After Relativism Recent Directions in the High Analysis of Low Music

DAI GRIFFITHS

AFTER RELATIVISM: RECENT DIRECTIONS IN THE HIGH ANALYSIS OF

LOW MUSIC

Readers of Music Analysis may recall that my essay ‘The High Analysis of LowMusic’ set so-called popular music in an imaginary but bitter fight to the deathwith so-called contemporary classical music (Griffiths 1999). In the course oftime, it was gratifying to find Richard Cohn ending a dictionary entry onharmony with these two sentences:

Several developments in the late 20th-century academy – notably a suspicion ofhistoricising teleologies and the re-evaluation of the distinction between classicaland vernacular – stimulated a recognition of diatonic tonality as a living tradition.Perhaps the most important trend in practical harmony at the beginning of the21st century is the reintroduction of contemporary music, in the form of folkmusic, jazz, show-tunes, rock, and so on, into manuals of practical harmony, inboth Europe and North America, in the service of compositional and improvisa-tional as well as analytical training. (Cohn 2001, p. 873)

That shift in the word ‘contemporary’ rings true. I have served on the board ofOxford Contemporary Music since 2003 and acted as its chairman between2006 and 2011, and ‘contemporary’ was used throughout that period to includeseveral types of interesting music and their mixture: sonic art, contemporaryclassical, folk, jazz, rock and world music. A rare letter arrives from a disgruntledsupporter insisting that ‘contemporary’ means, or ought to mean, contemporaryclassical music, but this is a minority view: many people apparently accept‘contemporary’ simply for its temporal connotations of the music of the presentand recent past. The highs and lows have gone, replaced by tolerance, pluralismand inclusivity; but what next?

So embedded now is popular music in the academy, indicated for example bythe demand for its study and conversion into forms of academic validation whichhas for some time generated textbooks, that it has extended into music analysisitself. This condition provides the starting point of the current essay, in which Ireview two volumes, Allan F. Moore’s Song Means: Analysing and InterpretingRecorded Popular Song (2012; hereafter SM),1 and Philip Tagg’s Everyday Tonal-ity: Towards a Tonal Theory of What Most People Hear (2009; hereafter ET),2 butbring 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 wasauthor of one of the first, and best-established, general textbooks in the field

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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 SMspecifies ‘recorded popular song’, with the two important little transplantationsof ‘popular’ for ‘rock’ and ‘song’ for ‘music’; ET has both ‘tonality’ and ‘tonaltheory’, suggesting the abstractions of theory over the empirical detail of analysis,but also the provocation ‘what most people hear’. A final word of significance isMoore’s ‘interpreting’, which goes beyond ‘analysing’. After brief accounts ofthe three books, my essay will discuss their authors’ varied attitudes towardstheir material and their treatment of harmony; I will conclude with a substantialdiscussion of Moore’s innovative inclusion of interpretation in SM.

All three authors are knocking on and are able to look back over a lifetimespent listening to popular songs; the sheer number of tracks referenced in allthree books is impressive, comparable perhaps to the wide-ranging examples inclassical harmony textbooks. My guess is that Moore and Tagg refer to around900 tracks each, while Everett claims a total of ‘well over sixty-five hundredsongs’ (FR, p. vi). Moore’s article ‘Patterns of Harmony’ (1992) was a signifi-cant precursor of large-scale data collection, with its appendix of around 24pages containing hundreds of tracks organised by harmonic type. Given thequantity of records referred to in the three volumes, readers are urged to employdigital 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 prin-ciples. First, by date: the subtitle refers to the Carl Perkins track ‘Blue SuedeShoes’, 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 musicbetween these dates; these two tracks also feature prominently in the book’sconclusion (FR, pp. 389–99). Second, by selection process: Everett coversbest-selling singles – the Top 20 hits of charts listed in the American trademagazine 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 ofrock’ of his title. Only occasionally and with a light touch does Everett refer tomusic from before his period or hint at developments to follow, but he does makethe 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, withTagg putting it comically in characteristic capitals as an alternative title for hisbook: ‘tonal elements in widely heard music diffused in mainly, but by no meansexclusively English-language cultures in the late twentieth century, i.e. musicthat Philip Tagg has played, sung or heard’ (ET, p. 3). True to the broad titleTagg ends up with, the range of music in ET encompasses all sorts of tonalmusic, including jazz, folk, world and even so-called classical music. In a cau-tious explanation of his repertory, Moore reveals that his original focus was ‘thepop/rock of the late 1950s and 1960s’ (SM, pp. 16–17), signalling through a

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footnote its similarity to the repertory covered in FR (p. 16). However, Moorealso occasionally draws on earlier sources, making curiously frequent referenceto the singer Al Bowlly (1898–1941), and often with the aid of Allen Forte’sstudy (1995) of the American popular ballad. He also turns very often topost-1960s songs, with a particular expertise, familiar from his other work, in1970s British rock music, progressive and otherwise, and a wide range of otherpop and rock recordings, including many from the last decade. All three havemuch to say about the Beatles, in Everett’s and Moore’s cases building onpreviously published work (Moore 1997; and Everett 1999b and 2001) andoffering yet more to ponder with regard to the Fab Four’s canonical status.

The structure of FR is essentially twofold, with both sections punctuated bydiscussion 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 seven-chapter overview of the elements of tonal music (form, melody, harmony [fourchapters] and rhythm). Two concluding chapters cover recording technologyand interpretation. ET recycles a series of dictionary entries (Shepherd, Horn,Laing, Oliver and Wicke 2003),5 which explains the expository nature of some ofthe material presented. These combine to form a three-part scheme: five chap-ters of rudiments (notes, tuning and intervals, modes, melody and polyphony),three chapters on harmony (classical harmony, non-classical harmony andchords) and five chapters on drones and repeated chord sequences (one-chordchanges, 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 hisbook as methodology, not theory); connected by a fifth chapter (‘styles’), whichoffers an historical model; and concluded by an eleventh and final chapter thatconsists of questions and keywords for further study. There are three chapters ofmusical description that cover, in turn, instrumentation and recording technol-ogy (shape); rhythm and harmony (form); and melody, voice and lyrics (deliv-ery). After the historical interlude, there are five chapters on interpretation(friction, persona, reference, belonging and syntheses), to which I will return inmy final section.

Attitude

Reflecting on the complex relationship between popular music and its intellec-tual discourse, including teaching, Middleton has written:

A further issue debated in popular music studies – often prompted by attacks onthe scholars by practitioners and critics, and sharpened by the impact of complexcultural theory – is the relationship between theory and practice. This was placedin even higher relief by the introduction in the 1980s of the teaching of popularmusic in some universities, conservatories and schools. While it can act as acatalyst to the opening up of issues concerning educational aims and relative

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cultural values, popular music placed in such contexts raises questions about thedesirability and implications of its own legitimation. On one level the questionsconcern whether to teach the music’s production or its understanding, and thewisdom of teaching either aspect to young people who may well be closer to themusic, as consumers or as practitioners, than their teachers. It is not obviouswhose terms should be used, for example, or what should be the relationshipbetween academic and vernacular theory. But on a broader level these questionsare symptoms of problems that affect the study of popular music in general. Thequestions are not just tactical (how to attain the best understanding): given thatthe situation presents itself in terms of ‘ordinary’ culture under the gaze of‘experts’, the people interpreted by the intellectuals, they must also be epistemo-logical (how to define what is a ‘true’ understanding of this music) and evenethical (who is entitled to speak about this, and in what terms). (Middleton 2001,pp. 150–1)

