Rock: The Primary Text

Developing a Musicology of Rock

Allan Moore, Remy Martin

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429954108
• Edición: 3
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Music

This thoroughly revised third edition of Allan F. Moore's ground-breaking book, now co-authored with Remy Martin, incorporates new material on rock music theory, style change and the hermeneutic method developed in Moore's Song Means (2012). An even larger array of musicians is discussed, bringing the book right into the 21st century. Rock's 'primary text' – its sounds – is the focus of attention here. The authors argue for the development of a musicology particular to rock within the context of the background to the genres, the beat and rhythm and blues styles of the early 1960s, 'progressive' rock, punk rock, metal and subsequent styles. They also explore the fundamental issue of rock as a medium for self-expression, and the relationship of this to changing musical styles. Rock: The Primary Text remains innovative in its exploration of an aesthetics of rock.

1
Issues in Theory

The opening sections of this chapter situate the activity of analytical musicology and explore its use to date in discussions of ‘rock’. The remainder of the chapter focuses on purported differences between ‘classical’ and ‘popular’ musics. ‘Classical’ in this sense refers to the musical tradition of Mozart and Beethoven, of Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and Stockhausen, about whose products detailed musical theories have been constructed. ‘Popular’ here refers not only to ‘rock’, but in this discussion, it would be pedantic to insist on a separation of ‘rock’ from the more general ‘popular’. After discussing the generalised differences which are supposed to distinguish these musics, I argue that conventional bourgeois musicology (those ‘detailed musical theories’) cannot simply he applied to rock. It will be the task of Chapter 2 to begin the necessary re-formulation.

The musicological background

As a musicologist practising in twentieth-century music, but with many years’ experience and love of that music called ‘rock’, I find it as difficult as ever to understand the intransigence of the academic musical community in refusing to negotiate with what has recently been, according to Frith (1983: 137–50) and Wallis and Malm (1984: 74–85), the fastest growing industry in the world. Some initial reason¹ for this may be sought in the fact that most musicologists still labour under a notion of music as ‘pure form, liberated from any object or from matter’ (Schelling, writing in the eighteenth century, quoted in Street 1989: 86). This notion encourages a belief that music is somehow autonomous with respect to the culture in which it appears, a belief that has become an intrinsic aspect of most analytic musicology. As a set of techniques for dealing with musical texts, analytic musicology (or music analysis) can be traced back as far as the fifteenth century, where it was used to supply tools for composition. It only began to assume its present form in the early nineteenth century (see Bent 1987: 32–6), when musicologists became particularly concerned with the canonical ‘masterpieces’ of the western tradition (which they largely situated in what are now Austria and Germany). Their programme was to discover what made these works ‘great’. In this century analytic musicology has come under the sway of positivism, such that it has argued that the ‘effects’ of music, because they are unquantifiable, are not worthy of consideration. Although the activity of analysing music has, thus, treated the music as autonomous, that activity itself is clearly an expression of its culture. As the historian of analysis Ian Bent observes:

Analysis is the means of answering directly the question ‘How does it work?’… [but] the analyst works with the preconceptions of his [sic] culture, age and personality. Thus the preoccupation which the 19^th century had with the nature of ‘genius’ led to the phrasing of the initial question not as ‘how does it work?’ but as ‘What makes this great?’, and this has remained the initial question for some analytical traditions late in the 20^th century.

(Bent 1987: 50)

The programme of Heinrich Schenker, the most notable of the early twentieth-century analysts, was designed to ‘prove’ that the music of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms was intrinsically better than the modernism of Stravinsky, Schoenberg et al. (see, for example, Schenker 1979). His methods remain paradigmatic. As will become plain, it is not this initial question (what makes this great?) that concerns me. Lucy Green, a writer who regards the wholesale assumption of autonomy as erroneous, nonetheless notes that styles of music are autonomous in the sense that their internal logic can be explored without reference to external matters (Green 1988: 82). This gives rise in the minds of musicologists to the belief that this internal logic somehow represents the essence of the music (an essence which is incommunicable), while extra-musical factors act to distract listeners from this and are thus dispensable (Green 1988: 100).²

Against this assumption of autonomy, sociologists in particular have argued that musical structures are entirely socially determined (e.g. Willis 1978), a position with which the musicologist John Shepherd seems to have some sympathy. He notes that music in Western societies has been considered autonomous because of the marginal position it occupies: he notes that ‘music is not seen as central to social processes’ (Shepherd 1991: 215), a belief that is far less common in other societies. The oppositional views adopted by musicologists and sociologists arise because, whereas musicologists have assumed that the ‘internal logic’ constitutes the entire meaning of music, sociologists have argued that the ‘social role’ of music constitutes its entire meaning. Neither position, I think, is useful to adopt. Although in explaining the internal logic of a style it is not always necessary to refer to external factors, a style cannot appear ex nihilo. To take a gross example, ‘rock’ could not have arisen in sixteenth-century Florence, for its style is in part constituted by the use to which it puts electronic technology (see Chapter 4, first section). It is necessary, therefore, to regard musical styles as partially autonomous, whereby internal and external features inform each other.

