OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

I am not at all afraid to be the asshole who says that ppl don't know enough about musical analysis to be talking about music, esp since I know exactly enough music theory to get through my various musical endeavors

This is kind of turning into a subthread that has nothing to do with the thread anymore, but I also feel like music itself would be better if both artists and audiences had broader musical knowledge. I mean there's lots of great really simple pop music, but today compared to, say, 1965, or 1975, or 1985, I feel like there is so little that ISN'T simple. I just feel like there's less harmonic and melodic variety and imagination in today's pop music. Formal musical education isn't about playing or writing "right" imo but about opening up possibilities -- how to find 12 other chords I could go to from this chord that would also sound good, how to write a melody that doesn't just follow the root or third, how to do stuff that isn't obvious to the ear but actually might sound cool anyway.

And I don't want to get into the whole "there are other kinds of musical knowledge" thing, because of course there are. There's knowledge relating to rhythm and texture and feel and style and all that stuff is really important, so I guess I'm just saying "knowledge" in terms of harmony and melodic writing.

It's a frustrating exercise for me, because like "I have so much to say about Lady Gaga!" but at the same time I cannot, actually, get through reading a single fucking wikipedia page breakdown of any Sibelius symphony, they have been dissected so irrelevantly and uninterestingly by musicologists who, instead of identifying the innovative features in the orchestration or handling-of-material, just throw their "it's in b-minor and then goes to G-major" dicks around. Seriously if you want to see "worst piece of music writing ever" just look at a wiki for a Tchaikovsky symphony, I'll be over here slitting my wrists

what I'm trying to say is: musicology is awesome but musicologists need to take an atavan or fifty

I think there is a place for academic analysis of pop culture (it's sort of why I joined ILX in the first place). Wished more people were going that way instead of down the Buzzfeed style route.

If you're interested, fwiw, academic music theorists have been doing plenty of analysis of popular music over the last couple of decades (especially considering that it's hard to come up with something new to say about Bach). You could start with Music Theory Online maybe, which usually runs a piece on popular music, is a top journal in the field, and is usually relatively readable: http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/issues.php

This issue was completely devoted to rock music, for example: http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.11.17.3/toc.17.3.html

This is something of a 'classic' book: http://www.amazon.ca/Understanding-Rock-Essays-Musical-Analysis/dp/0195100050

Kyle Adams's work on rap and Lori Burns's work generally (http://www.music.uottawa.ca/faculty/burns.html, has a few MTO articles, has written book chapters on Lady Gaga, Dixie Chicks, and Rihanna if you're concerned that the pop being analysed isn't always pop enough) are usually great.

Sorry, the Dixie Chicks thing was an article.

What is the *place* you're referring to that musicology cannot attain (and that, presumably, something else can)?

― timellison,

Well, let me return to the example I used about versifying. I can argue that Frost's use of iambic tetrameter in "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" enforces the mind-numbing regularity of the speaker's mission, most notably in the line "And miles to go before I sleep." But I could also argue that the unyielding beat of that tetrameter reduces the poem to a greeting card. Frost's choice of meter is a fact; what you and I deduce from those facts is an opinion.

I'm not at all suggesting a musicological approach is flawed, only that mentioning a series of facts about clusters and time signatures and chord sequences still adduce opinions.

Blind drunk when typing those last two posts, sorry to any musicologists

Ha, I mean, Wikipedia is probably not the best source for quality musicological writing. I suspect that people are confusing musicology and music theory on this thread though.

Was wondering about that. What would you say is the difference?

Ime, on this side of the Atlantic at least, a simple explanation would be:
music theory = formal/structural analysis of music (which includes model composition at the undergrad level)
musicology = humanities or social science approaches to the study of music

I think that in Europe, what I would call music theory can be included as a sub-discipline of musicology, actually, which would weaken my original point.

(Grove on musicology fwiw (they don't have a "music theory" article!):

The term ‘musicology’ has been defined in many different ways. As a method, it is a form of scholarship characterized by the procedures of research. A simple definition in these terms would be ‘the scholarly study of music’. Traditionally, musicology has borrowed from ‘art history for its historiographic paradigms and literary studies for its paleographic and philological principles’ (Treitler, 1995). A committee of the American Musicological Society (AMS) in 1955 also defined musicology as ‘a field of knowledge having as its object the investigation of the art of music as a physical, psychological, aesthetic, and cultural phenomenon’ (JAMS, viii, p.153). The last of these four attributes gives the definition considerable breadth, although music, and music as an ‘art’, remains at the centre of the investigation.