These three books are aimed primarily at a school or university audience andshould therefore be evaluated in terms of pedagogic usefulness. Certainly Mooreand 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 thereader’s understanding through thousands of specific points backed up by exam-ples on a supporting website that includes sound examples and photographs(some of which are also in the book);7 furthermore, the reader-listener is directedto examples in recordings, often to specific portions of the recording indicated bya digital clock. The book works in tandem with the website, and the recordingson 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 sixchord, back to the one chord, neighboured by the six chord’) and comic namesfor 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 forgiventhis decision. Everett refers to non-popular music only if he deems it necessaryor interesting, and his presentation of harmony follows in outline the headings ofa standard classical textbook. That said, one point needs underlining for anyonewho 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 isprovided, for which, in a phrase that may eventually strike the reader as ironic,‘some acquaintance with the rudiments of music theory including conventionalWestern (classical) harmony is probably an advantage’ (ET, pp. 2–3). Tagg’sattitude towards the material is crucial in at least two ways. First is the nature ofhis book as a book: in fact, ET is a .pdf file that can be purchased from Tagg’spersonal website,8 although it has subsequently appeared as a print book inItalian (Tagg 2011). A minimum (and cheap!) price is suggested, and thepurchaser can then donate directly to Tagg as much as he or she likes. No doubtthe book’s accessibility will appeal to the student, for whom the Internet is alland for whom print books are increasingly exotic adventures. By cutting out the

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publisher, Tagg has an immediate reach, and in fact some of the book isduplicated elsewhere on his remarkable website. Who knows how this issue ofweb-based publication will develop? On the one hand, I can point out that anindefinite article has been lost from the end of line 6 at page 7, and that theacknowledgements include two no. 5s (ET, p. 15), and that these glitches couldbe corrected in only the time Tagg takes so to do; whereas Moore’s reference tothe keyboard player in Genesis as Peter Banks, presumably a close friend of theband’s singer, Tony Gabriel (SM, pp. 264 and 385 [in the index]) awaits thesecond edition of the book for its correction.9 On the other hand, Tagg’sapproach is resolutely outside the world of peer review, with its blind readers; Iwill not go into the way that ties into that hot potato of the UK academy, theassessment of research. Tagg seems always to have set himself outside of theadministrative structures of higher education in not one but three countries(Sweden, Great Britain and Canada), even while spending his working life insidethose 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 thefierce attack ‘Audititis’10 and a poignant if self-obsessed document in which Tagganswers the apparently ‘frequently-asked question, “Why did you leave ... ?” ’11

I mention all of this because an oppositional stance is fundamental for ET incontent as well as context. For Tagg, popular music is people’s music, so that theterm 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 onrepeated 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 verymany versions of this dichotomy). The book’s proportions suggest a closerelationship between ‘most people’ and ‘places to be’ that I doubt; but, anyway,his celebration of still life over story pales alongside the driving, negative, criticalaspect of ET, and one can only admire the verve of Tagg’s characterisations ofthese unnamed and never-cited enemies. My guess is that he has in mind twotypes: the kind of historical musicologists who taught him and with whom heworked in various institutions over the years and, secondly, quite frankly, readersof this journal, you. So in ET we find, in order of appearance: ‘conventionallytrained musos’ (p. 5); ‘conventional Euro-North-American music theory’ (p.45); ‘teachers of European art music history’ (p. 81); ‘conventional historicalmusicology’ (p. 87); ‘seats of musical learning; that is, institutions rarelyrenowned for serious interest in the tonal elements of everyday life for thepopular majority’ (p. 91); ‘conservatism’ (p. 91); ‘European art music (therepertoire on which the conventional teaching of harmony is almost exclusivelybased)’ (p. 91); ‘many institutions of musical learning’ (p. 94); those ‘seats ofmusical learning’ again (p. 95); ‘the rise and hegemony of the bourgeoisie inEurope’ (!) (pp. 96–7); something ‘ingrained and overtaught, ... established andunquestioned’ (p. 101); ‘music that conventional harmony experts have betweenthem spent countless lifetimes avoiding or trivialising’ (p. 115); ‘some art musicbuffs’ (p. 159); ‘those who believe in hierarchically arranged tonal centres’ (p.

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180); ‘a gullible harmony teacher’ (p. 188); something ‘off the conventionalharmony 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 musicologyprofessor to work out’ (p. 210). One wearies of the onslaught, and it would beinteresting to get a hint of exactly who or where these people and places are. Onlyin one final passage are a couple of culprits vaguely identified, and I’m not surethey themselves would have enjoyed sharing the taxi; note again the energy ofTagg’s negatives (‘not ... nor ... nor’):

Any sense of overall tonal process, ‘narrative’ or ‘form’ in this Police song, and incountless others, derives not from modulation, nor from overriding tonalschemes, nor ‘deep structure’ à la Schenker or Riemann, but from the juxtapo-sition of distinct harmonic constellations and from the organization of thosedifferent 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 lan-guages 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 baggagethat 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 har-monic cultural absolutism’ (ET, pp. 103–4), while for the iniquity and inappro-priateness of ‘dominant’ he has at his website a filmed lecture of over twentyminutes’ 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 weshall 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 wasunexpected but important in the early days of Music Analysis: Hans Keller.Firstly, consider Keller’s attentiveness towards attitude: ‘There are three over-lapping ways of writing about music. One is to write about music. The second isto write about performance. The third, most popular among writers and readersalike, 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 BroadcastingCorporation’ would be an interesting topic at the pub. Finally, Tagg’s audio-visual correspondences to his written work may actually be just new-media,downmarket heirs to Keller’s functional analysis. Several passages of ET can befound in their audiovisual form at his website.14 Included in addition to thelecture 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 harmonicvariations of the melody ‘The Tailor and the Mouse’. At their best, as in thedoo-wop montage, the audio examples hurtle along while the screen plays allsorts 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

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songs and other keywords; and photos of all description, often comic. All this isa long way from the motivic structure of a late Beethoven string quartet, the BBCThird Programme world of Keller’s wordless functional analysis, yet they mayhave the same motivation: to communicate the technical point directly throughmusical invention, bypassing words of explication.

I’ve spent a long time on Tagg’s attitude, since I think the reader must expectto encounter and engage with it at length – imagine the student asking, ‘WhenProfessor Tagg says “conventionally trained muso”, does he mean me, sir?’ – andsomething of the same applies to Moore, too. Moore is more complicated thanthe other two: he makes things more complex and can make the familiar seemunfamiliar. His book is a real summary of a lifetime’s work, and one feels thereis a great deal at stake for him, a sense underlined by the touching discussion atthe book’s very close of his own ‘autistic spectrum disorder’ (SM, p. 329). SMexplores more deeply and widely a greater range of sources than the other two,including literature often outside the musical domain. Not for Moore Tagg’sdo-it-yourself, available-on-my-website approach: chunks of Moore’s bookunderwent the grind of peer review or were commissioned for collections; muchof it was aired at conferences and seminars; editorial positions on two verydifferent journals, twentieth-century music and Popular Music, gave him an imme-diate gain on disciplinary trends; and in general, Moore’s commitment to publicengagement is both inexhaustible and admirable.15 That said, there are in facttwo 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 DefLeppard’s ‘Love Bites’; the phrasing of the Kinks’ ‘Waterloo Sunset’; NikKershaw’s ‘The Riddle’ is like ‘a change of film shot’.17 The other, newer bookis 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. Thosetwo 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 theway to the sense of life’s purpose – for example, one’s reaction to the realisationthat one has spent a lifetime writing about popular music, only for most of itspractitioners 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 (onthe 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 ofBrahms’ (Everett 2000, p. 303), Moore took umbrage at both the ‘politicalimplications’ and the ‘implied value judgment’ of Everett’s comparison (Moore2001, p. 62 n. 21). There is a certain tension between commitment to popularmusic 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 toset up a meaningful connection between the primary text and real life. By

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comparison, in FR and ET, Everett and Tagg are concerned with explicatingmusical texts in their production and more or less leaving the matter there.However, Tagg draws substantially on musical semiotics (see Tagg and Clarida2003), including aspects of ET’s concluding case study (see ET, p. 262), and hasanother book on music’s meanings (Tagg, 2012); ET must therefore be consid-ered in that broader context.