Analytical approaches

Fortunately, over the past thirty years, musicologists have begun to focus their attention on rock and its related musics. Although these writers have adopted a number of different approaches, they seek one of three goals.³ The first is to elucidate theoretical approaches pertinent to the music. This activity is best considered pre-analytical, since any analysis must he based on theoretical preconceptions, which too often remain implicit. Its most outstanding example is Middleton (1990). The remaining approaches are both strictly analytical. Of these, one aims to unearth the ‘meaning’ of individual songs, while the other aims to discover the characteristic features of particular styles. To the specialist reader, probably the most familiar of the texts taking either of these latter approaches is Wilfrid Mellers’ treatment of the Beatles (1973). It is also, perhaps, the most conventional, for Mellers writes from a position firmly within established musicology. He approaches the meaning of individual songs through examining music-theoretical constructs, particularly those of rhythm⁴ and mode/key, referring these back to the content of the songs’ lyrics. Speaking of the girl in ‘Norwegian Wood’, Mellers tells us that ‘her polished archness is satirised in an arching waltz tune wearily fey, yet mildly surprising because in the mixolydian mode. Here the flat seventh gives to the comedy an undercurrent of wistfulness’ (Mellers 1973: 59). Elsewhere, discussing Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande, Mellers suggests that Pelléas’ ‘life-enhancing qualities are associated with a characteristically eager, syncopated rhythm, and with the “sharp” key of E. But his music … never “gets anywhere” harmonically’ (Mellers 1968: 66). The terms of discussion are fundamentally the same: they support his general programme of ‘Starting from a … detailed description of what happens in musical terms, [and proceeding] to relate these musical events to their physiological and psychological consequences’ (Mellers 1980: vii).

Mellers clearly does not believe that ‘popular’ and ‘classical’ musics need to be discussed in different terms; he straightforwardly applies the same types of criteria to the music of both Lennon and McCartney, and Debussy, although he avoids making value judgements between these musics on the basis of those criteria. In so doing, he assumes that mode/key, lyrics and basic rhythmic pattern are the fundamental aspects of the Beatles’ music: they are what constitute the ‘musical events’. All other factors, including those others we are able to hear, have secondary, articulative functions.⁵ This assumption is taken over wholesale from the established musicological position relating to concert music (whether it is adequate to suggest that music is not an issue I can raise here). The music of Lennon and McCartney is also the subject a number of articles by Walter Everett (e.g. 1985, 1986, 1995), the first two of these among the first on rock to appear in musicological journals. That neither seems to have attracted comment may be taken to mean that the Beatles have joined some established musical canon, although what other music that canon may include is unclear. Everett undertakes analyses of ‘She’s leaving home’ ‘Strawberry fields forever’ and ‘Julia’, from the perspective of Schenkerian theory:⁶ I shall restrict my own comments to the first article. Schenkerian theory assumes (and undertakes to demonstrate) that any musical surface (foreground) is an elaboration of more middleground and background successions of sound-events. As such, it does not suggest that musical phenomena are in some way special: this theory of elaboration would correspond to established theories of generative linguistics, taking the spoken sentence as an elaboration of an underlying ‘deep’ structure: see Brown (1984: 117–20).⁷ A Schenkerian theorist interested in Cream’s ‘Sunshine of your love’ would demonstrate how the riff that underlies the first two-thirds of each stanza elaborates the chords of the blues progression that form its conceptual background. This is an unproblematic example, for there are direct correspondences between the notes of the blues chords and the notes of the riff, and between the I-IV-I succession (A minor – D minor – A minor) which begins the blues progression, and the transposition of the riff by the equivalent interval. In ‘She’s leaving home’, Everett argues that the surface (the notes we actually hear) and the background (which, at its deepest level, is simply a I-V-V-I progression) are rather divorced from each other. Indeed, he suggests that this background actually becomes lost as the song progresses, and uses this observation to suggest that the music itself thereby enhances the psychological conflict between the parents and daughter that is the subject of the lyrics. As a demonstration of the interdependence of music and text it is both interesting and persuasive. In practice, it is a sophisticated attempt to carry out the same task Mellers set himself, to understand the meaning of the song (both words and music) through the application of established music-theoretical methodology. It is hard to argue that ‘surface’ and ‘background’ are inappropriate concepts for popular musics, but it cannot be unquestioningly assumed that those procedures for generating a surface from a middleground that are normative in tonal concert music will necessarily apply to these musics. As I shall later argue, they must be considered different ‘languages’, especially with regard to harmonic succession and rhythmic profile. Again, Everett assumes that pitches and the order in which they occur (the subject of Schenkerian theory) constitute the events of this music, articulated as they are by instrumentation, timbre, studio techniques and other musical features.

