scholarly journals Plateau Loops and Hybrid Tonics in Recent Pop Music

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Duinker
Keyword(s):  
Harmonic Function ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Roman Numeral ◽  
Minor Chord ◽  
Strong Position

This paper investigates harmonic progressions built around two major chords and one minor chord, all related by step. In many pop/rock songs, these chords can be analyzed as Aeolian progressions—VI, VII, and i—(Moore 1992; Biamonte 2010; Richards 2017a). Recent songs by Bon Iver, The Chainsmokers, and others, however, use chord loops where the harmonies can be interpreted as IV, V, and vi, which I call the plateau loop for its plateau-like activity: a constant hovering above Roman numeral I or i tonic chords, while retaining an overall consistent pitch-based topography. I interrogate the tonality of these songs, advancing the notion of a hybrid tonic. Hybrid tonics occur when a song or song section lacks a salient Ionian or (less often) Aeolian tonic on which both the harmony and melody concur. Instead, IV or (less often) VI or vi chords can function rhetorically as tonic, especially when the chords sound simultaneously with a melodic ".fn_scaledegree(1)." and occur in a metrically strong position, or initiate a plateau loop. The paper defines plateau loops and hybrid tonics, and explains the theoretical framework that supports them, consulting work by Harrison (1994), Nobile (2016), and Doll (2017) that decouples scale degree from harmonic function. Song examples by The Chainsmokers, Bon Iver, Jónsi, Astrid S., and M83 show how hybrid tonicity operates in varying degrees of prominence in popular music, and can also be contextualized with Spicer’s (2017) theory of fragile, emergent, and absent tonics. By building on prior scholarship, this paper aims to stimulate further inquiry into how tonal structures of recent popular music subtly differentiate themselves from conventions of common-practice tonality.

The Culture of the Sound Image in Prewar Japan

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Japanese Cinema ◽  
Electronic Sound ◽  
Recorded Sound ◽  
Sound Image ◽  
Visual Style ◽  
Sound Technology ◽  
Sound Culture

This collection of essays explores the development of electronic sound recording in Japanese cinema, radio, and popular music to illuminate the interrelationship of aesthetics, technology, and cultural modernity in prewar Japan. Putting the cinema at the center of a ‘culture of the sound image’, it restores complexity to a media transition that is often described simply as slow and reluctant. In that vibrant sound culture, the talkie was introduced on the radio before it could be heard in the cinema, and pop music adaptations substituted for musicals even as cinema musicians and live narrators resisted the introduction of recorded sound. Taken together, the essays show that the development of sound technology shaped the economic structure of the film industry and its labour practices, the intermedial relation between cinema, radio, and popular music, as well as the architecture of cinemas and the visual style of individual Japanese films and filmmakers.

scholarly journals Starting young: Multimodal gender presentation in children’s pop music

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
School Age ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Mixed Methods Approach ◽  
Music Competition ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Eurovision Song Contest ◽  
Gender Presentation ◽  
Background Context ◽  
Selection Of

A recent quantitative study (Smith, Choueiti, and Pieper 2018) demonstrates the hegemonic discrimination in today’s popular music scene, particularly but not exclusively in gender and race. This paper builds on that study, taking it not only into a multimodal dimension (where musical and visual performances are taken into account), but also extending it to children’s popular music, here defined as popular music performed by children for an audience and market primarily made up of children and their guardians.  The annual Norwegian popular music competition for children aged 8-15 Melodi Grand Prix Junior (MGP Jr) is the children’s equivalent of the adult competition to be Norway’s entry in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC). It has been running since 2004, with 10 entries in each final, and those from 2007 onwards are available for public viewing on the national television channel’s website (tv.NRK.no). The resulting 130 songs thus provide a meaningful corpus from which to study current and recent multimodal gendered presentations of child performers.  Preliminary multimodal gender analyses (cf Maxwell and Mittner 2018) show that the performances are based around traditional gender binaries (i.e. boys and girls). While both presented genders sing, except for rare exceptions it is only boys who play instruments. This both complements and contrasts the study of the ESC (Isaksen forthcoming) which also shows a clear dominance of singing, particularly among female and female-presenting artists (including drag queens).  When these results from children’s pop music and from the ESC are set in relation to Smith, Choueiti, and Peiper 2018 in an interdisciplinary mixed methods approach, it is clear to see that the discrimination in the industry not only begins at a young age, it is also presented as normal, indeed attractive, to child viewers. This is borne out by the decreasing uptake of music tuition at Norwegian kulturskoler (the provider of state-sponsored lessons in the arts), particularly among school-age girls (Utdanningsdirektøret 2017).  In this paper I will present multimodal analyses of a selection of songs from MGP Jr in order to provide both examples of and exceptions to the norms shown by the statistics. In addition, an analysis of the (gendered) presentations of standard Norwegian instrument textbooks (cf Blix 2018) provides background context, with an emphasis on the gendered meanings that surround children in their everyday musical lives.  With thanks to Matilda Maxwell (age 11), aspiring instrumentalist, fan of MGP Jr, and research assistant. 

scholarly journals “Gimme a Beat!”