Moore’s emphases on interpretative theory and listening can be illustrated bythe following four juxtapositions with FR. First, whereas Everett has a 38-pagechapter entitled ‘Creating an Interpretation’, of which seven pages provide tipsfor further study, Moore requires 150 pages and four chapters. Secondly, Ever-ett’s brief discussion of authenticity spans two pages (FR, pp. 381–2); Moore’sneeds twelve (SM, pp. 259–71), including a three-part schema (SM, p. 269).Thirdly, whereas over the space of eleven pages Everett approaches words insongs through lists of topics and techniques found in several tracks, including anextended 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 MelanieGreen, Charles J. Fillmore, Allen Forte, Simon Frith, Dai Griffiths, AlbertMehrabian, Richard Middleton, Gino Stefani, Leonard Talmy and MarkTurner) and their theories (among them semantic frame, conceptual structure,narrative, verbal space, euphonics and addressee) (SM, pp. 108–18). The con-trast 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 ofFR entitled ‘Engineering the Master’ (pp. 333–61). Moore’s work in this areahas been influential ever since his brief but masterly presentation of his ‘soundbox’ (1993, pp. 105–10), and some of the presentation in SM is his evaluationof the considerable developments in the area since then. But his emphasisremains on the listener, and new work in SM gathers around imaginary photo-graphs of the sound box, the visual image that the mind carries of a givenrecording. 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 wereavailable to the engineer or producer so that, between book, musical examplesand 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 sys-tematic clarity in the presentation of such technical terms, and Everett is happyto leave the sound box to listeners (and doesn’t use the term), although itsconstituent elements (stereo separation and the foregrounding of some soundsover 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 amanager, and elements of those caricatures remain (see Griffiths 1999). Aveteran of the administrative structures of American music theory (Society forMusic Theory, Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Spectrum and Music Theory

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Online), Everett carries out a job with great efficiency, in research method and inpedagogic communication; but he is a great wit as well, with little gags aplentyoften achieved by mixing music-analytical observations with words and ideasderived from song titles or lyrics. Tagg is still certainly fighting the revolution,although, because so-called popular music is now firmly embedded in theacademy, it is possible that the revolution has in fact moved on, not least in thesense that students may be trained in music-analytical methodologies that havemoved on from the theoretical premises that Tagg assumes and describes.Traces of Moore’s earnestness are still there,19 in his classic pinched oxymoronsor euphemisms – ‘rather extreme’ (SM, p. 55), ‘fairly extreme’ (p. 106), ‘prettyprecise’ (p. 51) – and his judgement that John Lennon’s ‘Cold Turkey’ displayspain ‘in fairly convincing terms’ (p. 298). But there’s also a tremendous open-ness in SM to ideas of all stamps and complexities, so that his book opens up adifferent type of interdisciplinary pedagogic context. To use Middleton’s termsfrom the opening of this section, both Moore and Tagg carry the epistemologicaltrace 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’sparenthesis, ‘who is entitled to speak about this, and in what terms’): all threeauthors are great musicians, and there is a palpable sense in all three books ofcommitment 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 aboutharmony anymore?’ (Griffiths 1999, p. 399). More than I imagined, no doubt,but I had a sense of historical musicology as moving away from something sointernal to the musical text as chords, and of course post-tonal music by defi-nition used different techniques. Explicitly in the title of ET, harmony is animportant element of all three books, in which we find a familiar tension between‘harmony and voice leading’ on the one hand and chords assigned romannumerals on the other, while a more repertory-specific question arises over thedegree 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 onewants to think of so-called popular music as having its own history and set oftechniques, and so this is an important area of tension and debate.

Everett can again stand as the least contentious case, especially if the reader isfamiliar with the teaching of harmony to undergraduates. His four chapters onharmony (FR, Chs 8–11) build upon the model now established in textbookssuch 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 thisoutlook derives from such work as that of Felix Salzer and Schachter (1989),with Heinrich Schenker strongly in the background. Thus, having alreadyintroduced scales and modes in his chapter on melody, Everett surveys chords

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and notions of consonance and dissonance; the various seventh chords, ninthsand elevenths; a cluster of elements such as pedals and suspensions; and the useof fourth-based chords that eventually border atonality (Frank Zappa, inevita-bly). The remaining three chapters divide up diatonic functions, principally inthe major key; minor and other non-major modes (such as church modes andpentatonic patterns); and, finally, chromatic harmony. Gauldin, by way of com-parison, has a similar expository structure, except that modes are consigned toa brief appendix (1997, pp. 627–33). Within Everett’s chapter on diatonicharmony is found another familiar organising principle: root motion by fifth,followed by root motion by third, the functions (dominant, pre-dominant andtonic) and, significantly, the contrapuntal element in harmony: auxiliary andpassing chords (compare with Gauldin 1997, pp. 198–9, on ‘embellishing pre-dominant chords within the phrase’). The chapter on minor and other modes issimply presented, organised in order of quantitative prevalence in Everett’srepertory. Under the heading of chromatic harmony, Everett includes aspectssuch as secondary dominants, the double plagal, the ‘cowboy cadence’ (�VII–V),major II as endpoint, and modulation and tonicisation, including the ‘truck-driver modulation’.20 Principles are thus presented against the logical back-ground of the harmony textbook, and it is important to recognise that every oneof those categories has an array of examples drawn from recordings withinEverett’s period. To take one example, the principle that ‘one of the moreexceptional functions of chromatic chords is to serve as an unorthodox cadencepoint’ (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 BobDylan is rarely celebrated as a musician (Negus 2008, pp. 127–54), so he woulddo well to track through the many index references to Dylan in FR in which, bysimply 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 prizedfor its humanity and range’ (FR, p. 121), with Janis Joplin as his ‘femalecounterpart’ (FR, p. 122).

Now, you might expect Tagg to oppose Everett’s presentation of harmonywith great gusto, but that turns out not to be the case in a book in whichtraditional categories continue to operate despite the seemingly uncongenialcontext; indeed, the book contains many useful tables of chords and arrays ofexamples. Concerning the modes, for example, although Tagg makes muchmore of a song and dance about their ‘non-classical’ status, his presentation is inoutline similar to Everett’s: the Ionian, Aeolian, Dorian and Mixolydian arefound often, the Phrygian and Lydian less so, so that the progression I–II–IV, forexample, is a ‘definite no-no for lydian harmony’ (ET, p. 123). However, heinsists that we should replace the term ‘major scale’ with ‘heptatonic ionianmode’ (p. 45) and also makes the bizarre suggestion that, in an A minorcontext, 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

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of Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre ([1911] 1978) but also chords clearly made ofsuspensions (‘sus 2’ for example); this makes for an interesting comparison withEverett, for whom ninths, elevenths and thirteenths have contrapuntal functionsand some fourths have word-painting origins (FR, pp. 211–12). As observedearlier, Tagg eventually puts great emphasis on drones (such as in funk music, inwhich the band sits on the I chord and action happens at the level of rhythmicactivity, voices, words, and so on) and repeated sequences (which are dividedinto shuttles [from one chord to another and back] and loops [longer sequencesof 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 itsfour-part neatness with Everett’s SRDC scheme for form: statement, restate-ment, departure and conclusion (FR, pp. 140–1). Tagg is most attentive to theduration of his loops, often measuring them by the clock. Drones and loopsaccount for over 100 pages of ‘everyday tonality’ in a book that neglects tomention something as common as Everett’s ‘truck-driver modulation’ (see FR,pp. 283–4; and, briefly, SM, p. 226); and perhaps ET follows Middletonpre-eminently (Middleton 1990, pp. 117–19) in finding, in repeated chordsequences, historical connections and models that can encompass – my example– the ‘loops’ of Monteverdi’s ‘Beatus vir’ alongside those of Zappa’s ‘Joe’sGarage’. ET contains longer and interesting discussions of specific tracks by PinkFloyd, the Human League and the Police and concludes with a lengthy analysisof ‘Yes We Can’. However, it must be said bluntly: Tagg is some way behind thecurrent professional literature. Everett, for example, would surely expect to findhis 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 theBeatles’ ‘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 suspectit would have to be broken to him gently that some of his points head in aSchenkerian 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 orauxiliary notes (p. 165), and leads to the conclusion that chord ‘means at leasttwo chords’ (p. 170), perhaps the beginnings of a foreground layer; the discus-sion of the mediant as mediator resembles Schenker’s third-divider (p. 239).22

