"problems" in pop music and the poss. need for a formalist criticism (your suggestions here!)

jess: re. harper's, etc.: not quite. there are unfortunate deficits in film criticism as well. but it's unfortunate that so many magazines (and schools) have no space for pop music! (although sasha's new yorker column is a def. advance on that front, if it lasts.)

when is started this thread i was thinking less about the real-world problems with the viability of such a criticism (owing to commerce, etc.) than hoping for examples of how it could be useful. but we can talk about both.

(x-post)

MORE EXAMPLES PLS!!

"less exclusively technical" is what i meant to write

(i felt rushed by the onslaught of xposts)

one possible thing that could happen as a result of a practiced formal criticism is bringing the art of criticism and the art of making music a bit closer together. it could even potentially help diminish the skepticism that many musicians feel toward criticism (though a lot of that skepticism is probably inevitable, not for the best reasons). i think a good formal criticism would be very informed by an understanding of the sort of choices artists in a given genre make (sometimes half-unconsciously?!) when creating music.

i think musical training is probably a prerequisite, but it would have to be a *modified* or *nuanced* classical training, since the same tools are not used for pop music (or even different genres of pop music) as for classical music.

I mean - so what if diamanda or any pop singer used this or that technique, you know.

One way to do this is to look at the pre-existing metaphors and rationales that pop up in music reviews, but apart from the mythic aspect of some of the problems with these are that they're usually hobbled together cliches with no real explanatory power, or they're based on some concept external to music (eg. critics who treat songwriting like literature), or they're unknowingly discriminatory, veiling a "best practice" standard of which all other music is merely an inferior derivation.

Of course I think most critical concepts are going to suffer from this veiled best practice thing (whether the idol is real or imagined) because we use critical concepts to say something about the qualitative value of the music we're looking at. But I think it's important to allow for an endless multiplicity of critical models to explain this strategy of effectiveness, to allow the music we're looking at to determine the nature of the critical concept we use along an ascending model of analysis rather than a descending model of analysis. Indeed there can be no one model to explain this interaction between the music and the listener, because inherent to the success of a "strategy" is its novel combination of tactics, its element of surprise.

... and of course many of you are familiar with it since you posted there as well.

more later.

The next question I want to ask though is "for what reasons or under what conditions would the listener *want* a tight groove". I don't think you can rest on the technical explanation of the tightness of the groove as an explanation of the music's quality because that assumes that tightness (in grooves) is universally desirable.

ok i really gotta leave now....

i should add that between the music's creation and the "demands of the marketplace" there are even more proximate factors like the cost of a session, new dance crazes, james brown's bass player being fired on thursday, etc.

Rachel Stevens' "Some Girls" can be explained technically by breaking down its discrete sonic and musical components, but that doesn't explain the wealth of associations, the interlinks between sonics and contexts (most obviously the schaffel-pop groove, whose resonance will be utterly different depending on whether the listener can "place" it or not).

Regarding the tightness of the groove: rhythmic regularity is significant in making people want to dance. That's how drum machines and Kraftwerk can be "funky." If you could show, graphically, how the members of James Brown's band's articulations are all constantly right on the beats (or on the upbeats or wherever they're supposed to go), and that the tempo stays very constant, that would be significant.

xpost with tim

personally, i want to feel it, not think it.

"feeling" and "thinking" shouldn't be set against each other like dogs
cocks then? with razor blade claws.

"feeling" without "thinking" about those feelings is the province of children and the mentally handicapped.
uh...okay.

xposts

Then you should understand why I don't want to think about "I Want Candy".

heh heh. that's me.

No, but it didn't claim to.

"Or why some people like dancing to it and others don't? Or how people actually, physically dance to it? Again I don't see how that approach goes beyond a sort of ahistorical impersonal explanation that has to presume some ideal audience reaction for which there is no real explanation."

Sometimes it just suffices to say, "A lot of people like to dance to James Brown. Their enormously tight rhythmic regularity is part of why that is so."

Whenever this subject comes up, I always feel like I'm saying the same thing: while I don't have the chops to perform useful analyses of the techne of music, I'm all for other people doing it, anything to add to the galaxy of possible understandings of rock music cannot be anything but a good thing, let a hundred flowers blom, etc.

But I think about music strictly for enjoyment, too!

However, IMO the structures and phenomenon within music itself are perfectly up for discussion and analysis within a normal album or song review. Why not? At the very least, it's just another plane of discussion, and why should anyone restrict themselves about what they're willing to consider about music?

um, no they aren't

book reviews are almost always written by people who wish they were writers, just as most music reviews are written by people who wish they were musicians.

those who can, do. those who can't work as critics.

(except for bad footballers- they just play in goals)

Besides, if music writers are bitter, there are a lot better reasons than not being musicians.

x-post

I already regret posting to this thread. I would like to state for the record, that I don't believe the "those who can't, write" line.