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 95-117
Author(s):  
Christine Capetola
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
Music Technology ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Digital Music ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
The Senses

In 1986, Janet Jackson forever changed the direction of pop music and its music videos with the release of her third and breakthrough album, Control. Working with producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, choreographer Paula Abdul, and director Mary Lambert, Jackson created songs and videos that conveyed a new kind of feminist affect that intertwined individual stories of endurance, the forcefulness of relatively new digital music technology, and Black and female collectivity. In this article, I chart how Jackson transmitted this feminist affect through what I call hyperaurality, or sounds and vibrations that work in excess of the limitations of visual representation. Through tracing the affective excesses of Jackson’s visuals, sounds, and movements, I unpack how hyperaurality both intensifies and reintegrates the senses of sight, hearing, and feeling. In the process, I posit that vibration, or sound’s materially felt oscillations, works as a point of connection across these three aspects of hyperaurality. By demonstrating its connective power, I assert that vibration is a source of affective politics within popular music, one with the power of repurposing capitalism's excesses.

scholarly journals The Musical Offers of Children’s Programming on «Televisión Española» as its Hearing Universe

Comunicar ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (37) ◽  
pp. 177-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amparo Porta-Navarro
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Direct Experience ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Incidental Music ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Preliminary Study

The music that children are exposed to in their everyday lives plays an important role in shaping the way they interpret the world around them, and television soundtracks are, together with their direct experience of reality, one of the most significant sources of such input. This work is part of a broader research project that looks at what kind of music children listen to in a sample of Latin American and Spanish TV programmes. More specifically, this study focuses on children’s programmes in Spain, and was addressed using a semiotic theoretical framework with a quantitative and musical approach. The programme «Los Lunnis» was chosen as the subject of a preliminary study, which consisted in applying 90 templates and then analysing them in terms of the musical content. The results show that the programme uses music both as the leading figure and as a background element. The most common texture is the accompanied monody and the use of voice, and there is a predominance of electronic instrumental sounds, binary stress and major modes with modulations. Musical pieces are sometimes truncated and rhythmically the music is quite poor; the style used is predominantly that of foreign popular music, with a few allusions to the classical style and to incidental music. The data reveal the presence of music in cultural and patrimonial aspects, as well as in cognitive construction, which were not taken into account in studies on the influence of TV in Spain. Such aspects do emerge, however, when they are reviewed from the perspective of semiotics, musical representation, formal analysis and restructuring theories.La música de la vida cotidiana del niño tiene uno de sus referentes, junto a su experiencia real, en la banda sonora de la televisión, configurando una parte de su interpretación de la realidad. Este trabajo forma parte de una investigación más amplia sobre la escucha televisiva infantil en una muestra iberoamericana. El objetivo, conocer qué escuchan los niños en la programación infantil de «Televisión Española», ha sido estudiado desde un marco teórico semiótico con un enfoque cuantitativo y musical. El artículo presenta un resumen de los resultados obtenidos en un primer análisis del programa «Los Lunnis» mediante la aplicación de noventa plantillas y sus análisis musicales correspondientes. Estos resultados indican que el programa utiliza la música como fondo y figura, textura de monodía acompañada y utilización de la voz, predominio del sonido electrónico instrumental, acento binario y modo mayor con modulaciones. Aparecen piezas musicales cortadas y cierta pobreza rítmica, su opción estilística es la música popular no propia, con algunos guiños al estilo clásico y a la música incidental. Los datos muestran la presencia de la música en aspectos culturales, patrimoniales y de construcción cognitiva no considerados en los estudios sobre la influencia de la TV en España, pero que emergen cuando son revisados desde la semiótica, la representación musical, el análisis formal y las teorías de la reestructuración.