Since his groundbreaking work on harmony in the 1990s, Moore has keptfaith with a system that assigns priority to modes but then uses roman numeralsto identify chords by root: the method is explained with some compression (seeSM, p. 73 and its supporting footnote). Like Tagg, Moore pointedly refers to themajor as Ionian and in some respects goes even further. For example, in labellinga passage from Howlin’ Wolf (SM, p. 92) as Mixolydian, its melodic seventhconsistently flattened, Moore merrily removes one sharp from the notated keysignature: ‘E mixolydian’ is thus the three sharps of A major.23 However, theroman numeral continues to refer to E (not A) as the I chord, and to A (not D)

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as the IV chord. With two of the abstractions of notation (key signature androman numeral) not talking to each other, confusion ensues.24 Moore also haslittle time for voice leading or counterpoint as theoretical necessities (the lineagethat underlies Everett’s presentation), so that SM reaches its voice-leadingsketches – the Slade example can be taken as representative (SM, p. 88) – almostby accident rather than by a view of a tonal piece in which harmony and voiceleading coexist from the start (see also Bernard 2003, p. 377). At two points inthe book, indeed, traditional nomenclature for chord inversions is invoked – ‘Ic’(SM, p. 88) and ‘VIId’, ‘Vd’ and ‘Ib’ (SM, p. 305) – alarmingly, perhaps, sinceinversions are key points for considering contrapuntal aspects of harmony.25

Tagg deals with inversions by taking another smack at ‘European textbookharmony’ (ET, pp. 140–1) and insists that textbooks should label the firstinversion of the I chord as ‘iii6’ (p. 140).

The question that arises, then, is the extent to which modes ought to be givenpriority, and this is an area of current debate. As David Temperley recentlyobserved:

Modality has also played a large role in my own work in popular music; in mybook The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures, I argued strongly for modality as anorganising concept in rock and listed ten well-known songs in Ionian, Mixolydian,Dorian, and Aeolian modes. I now believe, however, that the role of modalorganization in rock has been somewhat overstated by these authors, myselfincluded. (Temperley 2011)

My own view is that what is specifically and conceptually lost in a modes-firstapproach is minor scales with sharpened sevenths (that awkwardly titled pair, the‘ascending melodic’ and ‘harmonic’ minor) – although of course Moore’sroman-numeral system will simply convert a given v to V; at the same time, Iacknowledge the usefulness of viewing the Mixolydian as a major scale withflattened seventh.26 My thinking also hinges on this question of whether one isspeaking about rock music, for which there seems to be some evidence of modecentrality, 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 smalland 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 madethe joke – ‘one might as well hear the Eroica Symphony in G Phrygian’ (Everett2000, p. 307) – but it could also be said that the mode evokes the wrong kind ofmusic-historical association, as though the pianist Bill Evans had entered for thisone phrase amid light-hearted Broadway-style material for Diana Ross. Else-where, 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

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chord sequence of the verse is given as A minor–F major–G major, whereas thecorrect 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’ssuggestion that the interpretation turns on a choice between Ionian and Aeolianlistening demands much of a simple and familiar shift from minor to relativemajor.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’sharmonic system was all but excised from the revised version that appeared inEverett (2008).28 Moore’s suggestion that there is now only ‘minor disagreementbetween us’ may yet be wishful thinking (SM, p. 71), for, while Moore has anadmirable awareness of current debates, rarely does he build upon examples thatare offered elsewhere, preferring to supply seemingly endless examples of hisown. A key reference point in the professional literature is Beck’s superb ‘Lone-some Tears’ (Geffen, 2002), which has already received a Schenkerian (Everett2004) and neo-Riemannian (Capuzzo 2004) analysis,29 thus making it an idealexample for the harmony classroom. Moore intentionally avoids the Everettanalysis, since elsewhere (SM, pp. 70–1) he refers to Everett’s typology of rock’stonal systems (Everett 2004). The reasons for Moore’s deliberate oversight arenot hard to imagine, for in his analysis Everett sounds not just like a Schenkerianbut like Heinrich Schenker himself. With the subheading ‘A Complex TonalStructure Yields Its Secrets’, the analysis is organised so that the track is firstapproached via the chords of a tablature site (OLGA, the Online GuitarArchive)30 and then via roman numerals, as though Moore should take note.Then Everett dons the guise of Schenker: ‘only a consideration of voice leadingwill lead to progress with this puzzle’, and ‘clearly, it would be senseless to try toevaluate the harmony of this song by studying its OLGA roots alone, which arenearly all of an illusory nature’ (Everett 2004).

‘Senseless’ is quite a charge for Everett to level at a reliance on roman-numeralharmony. Be that as it may, both Everett’s and Capuzzo’s accounts are convinc-ing, Capuzzo’s for the way that the transformational network encloses the track’schords, its sneaky (or parsimonious) slithering between one chord and the nexthelping to generate a ‘tears’ motive (6–�6–5), while Everett’s contrapuntal graphsprovide a literal visualisation of the relative weight of the chords and their linearprogression. In teaching harmony over the years, and as part of my book on ElvisCostello, I get considerable mileage out of putting the mixture of tonic major andtonic minor close to the heart of things (Griffiths 2007, pp. 38–40),31 andmixture 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 majorcoloured by a touch of mixture in the chorus’ (2004); Moore’s example ‘TheHappening’ starts with a groovy riff in G minor, which gives way (at 0′11″) totonic major as a tierce de Picardie, repeated for the ‘truck driver modulation’ (upby a semitone) at 1′54″ (and mentioned by Moore in SM, p. 226); for Mott theHoople’s ‘All the Young Dudes’ (Columbia, 1972), Moore’s ascription of Ionian

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and Mixolydian (SM, p. 230) seems to me to say little, but the song’s shift frommajor to minor (at 0′58″–1′04″) opens up the dominant parallel minor as thecounterpart 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 theHuman League (Virgin, 1981) employs the ‘shuttle’ between F major and Gmajor in both verse and chorus (ET, pp. 191–4), but this progression headsresolutely 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 themodes and is attentive again to sense:

Many who have had classical training might think of the minor mode as theopposite of the major because most composers of the period roughly occupyingthe years 1725 to 1900 would indicate that this or that piece is in A major or Fminor. But such an opposition makes no sense in rock music, because althoughthe minor mode does appear regularly, other non-major modes occur with com-parable frequency. (FR, p. 166)

I don’t dispute the point at all from the rock-music perspective, but, beggingEverett’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 arelative minor and a parallel minor.

By virtue of its varied presentation in these three books, harmony emerges asa key issue for the study of popular music, and above the happily recondite issueof modal harmony lies the question of whether popular music needs its ownanalytical 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 importantdistinction between the harmonic and contrapuntal domain (pp. 219–20) withexamples from doo-wop, early 1960s pop music, garage-band hits and numbersby vocal soloists. In the context of intertextual links, Moore builds a remarkablehistorical schema around the sequence (SM, pp. 278–82), but he starts withHoagy Carmichael in 1938 and places emphasis on its status as the ‘doo-wopprogression’ (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 Mozartexamples as a footnote (ET, p. 204 n. 7). There is little here to dispute and muchto celebrate, but I would add that the sequence is there in Gauldin (1997) as arepeated sequence (p. 241, ‘the harmonic basis for innumerable popular songs’)and with vi as a voice-leading chord (pp. 239–40). In short, the progressionbelongs to both popular and classical repertories. I think that what is principallyneeded now is a harmony textbook that includes examples from both score-based works and the so-called popular repertory, including recordings. Gauldinincludes examples from Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, the Beatles and a fewothers (as indicated by copyright permissions listed in Gauldin 1997, p. 665),but there could be many more, copyright permitting, with further chapter or

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sub-section headings also possibly, after relativism, generated by the popularrepertory. How this view might affect the theory textbook is a matter to which Ishall return.