A third view, which neither of these definitions fully implies, is based on the belief that the advanced study of music should be centred not just on music but also on musicians acting within a social and cultural environment. This shift from music as a product (which tends to imply fixity) to music as a process involving composer, performer and consumer (i.e. listeners) has involved new methods, some of them borrowed from the social sciences, particularly anthropology, ethnology, linguistics, sociology and more recently politics, gender studies and cultural theory. This type of inquiry is also associated with ethnomusicology. Harrison (1963) and other ethnomusicologists have suggested that ‘It is the function of all musicology to be in fact ethnomusicology; that is, to take its range of research to include material that is termed “sociological”’

In the US/Canada, ime, I think it would more common for theory/composition to be combined in a department or 'area' within a department as for theory/musicology to be combined, although the latter is definitely not unheard of.

@ Sund4r I keep up with that journal but have learned to skip the articles about pop rock and rap. My ish is that those pop articles seem intended for an audience of no-one. The language is too academic for people who're interested in Radiohead, and Radiohead is too easily parsed for people who can comprehend an academic theoretical approach. I mean:

“Paranoid Android” was composed and recorded by the alternative rock band Radiohead and appears on their widely acclaimed album OK Computer (1997).(9) As Radiohead critics and fans point out, the title of the rock song references the fictional character “Marvin the Paranoid Android” from Douglas Adams’s 1978 BBC radio comedy series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was later adapted into a series of books. Unlike Adams’s comedic portrayal of the depressed robot Marvin, however, Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” appears to depict a socially alienated and anxiety-ridden persona surrounded by a society consumed by the trappings of capitalism––one of several themes that the album explores. Power (“When I am king”) and materialism (“gucci”; “yuppies”) generate self-importance (“Why don’t you remember my name”) and excess (“piggy”), threatening to consume, impair, and silence (“With your opinions which are of no consequence at all”) in the desire for more (Example 1a). The fear and realization that the capitalist machine has participated in the formation of the subject and created, as a condition of possibility, the potential to equate the valuation of material goods with identity and self-worth, provokes a split subject––a “paranoid android” who recognizes that its individual thoughts and ambitions may also be a product of the capitalist machine (“Please could you stop the noise . . . from all the unborn chicken voices in my head”).(10) The plea to be cleansed (“Rain down on me from a great height”) from the markers of a capitalist identity proves futile in the song’s final section; the potential for grace and intervention is met with a cynicism that God may be passive (“God loves his children, yeah!”), leaving the persona no escape from Pandemonium. That all of the individuals in “Paranoid Android” are condemned to the same fate, regardless of social status or wealth, lends an ironic twist to the song’s ending.

My eyes glazed over there too but that's just like an introductory paragraph about the song more generally, though, right? The meat of the piece is the actual musical analysis.

I totally disagree with this!:

Radiohead is too easily parsed for people who can comprehend an academic theoretical approach.

Even under the rubric of Theory, don't different people use it to mean different things at different times? An old school classical guy might be referring to something out of the common practice period, particularly the law as laid down by Rameau in 1722, whereas a recent Berklee grad is walking around with his head stuffed up with Chord Scale Theory?

My eyes glazed over too but I hadn't put together where the title "Paranoid Android" came from so I learned something.

*moves to the other thread*

Even under the rubric of Theory, don't different people use it to mean different things at different times? An old school classical guy might be referring to something out of the common practice period, particularly the law as laid down by Rameau in 1722, whereas a recent Berklee grad is walking around with his head stuffed up with Chord Scale Theory?

Sure, but they're both doing structural/formal analysis of music. They're just working with different repertoire. They could still present at similar conferences, etc. Anyway, I better go mark some counterpoint.

(Xp)I guess what I am trying to say is if you define theory as something like "the study of what chords go together and what melodies go with them" then there are different approaches to theory and some explain certain things better than others. What is surprising or not done in one theory is not surprising and done all the time in another. If you don't take this into account then theory is kind of a strawman.

*ok I'm leaving too*

(Something about tyranny of theory, blah blah blah)

I want to continue this discussion just in the more specific "talking about articles" thread instead of the "lol at this guy" thread

Should we start a new thread for theory and pop or take it here?: Rolling Music Theory Thread

(I don't think math & music would be the right place.)

Yes, the math & music thread is too specialized, but that rolling theory thread looks fine. Plus I'm sure it will makeTim happy.

Moved.

