Details

Subject(s)

• Popular music—Analysis, appreciation [Browse]
• Music—Performance [Browse]
• Gesture in music [Browse]

Series

Oxford studies in music theory [More in this series]

Summary note

"This study of embodiment and meaning in popular music explores a wide-ranging repertoire, offering a performance-based analytical methodology that progresses from basic idiomatic gestures, to gestural combinations and interactions with large-scale design, to broader interpretive strategies that engage with theories of embodiment, the musical topic, and narrative. The book examines artistic practices in popular song that draw from a vast range of stylistic sources, including rock, blues, folk, soul, funk, fusion, and hip-hop, as well as European classical and African American gospel musical traditions. Exploring the interrelationships in how we create, hear, and understand music through the body, the study demonstrates how a focus on body-instrument interaction can illuminate musical structures while leveling implied hierarchies of cultural value. Through detailed analysis of artists' creative strategies in singing and playing their instruments, the book probes how musicians represent subjectivities of gender, race, and social class in shaping songs and whole albums. Tracing connections from foundational musicians including Jimi Hendrix and Aretha Franklin to recent artists, the book clarifies how inferences of musical topic and narrative are part of a larger creative process in strategically positioning musical gestures. This study of popular song explores how the situated and engaged body provides an integral dimension in listening, performing, and creating musical cultures, as it comprises a means by which we understand our own bodies in relation to the world"-- Provided by publisher.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

• Part 1. Guitar Voicing and Embodied Gesture in Rock. Guitar Voicing I : Barre chords, Gesture, and Agency ; Guitar Voicing II : Open-String Chords, Fretboard Strategies, and Virtual Spaces
• Part 2. Gospel and Groove : Gestural Strategies in Soul and Funk. Funk at the Keyboard ; Pentatonic Space to Outer Space : Funk Bands and the Rise of Afrofuturism
• Part 3. Gestural Variation in Songs with Acoustic Instruments. Temporality and Gesture in the Songs of Bob Dylan ; Counterpoint and Embodied Expression in the Music of Joni Mitchell
• Part 4. Situating Gesture. Keyboard Playing in the Beatles' Abbey Road : Topic, Persona, and Social Discourse ; Musical Topic and Ironic Gesture in the Songs of Steely Dan ; Voice in Hip Hop.

Show 1 more Contents items

ISBN

• 9780197692981 (hardcover)
• 0197692982 (hardcover)

LCCN

2023049376

OCLC

1412625961

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