Before I reach the interpretative chapters of SM, I have some critical commentto dispose of with respect to Moore’s Ch. 5, ‘Styles’, and I apologise in advanceto reader and author for what will seem like a dark rainstorm before the cloudslift. I understood the chapter to provide a historical framework for the change inmusical sound across the period in which recorded popular music is heard, as acounterbalance to the necessarily diverse provenance of examples throughoutthe book. This is achieved by small paragraphs and sentences in which selectedtracks 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 ‘AFoggy Day’ by Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald (p. 131). The problem is thata historical account necessarily adopts a historical framework, and too much ofthe chapter, which employs fewer footnotes than the others, recycles second-hand truisms, such as the following three examples. First, that rock ’n’ roll gaveway to ‘a new generation of insipid material’ in the early 1960s while ‘blackartists became even more marginalised, their essential contribution unrecog-nised’ (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 marginalisingof black Americans: for example, ‘this was arguably the most racially integratedpopular music scene in American history’ (p. 124), and who can forget theShirelles and Ben E. King on the television series Dancing in the Street,33 whilealso 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 theso-called British invasion of 1964?34 Meanwhile, Albin Zak III (2010) challengesthe ‘insipid material’ thesis as a ‘historiographic cliché’ (p. 207). Ironically, givenMoore’s position, Zak’s argument often turns on the proper integration ofaspects of records other than chords and perceived authenticity, such as the waya 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 explainwhy my CD collection includes their Let the Boogie-Woogie Roll: Greatest Hits1953–1958 (Rhino, 1995), acquired years ago; but I haven’t checked the claimand should prefer to trust Robert Christgau on the Five Royales: ‘Competingdouble-discs by Clyde McPhatter’s Drifters and Harvey Fuqua’s Moonglowsconvince me that these guys were the shit’ (Christgau 1994). That is to say, withsuch a vast historical narrative to recount, it is better to avoid value judgementsunless one is secure and supported. Finally, the description of Louis Jordan, ‘thefirst 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 forthe ‘gelidity’ he elsewhere identifies (p. 329), such that the quotation of foursentences from Simon Frith on David Bowie arrive as a breath of much-needed

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fresh air (p. 146). The final irony of ‘Styles’ is that at two subsequent points, itseems to me that Moore does a far more interesting music-historical job: one isa fascinating consideration of the term ‘authenticity’, with a lengthy but breath-taking single paragraph dipping in and out of five events in the term’s develop-ment (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 thechapter (p. 119) and may have been a good thing,35 but this would onlyunderline how much social context is crucial for history (art schools, the musicpress, venues, the BBC, and so on).36 Analysts beware: writing history is adifferent 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 wideand impressively interdisciplinary bibliography. Ch. 6 introduces the useful term‘friction’, which I took to mean the contradiction of expectation, or bending therules. Three large chapters follow. Ch. 7, ‘Persona’, includes work on ‘prox-emics’ and much interesting and pioneering material on the relationship betweenthe singer and accompaniment. Ch. 8, ‘Reference’, includes a discussion ofmusic semiotics, more on harmony and melody and two innovative theories – touse their sub-division headings, embodied cognition and ecological perception.Finally, Ch. 9, ‘Belonging’, divides neatly into two topics, authenticity andintertextuality. A final large chapter, ‘Syntheses’, is a personal trip throughseveral tracks that grabs ideas from earlier in the book; arranged by song title, itcovers 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 detailthe problems of interpreting popular music in the manner suggested by SM andwill conclude with my own reflections on developments in this area.

Three points in brief. First to celebrate Moore’s dependability as a guide totheories, with three examples representative of many more: the brilliant littlesummary of six (Keith Swanwick, Nicholas Cook, Howard Gardner, DavidElliott, Theodor Adorno and Mark DeBellis) theorised versions of Tovey’s naïvelistener (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 ofMark Johnson’s work (pp. 239–40) – effortless, and leading to ‘All Along theWatchtower’ and the discussion of ‘here’, already mentioned.

Secondly, with conspicuous use of interpretative theories, and partly as amatter of proportion, Moore nevertheless also brings out the limitations ofEverett’s approach, and this I think again turns on using the word ‘song’ ratherthan ‘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

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period 1955–69 sees a crucial shift, so that the ‘I’ of the Elvis record (written byDoc Pomus and Mort Shuman) differs immediately from the ‘my’ of CarlPerkins’s shoes, even when worn by Elvis, and significantly so from the post-Dylan ‘I’ of Stephen Stills in ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’. Moore is right to compli-cate 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 wordsin songs – for example, deeper inside rhyme and alliteration (Griffiths 2003 andSalley 2011) – and Moore’s presentation of euphonics is useful and suggestive(SM, p. 114–6).

Thirdly, both Everett and Moore include discussion of ‘intertextuality’: ‘styleand influence’ is included in Everett’s chapter on interpretation (FR, pp. 374–8),and the topic forms the second major sub-section (following ‘authenticity’) inMoore’s Ch. 9 (SM, pp. 271–84). Everett is on the case, I think, using twowords, ‘influence’ and ‘intertextuality’, that have been usefully defined anddiscussed by Helen Regueiro Elam (1993a and 1993b); and, being of the viewthat the terms can together generate a productive tension, I have elsewheresummarised 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 ofpotential connection with less regard for disciplinary boundaries, valuing thecritic’s ability to form links between disparate works with no explicit reference toauthorial intention. (Griffiths 2007, p. 13)

The integration of listener theories defines the innovative and pioneeringaspect of SM. They are likely to be its most debated element, not least in the fieldof 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 onesattracted to scholarly disputes. One important aspect for Moore is relativism,38

which provides SM with its provocative envoi: ‘if you encounter claims purport-ing to identify “the meaning” of a particular song, or claims as to “the way tohear” 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 assignedonly to the particular person making that interpretation, as though there are asmany 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 songwill generate only a limited number of possible meanings.39 Elsewhere aphilosopher-wit comments: ‘relativism at the level of “good for me” has so littleto recommend it that its popularity with ordinary people is truly astonishing’(Coady 1995, p. 757). And of course Moore constantly presents his own truthfulreadings, if only then to defer to this insistence, à chacun sa vérité, reminiscent ofan observation made by William Empson in 1949: ‘it is a familiar paradox; anyserious attempt at establishing a relativity turns out to establish an absolute’(Empson 1987, p. 212). Moore works hard, page upon page, example upon

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example, to integrate the listener into the musical text, with an interest inhermeneutic theory prepared early on (SM, pp. 10–14). Moore’s later discussionof the more recent theories of embodied cognition and ecological perception isboth drawn out and tough going (pp. 243–8). However, it is decisive for theinterpretative material of SM, as indicated by the heartfelt remark that ‘[f]or methis is absolutely crucial’ (p. 237). Noting in passing that a very fine version ofMoore’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 Mooreprovides, with subsequent discussion focused on my scepticism of the analyticalgain offered by these theories, disagreement over which turns on song’s use ofboth words and music.

The Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’ (Capitol, 1966) appears at three points inSM, but its chord sequence (given on p. 219) was discussed by Daniel Harrison,where ‘it marches through its transpositional structure in retrograde’ (Harrison1997, 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 hisavoidance of American music theory. Moore does provide an interesting discus-sion of different versions of ‘Good Vibrations’, including Brian Wilson’s belatedversion on Smile (2004) and the wretched Troggs cover of 1974 (SM, pp.276–7). However, Moore’s more innovative contribution is found immediatelyafter ecological perception is presented (SM, pp. 248–50). In this passage of SM,there are some intertextual references: Moore has ‘Happy Together’, a 1967record by the Turtles, for the opening descent (SM, p. 249), where Harrison byway of contrast has ‘the time-honoured ground-bass tetrachord’ (1997, p. 44)while, as befits his book’s premise, Lambert identifies references to the BeachBoys’ earlier work (2007, p. 255). The track’s famous theremin generatesTagg-related semiotics (SM, p. 249). We are left with these observations:

There is no introduction, simply the announcement of the singer’s almost breath-less 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 alwaysbe with some apprehension; the immediacy of the encounter is dependent on themetaphorical space that surrounds the ‘I’ ... . [I]n the competing melodic lines atthe end, for example, we are given a choice as to which to identify with. Perhapsmost importantly, we can choose to switch our identification from one time toanother. Do we exult in the vibrations (‘good, good, good vibrations’) or do wekeep an eye on the relationship (‘she’s giving me ...’)? (SM, pp. 248–9)

‘Metaphorical space’ and ‘identification’ are surely the key words, revealingpersonal involvements and psychological investments in the details of the track.Offering little significant gain in analytical wisdom, they seem to me like so muchfirst-time listening, and I prefer the attentions to the musical properties of thisand other Beach Boys’ tracks in Harrison and Lambert.

The analysis of ‘Bridge of Sighs’ (Chrysalis, 1974) by Robin Trower is a mostinstructive example of how Moore’s method works and what its endpoint is (SM,

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pp. 299–302). Moore is inspired especially by the governing riff or melodicmotive of the track, played by guitar and first heard at 0′15″–0′25″, and ends hisdiscussion with the italicised phrase ‘what the track I am listening to teaches meabout my own actions and responses’. Between the riff and the italics are a fewgermane 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’spersona, who spends time “crossing” ’ (SM, p. 301). Moore now ponders theimage of the cold wind and its effect, whereupon the memory of seeing the bandon television leads him to contemplate the desert and ideas about the way strongwinds work in reality. Indeed, actual recorded wind enters at 2′30″ on a trackthat lasts more than five minutes (Everett would include the sound effect in hislist 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 inthe wind, and it is that action that, it seems to me, is captured by Trower’sopening 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 relation-ship between the bodily action of leaning into the wind and Trower’s riff. FinallyMoore goes off into his perennial concerns – that he’s only one reader, and thatevery listener might have his or her own reading, that there’s no accounting fortaste – but spelling out this time the order of service: ‘what is objectively presentin the music’, followed by ‘my own response’ and ending with that italicisedpassage.

What are we to make of that? Moore really believes all of this, so we need toconsider it seriously too. Moore’s attention to the ‘objective’ musical detail isexemplary: whatever one makes of his harmonic theory, his close listening isalways accurate and germane. I like the integration of memoir and feel that thiscould inspire writers both in the scholarly world and in the blogosphere: a MusicAnalysis that includes music hermeneutics may be no bad thing. I’m entertainedby the deserts and strong winds, although I can imagine Middleton, the authorof Voicing the Popular, grumpily exclaiming, ‘He (Moore) should (at p. 9) accuseme of being “too prone to flights of fancy”!’ However, I stop well short of thedirect connection between musical material and metaphor, partly because Iunderstand the words differently; but also, and more important, I’m simply notengaging in those bodily performances.

Finally, Moore’s discussion (1992) of Annie Lennox’s ‘Walking on BrokenGlass’ (Arista, 1991) is another great lesson for the reader. Such richness ofobservation: the rhythmic interaction of piano and strings (or their synthesisedequivalents), Lennox’s voice doubled at the octave in the opening, the manyprecisions of the sound box. But again, I’m not sure I commit to the idea ofembodiment sufficiently to come up with this: ‘it is easy to creatively imaginewalking across a floor, reaching broken glass, treading very carefully so as not toinjure oneself’ (SM, p. 254). With this Moore is referring to the interaction of

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piano and strings at the opening, their little shared silences providing a literalcorrespondence to the words of the title. After close observation of the track’soften fussy textural details, Moore is happy to note the consistent texturalpositioning of details that sustain his metaphor so that, again, the groove ‘rep-resents the placing of the protagonist’s feet on broken glass’ (p. 255) and, yetagain, ‘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 theway that Rudolph Réti finds motivic unity (1962), that David Lewin focuses onthe word ‘Rinde’ in a Schubert song (2006, p. 112) or that Lawrence Kramersees ‘imitation’ as ‘the creation of sonorous images that mimic the mimeticquality of a feeling or a natural process’, the second of a three-part schema of textsetting as rewriting (1984, p. 148). Be that as it may, my own enjoyment fromlistening to this track is nevertheless concerned with the unity of pitch andharmony; 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 openingmaterial in piano and strings presents at least three melodic lines in counter-point: the piano provides the melodic notes 3̂– 4̂– 3̂– 2̂–1̂ at the very top of thetexture, with a rising 5̂– 6̂– 7̂– 8̂ in the strings (gaining a little eighteenth-centurydecorative turn between 7̂ and 8̂ at 2′30″–2′38″) and the bass strings providing3̂– 4̂– 5̂ as support. The material gravitates towards the section that I thinkmatters, at 0′42″–0′58″, in which Lennox has the space to be a Nobly SufferingDiva; chords turn to the relative minor, with the melodic notes 3̂– 4̂ from theopening material composed out (as 3̂– 3̂– 4̂– 3̂) within the plagal cadence Amin–C–F–C, and the 3̂– 4̂– 5̂ motion of the opening bass strings composed out intothe chords iii–IV–V towards the cadence (followed later, at 3′10″–3′18″, by agreat big dominant). In passing, a disappointing bridge section – four dullrepetitions, 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 astalking of music, familiar in ‘positivist musicology’, in ‘internal, formally rela-tional terms’, in a ‘hermetic aestheticised space’,40 and that trying to go beyondall 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, itseems to me, we finally have’). So where does the divergence occur? Attitudeagain, perhaps. At Moore’s italicised endpoint, I don’t especially like ‘teaches meabout my own actions and responses’ because it sounds too much like church orprimary school. Over-affected as I was at a decisive time by the Clash and theGang 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 hippiesgathered inside a yurt. More important, where Moore wants to bring togetherwords and music through a unifying metaphor, I keep them as separate strandsin a song’s analysis (Griffiths 2007). With the last point in mind, here are two

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differing directions, one to do with political criticism, the other with thinkingthrough the next stage of attention to what I call the ‘singer-song’.

