scholarly journals Corpus Studies of Harmony in Popular Music: A Response to Gauvin

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 239
Author(s):  
Trevor DeClercq
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Analytical Process ◽  
Corpus Studies ◽  
Harmonic Content ◽  
Flat Side ◽  
Harmonic Syntax ◽  
Medium Level ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Harmonic Analyses

This paper responds to the research presented in Gauvin’s paper on the evolution of harmonic syntax in popular music from the 1960s.  I begin by situating the findings from his second study (on flat-side harmonies) within the context of my corpus work with David Temperley on harmony in popular music.  Gauvin’s results are similar to ours, although some important differences are worth noting.  I also provide an interpretation of the results from his first study (on modulation), which Gauvin found to be inconsistent with his proposed hypothesis.  Specifically, I conjecture that modulation and harmonic palette may be in balance with one another, in that listeners may prefer songs where harmonic content is at a medium level of complexity.  Gauvin’s study also brings forth some basic issues with regard to harmonic encoding, in terms of both the subjectivity of the analytical process as well as the ease by which harmonic analyses are shared with and verified by other researchers.

scholarly journals The Logic of Six-Based Minor for Harmonic Analyses of Popular Music

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor de Clercq
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Number System ◽  
Roman Numeral ◽  
Numbering Scheme ◽  
System A ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Harmonic Syntax ◽  
Chord Function ◽  
Harmonic Analyses ◽  
And Behavior

Harmonic analyses of popular music typically take the minor tonic to be Roman numeral “one.” By nature, this “one-based” approach requires a new numbering scheme when songs shift between relative key centers. Recent scholarship has argued, however, that popular music often involves ambiguity between relative tonalities, as exemplified in the “Axis” progression, if not sometimes a tonal fusion of two relative keys. I thus argue for the utility of a “six-based” approach to the minor tonic, where the minor tonic is taken to be scale-degree 6. This six-based approach, common among practitioners of popular music as seen in the Nashville number system, avoids the forced choice of a single tonic, and it thus offers a consistent way to track chord function and behavior across shifts between relative key centers. After considering these shifts in a diatonic context on the levels of both phrase and song form, I posit that popular music involves three possible tonalities, together which form a “triple-tonic complex” akin to Stephenson’s three harmonic palettes: a major system, a parallel-minor system, and a relative-minor system. I conclude by considering how chromatic chords common in a major key, such as II and ".fn_flat('')."VII, correspond to their counterparts in the relative minor, IV and ".fn_flat('')."II, thereby collapsing the landscape of diatonic modes into three modal complexes. Overall, the paper serves to reveal the logic of six-based minor—why it is useful, what issues it resolves, and what insights it can afford us about harmonic syntax in popular music.

scholarly journals “The Times They Were A-Changin’”: A Database-Driven Approach to the Evolution of Musical Syntax in Popular Music from the 1960s

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hubert Léveillé Gauvin
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Flat Side ◽  
Musical Syntax ◽  
The Times ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Large Corpus

The goal of this research is to investigate the pitch structures of popular music in the 1960s through a large corpus study in order to identify any consistent changes in harmonic and tonal syntax.  More specifically, two studies based on the Billboard DataSet (Burgoyne, Wild & Fujinaga, 2011; Burgoyne, 2011), a new corpus presenting transcriptions for more than 700 songs, is presented. The first study looks at the incidence of multi-tonic songs throughout the decade, while the second study focuses on the incidence of flat-side harmonies (e.g. bIII, bVI, and bVII) over the same period of time. While no difference was observed in the frequency of multi-tonic songs, the study showed a significant increase in the incidence of flat-side harmonies during the second half of the decade.

Gendered and Censored Modernity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Soojin Kim
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Social Values ◽  
Development Project ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Korean Society ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The U.S

This chapter examines the ways in which a juxtaposition of two definitions of modernity are reflected in the two female singers, Yi Mi-ja and Patti Kim, who actively performed in postwar South Korea, particularly between the 1960s and the 1970s. While different social values and cultural practices constituted the modernity of South Korea, most scholarship on Korean popular music gives particular attention to the cultural products of modernity that have been influenced by the West, mostly by the U.S. This chapter, however, suggest that the different cultures from Korea, Japan, and the U.S. together constitute the modernity of Korea. Also, different collective memories from the Japanese colonial experience, the Korean War, and the Korean government-led economic development project shape the ideal form of modernization. Modernity in South Korean popular music shows that the periods between the 1960s and the 1970s juxtapose what the Korean society was facing and seeking at the time. Focusing on the Yi and Kim’s music and their performance styles, this chapter explores how different musical cultures and social values are reflected in their music as a way to construct gendered and censored modernity.

‘Illiterate’ musicians: an historic review of curriculum and practice for student popular musicians in Australian senior secondary classrooms

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (02) ◽  
pp. 155-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Carroll
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Curriculum Reform ◽  
School Curriculum ◽  
Secondary Classrooms ◽  
Western Art ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Senior Secondary

AbstractThis article examines curriculum and practice in Australian secondary classroom music education, in order to trace the inclusion of, and provision for, students with learning orientations based on popular music forms. A 60-year period of curriculum reform, matriculation statistics and literature is surveyed with a focus on the state of New South Wales (NSW), where the ‘non-literate’ student musician was first acknowledged in curriculum documents dating from the late 1970s at the senior secondary level (Music Syllabus Year 11 and 12: New 2 Unit A Course. Draft Document). Three overlapping eras frame discussion. The first discusses the original post–World War II school curriculum established for Western art music (WAM); the second discusses the period of curriculum reform beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, which leads to the inclusion of popular music at junior secondary levels; and the third is the present era from roughly 1980 onwards, where separate pathways of instruction are maintained for WAM and students with interests in popular and contemporary musics. Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) from the sociology of education is employed, with analysis unveiling a series of historic code shifts and clashes with implications for present practice. An unveiling of these codes explains the cause of ongoing tensions surrounding the inclusion of popular music and musicians in Australian music classrooms and provides foundation for much-needed curriculum development in the NSW context, and potentially elsewhere, where similar dynamics underpin practice in secondary classrooms.