I'm not at all suggesting a musicological approach is flawed, only that mentioning a series of facts about clusters and time signatures and chord sequences still adduce opinions.

Yes, but like with any discussion about things other than facts, you usually proceed without undercutting what you're doing by asserting that you'll never be able to communicate and that everyone's frame of reference is entirely alien to your own.

What I do definitely "veers into qualitative stuff," as Hurting 2 put it. In fact, that's the whole point of it.

I think very few music theorists would claim that certain chord progressions or melodic leaps in certain contexts or certain kinds of voice leading sound objectively "better" or "worse" than others, but they might describe "effects" that they create, as well as how they rate in certain historical periods in terms of what is more or less common, what would be more or less expected, etc. Of course, all this stuff can be shaped by culture and by individual music experience, so it gets to be a bit of a mindfuck. A very simplistic but classic example is that the very fact that a major key sounds "happy" and a minor key sounds "sad" has been shown to be culturally conditioned, and there are cultures where minor is not associated with "sad" at all.

There's a quote I love from Marc Ribot that playing a standard is like playing a duet with the audience's memory. But in a way all music plays a duet with the audience's expectations -- you're used to hearing a certain chord progression resolve a certain way and suddenly someone fakes you out and has it not resolve but move to a series of chords that leads to a key change. Even if you don't know how to identify what you hear in music theory terms, you still hear it. But then if you aren't used to the chord progression resolving a certain way in the first place, you might not experience the exciting "surprise" of it moving in a different direction. It's not much different than when a film plays with a trope -- if you don't know the trope, the play isn't very meaningful to you.

A very simplistic but classic example is that the very fact that a major key sounds "happy" and a minor key sounds "sad" has been shown to be culturally conditioned, and there are cultures where minor is not associated with "sad" at all.

Pharrell's house

Ah

is Pharrell's house close to Daryl's?

well this ain't exactly a peer-reviewed journal, but
http://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/the-science-of-music-why-do-songs-in-a-minor-key-sound-sad

well this ain't exactly a peer-reviewed journal, but
Better not let Sund4r see that.

hey guys she's baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack

update: she listened to a record at the wrong speed

Gird your loins, ILX. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/magazine/the-pernicious-rise-of-poptimism.html?_r=0

In the guise of open-mindedness and inclusivity, poptimism gives critics — and by extension, fans — carte blanche to be less adventurous. If we are all talking about Miley Cyrus, then we do not need to wrestle with knottier music that might require some effort to appreciate.

Preach

Hahaha that URL is straight trolling ilx

the rise of.... what decade is this?

*closes tab when he mentions The Great Beauty as an example of something of quality*

There's some Morbzbait in there too:

I spend most of my time, professionally speaking, writing about movies and books, and during quiet moments, I like to entertain myself by imagining what might happen if the equivalent of poptimism were to transform those other disciplines. A significant subset of book reviewers would turn up their noses at every mention of Jhumpa Lahiri and James Salter as representatives of snobbish, boring novels for the elite and argue that to be a worthy critic, engaged with mass culture, you would have to direct the bulk of your critical attention to the likes of Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer. Movie critics would be enjoined from devoting too much of their time to “12 Years a Slave” (box-office take: $56 million) or “The Great Beauty” ($2.7 million), lest they fail to adequately analyze the majesty that is “Thor: The Dark World” ($206.2 million).

Saul Austerlitz is the author of “Sitcom: A History in 24 Episodes From I Love Lucy to Community.”

a guy who wrote a book on sitcoms complaining about critical obsession with pop

(xp) Like freakytrigger never happened.

oof didn't notice that, that's bad

the book he wrote i mean

haha not finishing it though since so many popists have done not actually engaging w/ rockism critiques of rockism it only seems fair to get it in the other direction. writing this however - the indie hero Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields was accused of being a racist for expressing his appreciation for the song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” from the (actually racist) Disney musical “Song of the South,” and his general dislike of hip-hop and not mentioning merritt's comments about the kkk or having no use for black musicians post-integration seems willfully dishonest. anyhow if there's any demographic that's shown its ability to not respond to every piece of navel gazing troll bait that comes across its rock critics so i'm sure this will pass unnoticed pretty quickly.

I mean, the piece makes like, one or two good points nestled amongst all the misrepresentation.

a guy who wrote a book on sitcoms complaining about critical obsession with pop

― Bryan Fairy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, April 4, 2014 10:51 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this was like the 'drummer for the rock band gay dad' of 2014 punchline

I'm surprised there's no mention of HAIM.