Firstly, criticism in general and political criticism in particular. Having praisedand pinpointed Dylan as a great singer, Everett goes on immediately to castigateArt Garfunkel (‘the voice is tiny next to Dylan’s’) and Rick Nelson (‘an emptyvoice with no vibrato, no support’) (FR, p. 121), acting like an examiner markinga 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 modulationis ‘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 mostpeople hear’; similarly, once a track has merited Moore’s attention, it can do nowrong – and, of course, even if it is faulty, 30,000 potential truth claimants in thetown of Earley in Berkshire have every right to protest otherwise. Moore down-plays the role of critics as mediators, whereas I would defer in the first instanceto the critic’s track record rather than disbelieve a truth claim. I don’t supposeI ever agreed with the great critic Steven Wells (1960–2009), who died tooyoung, but I enjoyed immensely the quality of his writing in the NME, and Irecognised his critical consistency – strict admiration of only the most commer-cial teen-oriented pop music and the most forbidding hardcore rock music anddislike of everything in between.41

Moore the relativist is consistent and patient in insisting that any statementcan be taken only as one person’s standpoint, and an important run of pagesstarts (SM, pp. 206–7) as the culmination of work on the persona and subjectposition, 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 inpopular music’s sociological or cultural-studies wing: ‘I do believe the market tobe 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 whateverglass-avoiding subtlety is found in the opening seconds is firmly trounced by arhythm 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 specialproperties, offering scope for critical and political engagement found, to be sure,firmly inside the text. There is a kind of pinched detachment in Moore’sfurther-study questions (SM, pp. 334–5), such as question 7.12, which might inthis 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 andgains. I don’t see that feminism, anti-racism or homophobia has to be sneakedin only as an aspect of ‘ecology’ or ‘environment’. Here for example is Christgauat his even-by-his-standards best, talking about two tracks on an album by TobyKeith (I hadn’t heard of him, either) and torn in the grading as rarely before:42

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Toby Keith: Unleashed [DreamWorks, 2002]

With America lighting up one too many places like the Fourth of July, I went backand tried to hate ‘Courtesy of the Red[,] White and Blue’ like I oughta, but it wasstill too pithy and heartfelt, and the album still gave up a colloquial aptness andeasy masculinity I’d overlooked. But obscured by the uproar is a piece of work asimmoral as ‘One in a Million’ or ‘Black Korea’ – no, worse. I can forgive duetpartner Willie Nelson almost anything, but I’m appalled that he lent his goodname to ‘Beer for My Horses’, which not only naturalises lynching but makes itseem like fun on a Friday night. True, the horses the mob rides evoke Hollywoodwesterns. Right, there is ‘too much corruption’, though somebody should tellthese yokels that ‘crime in the streets’ dropped in the good old days when we hadan economy. But the racial coding of the ‘gangsters’ the song sends to their makerneeds no explanation. And those ‘evil forces’ who ‘blow up a building’ ain’tbomber pilots, now are they? B/E (Christgau 2002)

Here I admire the critic full-on in the moment of writing, and thus, over inMoore’s summary questions and italicised keywords (SM, pp. 334–5), there is tomy 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 tothe song? If so, criticise that contradiction.

Does the industrial context (for example, producer, label, publisher) suggestcontradictions 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 thatthe battles are won. I think that Tagg wants more attention given to lots of othercontexts – world music, music in different media, music for different ages, andso on – while Moore aims to establish and celebrate a common truth of listenerresponse by integrating research in psychology and cognition. I’m with BobDylan:

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 enoughsongs. To me, someone who writes really good songs is Randy Newman. There’sa lot of people who write good songs. As songs. Now Randy might not go out onstage and knock you out, or knock your socks off. And he’s not going to get peoplethrilled in the front row. He ain’t gonna do that. But he’s gonna write a bettersong than most people who can do it.

You know, he’s got that down to an art. Now Randy knows music. He knowsmusic. 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 heroicanthem theme. He did it. There’s quite a few people who did it. Not that manypeople 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 ofBeethoven’s Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 2 No. 1; Wagner’s old chestnut, thePrelude 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 popularmusic 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 wheretheory meets analysis, and a context in which music analysis meets its educa-tional mass market. As Cohn could be said to suggest, the great achievement ofwriters like Moore, Everett and Tagg is the relativism of tonal harmony, asthough that point even needed to be made. A strong case could be made forpopular music’s becoming part of the theory book of the future in whichrecordings are described, while any textbook presentation of rhythm surely needsexamples from rock, funk and jazz.

I also suggest that popular music’s chief claim, with the relativism battlesended, is to the creation of poetic worlds, and that this depends on exactlyMoore’s insistence that the words and voice in song bring their own baggage. Inpassing, Moore claims that ‘we are more interested in the actions of the per-former than the composer, at least with this repertory’ (SM, p. 91), but I’m notso 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 deeplyestablished aspect of this repertory, and I find myself tending these days towards‘singer-songs’, in order to evoke the singer-songwriter, but freed from ‘singer-songwriter’ as a kind of 1970s sub-genre, a representative of which is likely toperform sensitively at an open-mic night near you this evening. Van Morrisonwas only one extraordinary example among several at the time, especially inGreat Britain, emerging from a band of competent musicians convinced that hewas also a poet of sorts, making up the words; Elton John is less compelling inthis 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 istriumphant and can therefore enable Moore’s iPod selection (King CrimsonSlade, Ray Davies and Kathy Kirby), but its triumph centrally concerns BobDylan’s influence, longevity and hegemony, as well as the hegemonic Beatles asboth song writers and performers of cover versions.45 As well as all the peoplewho were influenced directly by Dylan, brilliantly captured in Loudon Wain-wright III’s ‘Talking New Bob Dylan’ (History, Charisma, 1992), so Dylan inthat Bloomian way ‘influenced’ the ones who’d gone before, with WoodyGuthrie, Hank Williams, Buddy Holly and Jimmie Rodgers only in the front line(see Bloom 1973). What defined this particular repertory was a bringing togetherof two strands that reside in words-in-music: a collection of technical innova-tions usually borrowed from unpredictable aspects of poetry and the creationand 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 bestparagraph on this development, especially the list of no fewer than elevenadjectives in the penultimate sentence:

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It’s folkies, whether they call themselves that or not, who are forever revitalisingoutmoded 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 outtheir own thousands of great songs – sometimes with bridges and changesattached, sometimes strophic versifying, sometimes three-chord rants, laments, oranthems. The urbane wit and commonplace succinctness prized by classic popnever died out, but rock’s vernacular was more all-embracing – slangy or raunchyor obscene, earnest or enraged, confessional or hortatory, poetic or dissociative orobscure or totally meaningless. Some lyricist is recombining a personalised selec-tion of those qualities as you read this sentence. (Christgau 2000)

Genuine technical innovators are of course few (for instance, Bob Dylan, PattiSmith, Mark E. Smith, the Last Poets, the Watts Prophets and Chuck D), as aresong writers who rise to the challenge and carve out the space in languages otherthan English (for example, Meic Stevens or David R. Edwards in the Welshlanguage; see Hill 2007).

Beyond that, the ones who remain are those who create compelling musico-poetic worlds and expand our sense of what the song could contain. Forexample, Loudon Wainwright III has a poetic world as distinctive as PhilipLarkin’s – it is that good – although I prefer Larkin’s tough self-editing (onevolume per decade) to Wainwright’s prolixity (an album every two years).Wainwright’s theme46 is the family – the dad he argued with, the wife hedivorced, the daughter whose birthday he misses – all played through tiny detailsin which the persona and authenticity of which Moore writes are nicely blurred:the persona ‘Loudon Wainwright III’ is often teasingly and exactly the same asLoudon Wainwright III the person. The musical tricks are easily heard and oftenturn on a simple but distinctive formal device, which is to repeat the first verseas the song’s conclusion – a kind of meta-formal device that gently reminds us ofthe song’s construction while recalling the song’s subject matter. In ‘WhiteWinos’ (Last Man on Earth, Evangeline, 2001), Wainwright recalls how hismother used to enjoy ending her day with a glass of white wine, and one of theimmediate things is that even though it seemed so true, I’d never spotted that ina 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 therecording,47 eventually provides a hearty conclusion. The trick is that whenWainwright broaches dark memories, the deceptive cadence appears, followedby a cut in the sentence, either back to the first line or to the instrumentalopening: 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 argueabout poetic worlds, in a canon-forming game, as much inside as outside theacademy (Wyn Jones 2008, pp. 109–17), and I’d be at least louder than everyoneelse in insisting on the inclusion of Randy Newman, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon,

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Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, Robert Wyatt and Morrissey, who offer poeticworlds as distinctive, sustained and convincing as those of Larkin, SeamusHeaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell and August Kleinzahler. No doubtthis has something to do with a relationship to ‘real life’, but it also concerns aninterest in what the song could or even should contain in the future. The workis going to be inside the words as they relate to music.48 In my version of howthings move on, selection is all; and as ‘all things must pass’, to borrow theGeorge Harrison title (Apple, 1970), one should never underestimate howsignificant the death of Paul McCartney will be for even the Beatles, and thesubsequent, eventual conclusion of copyright issues. Note too that my view is,riskily no doubt, far less affected by downloading’s decisive shift towards theisolated track, and that I still think in terms of the oeuvre and the work, includingthe album as a determined sequence of tracks.

