Popular music analysis: ten apothegms and four instances
Robert Walser · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2003
About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorize; and I well remember someone saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service! Introduction What exactly constitutes ‘analysis’ of the texts, performances and discourses of popular music too often goes without saying. Indeed, the very idea of musical analysis has often been disparaged or defended as though it inevitably implies the deployment of ready-made models that had originally been designed to demonstrate the supremacy of German instrumental music or the underlying coherence of jarring modernisms. But basic questions of analytical method deserve to be continually rethought, since interpreting the musical texts and activities upon which pleasures and powers of popular music depend ought to constitute one of the central activities of popular music studies. And yet much of the popular music analysis that has been appearing lately simply applies methods that were developed for very different repertoires, without much explicit concern about the fit.