The most thoroughgoing attempt at providing an analytical model for the study of popular music is probably that of Philip Tagg (1979), a summary of which is reported in Tagg (1982).⁸ Part of the value of his work lies in its concern both with the sounds themselves, and with their transmission and mediation. The music-analytic part of his theory is explicit and detailed in its concern with the encoding of meaning within harmony and melody, a topic which has long exercised music theorists, and to which I shall return in Chapter 5. Indeed, in this area his theory seems most reminiscent of that developed by Deryck Cooke (1959), who effectively offered a lexicon of melodic phrases and their range of associative meanings. Tagg (1982) analyses the Abba hit ‘Fernando’. Part of his argument hinges on the interval of the tritone (six semitones), which he describes as ‘a stereotype of longing’. Although this enables him to make a very powerful interpretation of the song, the link between ‘longing’ and the tritone is merely one hallowed by association. (I find the importance attached to such associative meanings unsatisfactory and shall return to the question in Chapter 7.) In the same article, we are offered a detailed ‘generative’ analysis of the opening of the signature tune to the 1970s TV show Kojak. This utilises not only the Schenkerian notions of foreground and background, but also the somewhat anti-Schenkerian theories of melodic implication adapted from Gestalt psychology by Meyer (especially 1956) and Narmour (1977, 1990, 1992). Tagg argues that much popular music relies on a melody-accompaniment dualism, and there is the implication in this work that an explication of the melody can largely stand for an explication of the entire musical fabric. Thus, other features of the sound-surface can effectively be ignored. As far as the music-analytic part of his theory is concerned, his aim is reminiscent of those of both Mellers and Everett.

A rather different approach was adopted in Richard Middleton’s early discussion of the relationship between the ‘blues’ and what was then just ‘pop music’ (Middleton 1972). Middleton’s implicit concern is with style, and with the adoption of stylistic features of what was understood as ‘the blues’, and of its cultural position, by white youth in the 1950s and 1960s. Aside from providing a useful investigation into the cultural role of the style, for both its black originators and its more socially advantaged white adopters, Middleton defines the blues stylistically with reference primarily to rhythmic profiles, but also to harmonic usage, melodic patterns and vocal tone. In its refusal to make reference to criteria adopted from concert music, his treatment of pop is illuminating, and his discussion of how effects are achieved is not limited to the melodic and harmonic aspects of the music:

In Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds … the visionary dream induced by the uninvolved, feelingless glare of the timbres (the brightness of hallucination), by the ostinato, the surrealist lyrics, the electronics and the vague, ‘timeless’ vocal tone is ‘awakened’ by a faster, simpler, more tonally obvious refrain, which each time it comes brings us back to ‘reality’.

(Middleton 1972: 233–4)

Although Hatch and Millward (1987) are also concerned to trace the stylistic development of blues into rock, they adopt an alternative approach in their ‘analytic history of pop music’ (to quote the book’s subtitle). They offer definitions of the blues in terms of harmonic structure and rhythmic contour, which (like Middleton 1972: 34) they insist distorts the musical object, but their music-analytic content focuses on the concept of ‘song families’. This derives from studies of so-called traditional song, wherein songs are considered to belong to the same family if their tunes share a putative common origin, or if one can be considered as derived from another by the ‘normal’ processes of transmission, both oral and written (see Bohlman 1988: 14–32). It is a concept far removed from those of conventional analytical musicology, which is interested in what makes individual pieces unique. Hatch and Millward’s emphasis is likewise on mode/key, harmonic patterns and melodic structure, although they do attempt to incorporate the particular performance characteristics that are always so hard to notate: slides, vocally toying with the beat, non-tempered pitching and the like. This is important because the object, for analytical musicology, tends to be visual (the score) rather than aural (the performance). Thus, anything resistant to notation usually gets marginalised.

Thus far, two broad approaches can be discerned. Mellers and Everett make use of tools from conventional analytical musicology in making interpretations of individual songs. Middleton and Hatch and Millward demonstrate that it is possible to make some analytical comment on popular music without wholesale recourse to criteria derived from concert music. Ronald Byrnside’s short essay on the formation of early rock’n’roll style (1975) further develops the discussion of rhythmic, rather than pitch, patterns, but to a different end. His aim is to define the style through certain exemplars, rather than to interpret those examples themselves. He provides justification for his approach through noting that ‘rhythm and blues was dance music’, where the accentual pattern he identifies in the music closely corresponds to the bodily movements made in dancing to it. Byrnside does not ignore other domains – indeed, he acknowledges the importance of the harmonic language and formal structure of the blues in the formation of rock’n’roll style – but his concentration on rhythmic patterns leads one to believe that he would have the listener hear this as the style’s defining element (as listeners may well do). Although this is hardly an approach one would find adopted by an analy...