To summarise, SM is a tremendous work, a lifetime achievement (as they sayin award ceremonies), meandering like a great river or the first movement ofthe last Schubert piano sonata. It will set agendas for some time to come and,in its integration of literatures on embodiment and ecological perception, willbe much used and debated. I’m not convinced, though, that these theoriesmerit the space given to them, so to me the book overly compresses what I seeas its most valuable material: the detailed attention to words and music insong. I do hope that the book gets used, especially its syntheses, as there isevery chance that it could inspire new kinds of writing that integrate creativework and memoir alongside analysis. FR is the one to find space for in thecurriculum, since it provides the basis for systematic work on popular musicbefore 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 ofrelativism found in these three books and their thousands of examples are nowthe end of an era, following which the hardest questions arise about popularmusic’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 canappear 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 ofchapters in the music-history book needs to be reconfigured? We’ll see.

NOTES

1. Allan F. Moore, Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded PopularSong (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 MostPeople 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 technol-ogy 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’ atpp. 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 cam-paign 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 youngdudes, carry the nudes’, finding it a ‘striking image’ (SM, p. 230), but I’mquite sure it is ‘the news’ that they carry. That said, both Moore andEverett maintain a high level of error avoidance, and as for Tagg, whopresumably 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 detachedbiographer. I see to my surprise from his CV (http://tagg.org/ptcv.html)that he attended an expensive school (the Leys) in Cambridge and stayedin 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’sseries of radio programmes on songs, with the poet Simon Armitage, forBBC Radio 4.

16. Here are three editorial suggestions for a better second edition of SongMeans: more use of clock timing inside tracks (a consistent virtue of bothFR and ET), more precise cross-reference across the text (there’s too much‘see chapter x’ rather than ‘see p. y’) and considerably more precisepagination in the footnotes.

17. Found respectively on pp. 108, 39–40, and 170 of Moore (1993), and onpp. 156, 57, and 169 of SM.

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18. A rare case of positive endorsement from a practitioner is the tribute fromRobert Fripp (cited in Green 2002, pp. ix–x); perhaps more typical is thecritical comment by Tom Constanten, of the Grateful Dead, made ofBoone (cited in Boone 1997, p. 205).

19. Moore has the distinction of being pilloried by the novelist Nick Hornbyfor attending a concert by Jethro Tull in 1996: ‘But even so! Jethro Tull! In1996!’ (Hornby 2003, p. 18), a comment made in a review of ‘the hilari-ously dry Analyzing Popular Music’ in which ‘almost none of the essays hasbeen written with a view to being read’, and including chapters by bothMoore and myself; see Moore 2003.

20. ‘Truck-driver modulation’ is the name used consistently by Everett for theprocess by which songs, be they on record or in performance, modulateusually by a semitone or tone and usually upwards. Such modulationshappen 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 swimlengths 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 Auskompo-nierung); 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 linearchords’. Moore’s use of ‘Ic’ (etc.) is consistent with the system employedin the traditional theory exams of the Associated Board for the RoyalSchools of Music (ABRSM).

26. Tagg covers Mixolydian harmony in ET at pp. 124–5 (the ‘cowboycadence’), Mixolydian loops on pp. 221–6 and yet more Mixolydian melo-dies on pp. 274–5. The example I use in teaching is the remarkable essayin Mixolydian invention that is ‘Marquee Moon’ by Television (Elektra,1977), where almost all of the guitar improvisations are in that mode andrendered 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).

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29. The publication dates presumably explain why the readings do not refer toeach other.

30. The Online Guitar Archive (OLGA) was closed down in 2006 for reasonsrelating 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 in1963 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 publishedtranscriptions not ‘notoriously inaccurate’ but impressively accurate, andexamples that I regularly use include full scores of the Bill Evans Trio andSteely Dan and the note-for-note vocal transcriptions of the Carpenters, allpublished by Hal Leonard. The accuracy of a transcription also depends onwhen it was made; there is a world of difference between the old NorthernSongs 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 thisimplies is both unavoidable and to be embraced, for it asserts that not onlymusic’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 energeticbook What Good Are the Arts? Carey the relativist: ‘if this seems to plungeus into the abyss of relativism, then I can only say that the abyss ofrelativism 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 wayone person responds to it. It is the sum of all the subtle, private, idiosyn-cratic feelings it has evoked in its whole history’; ibid., p. 31. Carey andMoore on analysis: ‘those particular words in that particular order’; ibid., p.174. Moore: ‘the issuing of an invitation to hear a particular sample ofmusic in a particular way’; SM, p. 2. But Carey on repertory: ‘[i]f it is askedhow, in this relativist world, one decides which artists or writers or musi-cians to pay attention to, my own view is that Dr Johnson’s argumentcarries weight: “What mankind have long possessed they have often

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examined and compared: and if they persist to value the possession, it isbecause frequent comparisons have confirmed opinion in its favour.” Inother 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 nofurther than the cover of SM, where a woman lies on the floor listeningthrough headphones to a collection of CDs (long since ripped and traded oneBay). Fundamental in SM, the sound box relies on headphone listening forits 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 appearto be two separate cymbals, panned right and left, and played in thesequence right–left–both right and left–right, with the drummer imitating orreinforcing 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 presentsthat 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 thecase of this record, the B grade indicates ‘an admirable effort that aficio-nados of the style or artist will probably find quite listenable’, while recordsthat 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 poetJohn Donne and the living poet W.H. Auden in the 1930s, the latterconnected to Carole King and Gerry Goffin as inventors of, respectively,music and words, working in collaboration. In contemporaneous collabo-rations and inventions, a shared aesthetic between words and music con-stitutes the point of connection.

45. McCartney proves an enduring master of the cover version on Back in theUSSR (Melodiya, 1988) and Run Devil Run (Parlophone, 1999).

46. The subject matter of a song is only one of its important aspects, and Mooremakes the point that an attention to syllabic proportion within the sung linemay be as valuable as ‘any amount of content analysis’; SM, p. 114.

47. David Mansfield’s string arrangement for Last Man on Earth (2001) istasteful and brings out the formal cuts, but I’d recommend a performancefound in an interview with an enthusiastic and most likeable Dutch jour-nalist on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQHs8HJmzmM),where Wainwright performs ‘White Winos’, there and then, at 11′55″–15′00″.

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48. The worst thing that could possibly happen is that a book be produced withexamples of ‘lyrics’ by all of these songwriters – not least because such abook is going to make the words look like poems rather than respectingtheir place in the melodic line, ‘line’ being the element consistent betweenpoem and song (see Griffiths 2003, p. 43), the ‘verbal space’ suggestedby the music’s hypermetrical structure and the words that occupy thatspace.

REFEENCES

Aldwell, Edward and Schachter, Carl, 1989: Harmony and Voice Leading, 2ndedn (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).

Bernard, Jonathan W., 2003: Review of Allan F. Moore, The Beatles: Sgt Pepper’sLonely 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 andNew York: Oxford University Press).

Boone, Graeme M., 1997: ‘Tonal and Expressive Ambiguity in “Dark Star” ’, inCovach and Boone, Understanding Rock, pp. 171–210.

Brackett, David, 1995: Interpreting Popular Music (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press).

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NOTE ON CONTRIBUTOR

DAI GRIFFITHS is Senior Lecturer in Music at Oxford Brookes University and theauthor of monographs on Radiohead and Elvis Costello. His research is nowmostly on words in songs, while his teaching is mostly in tonal harmony andanalysis.

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After Relativism Recent Directions in the High Analysis of Low Music

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