Popular Music, the Devil, and Aerobics

2021 ◽  
pp. 141-194
Author(s):  
Peter J. Schmelz
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Piano Concerto ◽  
Film Scores ◽  
Concerto Grosso ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Entire Career ◽  
First Time ◽  
Group Center

This chapter advances the argument of Sonic Overload by turning to the interactions between art and popular music in Schnittke’s Symphony No. 1, Requiem (1975), Concerto Grosso No. 1 (1977), Piano Concerto (1979), Symphony no. 3 (1976–81), and Faust Cantata (Seid nüchtern und wachet, 1983), as well as several of his film scores. It considers for the first time Schnittke’s ongoing negotiations between high and low across his entire career, giving careful scrutiny to his declaration in the late 1980s that “pop culture is a good disguise for any kind of devilry.” Schnittke’s change of heart, from embracing popular music—and specifically jazz and rock—from the late 1960s through the 1970s, to expressing grave concerns about its effects a decade later, mirrored the sentiments of many. In the turbulent final years of the Soviet Union, rock supplanted poetry as the conscience of the nation yet it still inspired deep anxiety among those embracing traditional Soviet conceptions of being “cultured.” Schnittke’s apprehensions about popular music in the 1980s stemmed from its growing presence in the fragmented late-Soviet soundscape and its growing prestige among newly influential tastemakers, chief among them younger intellectuals and other cultural figures. The elevation of pop music in the USSR (as in the West) expanded a growing generational divide. Schnittke’s own rejection of popular music seems to have been instigated in part by his son, Andrey, who in the early 1980s was a member of the noted Moscow rock group Center (Tsentr), a fact overlooked by previous scholars.

Nordic Modernity and the Structure of the Musical Landscape

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabian Holt
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Geography ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Global Modernity

This chapter outlines macro structural changes in the Nordic music landscape, drawing from sociological theory of modernity. The chapter identifies popular music in wider tensions in Nordic modernity, particularly in relation to shifting hegemonic cultures to uncover the underlying dynamics of tensions between shifting mainstream formations and their alternatives. Following this logic, musical style and taste involve positionings in relation to issues of capitalism, nationalism, and mass media. The chapter analyzes changes in the region’s music landscape within the region’s evolving modernity, particularly in the transition from a national to a more global modernity. This is illustrated by the declining status of Stockholm’s Anglo pop music industry as the region’s center into a more decentralized and networked transnational cultural geography.

Buck Owens, country music, and the struggle for discursive control

Popular Music ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Fenster
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Studio Musicians ◽  
Music Publishers ◽  
Music Genre ◽  
Recording Studios

In the early- and mid-1960s, as mainstream popular music began to reach and exploit the growing youth market, the country music genre was going through a number of important transformations (see Malone 1985; Hemphill 1970). During this period the country music industry, including record companies, recording studios, managing and booking agents, music publishers and musicians, was becoming more fully consolidated in Nashville. In addition, a different kind of dominant sound was beginning to coalesce, based on a more ‘uptown’ feel and intended for a more cosmopolitan audience accustomed to mainstream, adult pop music. The beat and whine of the honky-tonk song, as epitomised by the rural twang in the music of Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell and Webb Pierce, was being replaced as the dominant country music sound by the smooth and urbane ballad styles of Eddy Arnold, Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline. This shift was both caused by and helped to foster the development of a steady set of studio musicians who would appear on thousands of country recordings per year. The musical style that coalesced in Nashville studios through the regular collaboration of these musicians and the record label producers who loosely arranged them became known as the ‘Nashville Sound’, a marketable and identifiable name for a particular set of musical conventions. This sound, nearly as similar to Rosemary Clooney as it was to Hank Williams, called into question the generic boundaries between ‘country’ music and mainstream ‘pop’ music.

Pat Boone’s last laugh: Cover versions and the performance of knowledge

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 440-454
Author(s):  
Nadav Appel
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
Epistemological Perspective ◽  
Central Value ◽  
Pure Intuition ◽  
The Way

The ‘cover version’ is a quintessential yet problematic popular music phenomenon. Endemic to a cultural form in which authenticity is a central value, it also calls authenticity into question by problematizing common notions of creativity and originality. This article investigates the practice of the cover version from a socio-epistemological perspective, inquiring as to the way that knowledge is performed through it. While the romantic mythology of the creative artist attributes the musician’s inspiration to an elusive ‘feel’, the cover version threatens to expose the formalized knowledge that lies behind the façade of pure intuition. Thus, when recording cover versions, musicians often take care to perform their knowledge in specific ways that allow them to reassert an air of unexplainable creativity. These various strategies are detailed and analyzed throughout the article in order to introduce and demonstrate a new theoretical framework for analyzing the relations between knowledge, performance, and cultural production.

Brazil

Popular Music ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-226
Author(s):  
Charles A. Perrone
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Urban Regions ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Musical Cultures ◽  
The World ◽  
The Impact

With its blends of Amerindian, African and European sources, Brazil has one of the richest and most diverse musical cultures in the world. Primitive tribal musics flourish in the Amazon, rural and urban regions practise many folk/traditional forms, and cosmopolitan art music has been produced since before the time of Villa-Lobos. Various musics that can be considered popular reflect both this wide national spectrum and the impact of international mass media pop music. Here, a description of the major tendencies in contemporary urban popular music of Brazil will be followed by bibliographical and discographic indications for further study or research.

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