Adopting imports: new images and alliances in Brazilian popular music of the 1990s

Popular Music ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Magaldi
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Urban Youth ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Electronic Apparatus ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
Bossa Nova ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Political Scene ◽  
Musical Styles

Anyone visiting Brazil today in search of an idealised ‘Brazilian Sound’ might, at first, be disappointed with the popular music scene. The visitor will soon realise that established musical styles such as bossa nova and MPB (Música Popular Brazileira (Brazilian Popular Music)), with their well-defined roles within the Brazilian social and political scene of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, have lost their immediate appeal with some contemporary audiences, and especially with Brazilian urban youth. In the 1990s, Brazilian radio and TV are saturated with a variety of new local genres that borrow heavily from international musical styles of all kinds and use state-of-the-art electronic apparatus. Hybrid terms such assamba-rock, samba-reggae, mangue-beat, afro-beat, for-rock(a contraction of forró and rock),sertaneja-country, samba-rap, andpop-nejo(a contraction of pop andsertanejo), are just a few examples of the marketing labels which are loosely applied to the current infusion of international music in the local musical scene.

Postbop Jazz in the 1960s

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Waters
Keyword(s):  
Small Group ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Original Compositions ◽  
Harmonic Syntax ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Harmonic Substitution ◽  
King Cobra

Innovations in postbop jazz compositions of the 1960s occurred in several dimensions, including harmony, form, and melody. Postbop jazz composers such as Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, along with others (Booker Little, Joe Henderson, Woody Shaw) broke with earlier tonal jazz traditions. Their compositions marked a departure from the techniques of jazz standards and original compositions that defined small-group repertory through the 1950s: single-key orientation, schematic 32-bar frameworks (in AABA or ABAC forms), and tonal harmonic progressions. The book develops analytical pathways through a number of compositions, including “El Gaucho,” “Penelope,” “Pinocchio,” “Face of the Deep” (Shorter); “King Cobra,” “Dolphin Dance,” “Jessica” (Hancock); “Windows,” “Inner Space,” “Song of the Wind” (Corea); as well as “We Speak” (Little); “Punjab” (Henderson); and “Beyond All Limits” (Shaw). These case studies offer ways to understand the works’ harmonic syntax, melodic and formal designs, and general principles of harmonic substitution. By locating points of contact among these postbop techniques—and by describing their evolution from previous tonal jazz practices—the book illustrates the syntactic changes that emerged during the 1960s.

Remembrance of Things Past: Marxism and the Study of Popular Music

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-155
Author(s):  
SIMON FRITH
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Sociology Of Knowledge ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Commercial Music ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Ideology ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractThis article considers the role of Marxism in the history of popular music studies. Its approach combines the sociology of knowledge with a personal memoir and its argument is that in becoming a field of scholarly interest popular music studies drew from both Marxist theoretical arguments about cultural ideology in the 1950s and 1960s and from rock writers’ arguments about the role of music in shaping socialist bohemianism in the 1960s and 1970s. To take popular music seriously academically meant taking it seriously politically. Once established as an academic subject, however, popular music studies were absorbed into both established music departments and vocational, commercial music courses. Marxist ideas and ideologues were largely irrelevant to the subsequent development of popular music studies as a scholarly field.

‘Funky Drummer’: New Orleans, James Brown and the rhythmic transformation of American popular music

Popular Music ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Stewart
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
World War ◽  
Related Development ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
Rock N Roll ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Reverse Development

The singular style of rhythm & blues (R&B) that emerged from New Orleans in the years after World War II played an important role in the development of funk. In a related development, the underlying rhythms of American popular music underwent a basic, yet generally unacknowledged transition from triplet or shuffle feel (12/8) to even or straight eighth notes (8/8). Many jazz historians have shown interest in the process whereby jazz musicians learned to swing (for example, the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra through Louis Armstrong's 1924 arrival in New York), but there has been little analysis of the reverse development – the change back to ‘straighter’ rhythms. The earliest forms of rock 'n' roll, such as the R&B songs that first acquired this label and styles like rockabilly that soon followed, continued to be predominantly in shuffle rhythms. By the 1960s, division of the beat into equal halves had become common practice in the new driving style of rock, and the occurrence of 12/8 metre relatively scarce. Although the move from triplets to even eighths might be seen as a simplification of metre, this shift supported further subdivision to sixteenth-note rhythms that were exploited in New Orleans R&B and funk.

Chicha in the shanty towns of Arequipa, Peru

Popular Music ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 229-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Bullen
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Wide Spread ◽  
Vacant Lots ◽  
Squatter Settlements ◽  
The Andes ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The 1960S

Chicha, a fermented maize beer, traditional in the Andes and brewed by Andean migrants in the shanty towns of Peru's cities, has given its name to a musical movement, which first emerged in the migrant squatter settlements of Lima in the 1960s. By the mid-1980s chicha was the most well-known and wide-spread form of urban popular music in Peru (Romero 1990; Rowe & Schelling 1991, pp. 121–2), widely played, sung and danced in impromptu chichodromos, set up in walled-in vacant lots or back yards.

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