age, Middleton’s Studying Popular Music4 remains the best theoretical overview of popular music we have. The theoretical pose of parts of the opening chapters (in which I have avoided the rigour of theory per se) is thus intended chiefly to support the hermeneutic5 superstructure of the remainder, rather than to be self-sufficient. More on this relationship anon.

I begin with the two understandings of the book’s title to which I have already alluded. The first is to try to lay bare the means by which popular songs are constructed. I do this from the viewpoint of the analyst, the listener with a deal of prior knowledge, but I always endeavour to bear in mind the more numerically common listener, the everyday listener, whose ears will frequently be as acute as mine, but who will not have the technical vocabulary, or will not perhaps be aware of the wealth of associations, to which I draw attention. The second, which I believe is no less pertinent, is to assert that popular songs create meanings in listeners (or perhaps the listeners create the meanings through listening to the songs, the difference being a matter of theoretical, but not practical, interest). Thus, I endeavour to explain the means by which songs can mean. I do this as an analyst, not a composer, nor an ethnographer, for the sounds to which we listen are the minimum of what we have in common as listeners. The book lays out the methodology which I have used, at first implicitly and subsequently explicitly, in all the interpretive work I have undertaken in the field since the early 1990s, and particularly in the interpretations I have presented in the broadcast media. Their level of reception suggests to me that what follows is of far from only academic interest and applicability, even if that is where it begins. Whereas many writers on popular music are interested in why a host of the activities connected to music are meaningful, I am concerned here with only one of those activities, the making sense of specific listening experiences.

I address popular song rather than popular music. The defining feature of popular song lies in the interaction of everyday words and music. Commentators, myself included, tend to address one at the expense of the other (often because of what they perceive as their level of expertise – does one have to be an expert to address musical details?), but it is how they interact that produces significance in the experience of song, in most cases. This also explains why I largely restrict my study to Anglophone songs. An analogy may be fruitful. The rush to interpretation that so many make, without grounding such an interpretation in the detail of the song that gives rise to it, seems to me akin to talking about the enjoyment of pancakes by focusing only on the maple syrup (which requires the pancake to carry it), and by declaring either that the size and type of egg that goes into the batter (hen, duck, goose?) is irrelevant, or that breaking the egg should be done mechanically, because it is too hard for human hands to get right every time.

Writing in 2010, the ‘analysis of music’ no longer requires justification. But, the ‘analysis of music’ is often taken (by both sympathizers and detractors) to be synonymous with the ‘structural analysis of music’, that is with the ascertaining of the musical relationships that obtain between different parts of a musical object (usually the score, occasionally the performance) or between parts of the object and the whole. It is a self-sufficient enterprise and it succeeds to the extent that it demonstrates those relationships. Although that may be all very well for the music of the concert tradition (I don’t believe it is, but that is a separate argument), it is not adequate to the discussion of popular song: indeed, I find a more realistic (and acceptable) definition of analysis to concern the issuing of an invitation to hear a particular sample of music in a particular way. Because popular song neither exhibits stylistic complexity (on the basis of which its success can be evaluated) nor necessarily results from carefully considered, artistic creation, its analysis is often thought to require justification, perhaps along the lines I am suggesting. However, popular songs are, frequently, put together with a minimum of overt concern for aesthetics (although aesthetics are still there), and always with an ear to a particular listening public. They will only attract that public if they can resonate with potential listeners, if they can mean something to them. To analyse songs without addressing the issue of meaning is, quite simply, to evade the issue. So, in principle at least, analysis can be directed towards two different types of question: first, asking of a musical experience questions like what, how and why; and, second, asking questions of value, effectively analysing whether a particular aesthetic is achieved. Determining the aesthetic of a given item of music needs to be based on explicit criteria because we can imagine mutually exclusive criteria of value: relational richness; motivic logic; surface diversity; economy of material; breadth of reference; structural coherence; emotional impact; commercial potential (etc.). Each of these criteria may be valid, but only for particular styles. (One of the most pressing of contemporary tasks is the explication of criteria for the various musics we encounter, for we have still not escaped the academic hegemony of the European canon.)

Michael Chanan extended Roland Barthes’6 emphasis on the importance of musica practica, of acknowledging that the way listeners listen is greatly determined by whatever bodily knowledge they have of producing music. This has two important consequences. First, as we now know from the discovery of the operation of motor neurons in the brain,7 trumpeters’ neurological response to trumpet music differs from her or his neurological response to piano music, a response she or he cannot control, by virtue of the fact that she or he has intimate physiological knowledge of what it takes to produce music from a trumpet. This is because the same body of neurons fires whether the action (e.g. playing the trumpet) is being undertaken, or is being perceived and hence simulated. But, second, trumpet music will forever engage him or her more completely than it will a non-trumpeter, no matter how competent at listening the latter may be, for the same reason. In terms of focusing on the details of melodic and harmonic structures, particularly if we refuse the artificial aid of visual notation, experience of producing the sounds can be crucial, and this is my second point. Across a variety of fields, we find testament to differences of mental operation in regard to these competences. From music education, Keith Swanwick8 follows Michael Polanyi in distinguishing ‘explicit’ from simply ‘tacit’ knowledge. From music theory, Nicholas Cook9 distinguishes ‘musicological’ from simply ‘musical’ listening. From psychology, Howard Gardner10 distinguishes ‘musical’ from other forms of ‘intelligence’. From pedagogy theory, David Elliott11 distinguishes ‘problem-solving’ from simply ‘problem-reducing’ competences for music. Theodor Adorno,12 of course, distinguished the ‘expert’ from the simply ‘emotional’ listener, while Mark deBellis13 combines analytic philosophy and cognitive theory to distinguish ‘conceptual’ from simply ‘non-conceptual’ listening. Despite disparities of detail, these writers are all acknowledging the same basic, structural, difference. In order to discuss how a musical experience was, we need to communicate its changing effect on us, and we therefore need to be able to identify parts of pieces precisely in order to do this. ‘Popular’, or ‘non-conceptual’ or ‘problem-reducing’ competences tend to have access to no such precise language.14 In the method outlined here, then, I am not necessarily modelling the sense any particularly listener may actually make, I am modelling the sense particular listeners will have the potential to make, related to their competence in the styles that articulate the structures they are hearing. This is necessary in order to counter some of the assumptions that stand for scholarship in some circles. To take just one example somewhat at random, Sean Cubitt has argued that: ‘Melody must disrupt the perfection of the tonic just as any good story has to begin with a departure, a mystery or some similar intervention … like narrative, in its departure from the norm, melody must contain a promise to return to the narrative closure of restored order …’.15 Such an unnuanced view may have been adequate in 1984, when we had undertaken little research into how popular melody actually operates but, as Chapter 4 will show, such globalizing assumptions (this is how melody must work) are no longer tenable. It will be clear by now that my concern is with music as it sounds, rather than in any representation of it: as Shepherd notes: ‘little work has been undertaken on issues of textuality in relation to th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Music Examples
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Methodology
• 2 Shape
• 3 Form
• 4 Delivery
• 5 Style
• 6 Friction
• 7 Persona
• 8 Reference
• 9 Belonging
• 10 Syntheses
• 11 Questions
• Bibliography
• Index of Recordings Cited
• Index of Names and Topics