Good question. These days, next to none. Honestly. I've kind of given up on music journalism except to see what has been released. Why? Hrmm. I think I've come to view so much of it as vacuous filler between advertisements or a tool by whomever to get free shit in the mail or maybe some public relations bait to get a bigger interview.

Just about everything I've come to love lately has come from reading ILM. My recent obsession with "Ignition (remix)", which I had never heard until two weeks ago, for instance came about after reading a thread on the new R. Kelly album. Likewise, Chuck made Big & Rich sound really fun in a couple posts on the rolling 2004 country thread. I was also, a few months back, able to read someone say the last Guided By Voices (a band I'd long since given up on) was their best., so I gave it a shot. Now, back before ILM or the internet, I *had* to rely on crit out of economic necessity. Now, fugg, anything can be pulled down at any time and immediately deleted or saved as *my* tastes discern. It's great.

No musicological (is that a word, tim?) argument ever made me go out and buy an album. I don't understand it. If that's why I'm against the whole concept, I apologize. It strikes me as boring.

I will say this, though. The other day, there was some mention of thirds to fifths or some such on the Fiery Furnaces Blueberry Boat and how it's their only trick. I did think to myself, oh, maybe that's why I can't listen to that album very often. So maybe you guys have a point. Maybe...

But there are plenty of critic-musicians and musician-critics, and they rarely venture into the musicological path. (Kogan's something of an exception.)

It had nothing to do with his impressive technical knowledge and everything to do with what he did with it. The technical knowledge is not neccessary; it can help in certain situations. Which I think is essentially what Tim is saying - you have to be pragmatic and adapt yr writing to the context - time place experience whatever - of when yr reviewing it.

(correct me if I'm wrong)

But I don't think that simply explaining how the music was created necessarily covers the full extent of explaining how it operates on the listener

this raised some interesting thoughts in my head

I write music with my laptop, and I find that the best stuff (the stuff that other people are the most excited about when I play it to them, and the stuff that I'm happiest with when it's done) tends to come when I get completely lost in what I'm doing.. when the sound becomes a tactile experience that holds my attention all the way through, without any bits jutting up at me and saying 'I'm wrong' then I know that I'm probably done with a track.

This best stuff comes when I abandon any pretences about what the listener might want to hear and write what I'd want to hear - it's like it turns out that what I want to hear is what everyone else wants to hear, but I mean that not in an arrogant way, I mean like.. umm.. say a track's divided into a,b,c sections, if you engage fully with a) then a satisfying transition from a) to b) in my mind is also a satisfying transition in your mind, if you maintain full engagement. A transition/development/continuation of sound that is musically or logically consistent within the local logical system (but it's not logical, see; it's more like experiential logic, this feeling followed by this feeling because that's what just makes sense) is going to be enjoyable for anyone to listen to, but only if they are fully engaged.

(Embedded in there is part of the reason why I write solo and tend to have a lot of difficulty on collaborative things - electronica works as far as I'm concerned when it's the sound of being alone - that's it's primary strength, ten or thirty or fifty hours of distilled aloneness focussed into eight minutes of music.)

Wow. Why was I talking about that? Ummm..

right. At least with electronica, the techniques of creation and the effect on the listener are one and the same. Composing for me consists of having some vague idea of something, setting it up, and then closing my eyes (sometimes after getting up from the chair and going to sit on the floor between the speakers) and listening and seeing how it feels. So if I've got a rhythmic element that's strongly swinging it's in there because that's what I as a listener would want to hear if I was just listening and not composing.

Listening to electronica for me is an experience which is better sometimes than others. It tends to be better when I'm focussing on it and actively listening to it, rather than just letting it passively float around me. To fully engage with a piece of electronica is to enter into a mindstate similar to if not identical to the mindstate the composer was in when they were playing.

So in cases like this (does this apply to electronica or just electronica that Damian likes? I like trippy electronica, hypnotic stuff that makes your eyes glaze over in a good way) talking about how the music is created, if you limit your terms of creation to a relatively abstract level ('this bit comes in here, this bit stops here'), just is talking about how the music is perceived.

robert pirsig to thread.

x-post

Unsatisfatory Crit As It Is Now: This song rocks because the singer is a junky, and the guitars have lots of reverb.

Longwinded Showoffy Crit: This song rocks because of the G#min9 guitar arpeggio played over the VI-ii-VII-ii-Tonic progression.

New More Informed Crit: This song rocks because the chords behind the guitar line make it sound like the tonal center is shifting which is spacy and cool.

looking back, the original question was good in that it provided an example to work with. otherwise it' all very abstract.....

It's no dream sir!

ive got quite a lot of thoughts involved in this discussion and ill try to get them formed and up here soon.

sorry i haven't been on this thread the last few hours, but tomorrow i will write more.

i used to read popular music (sometimes) when i had university-library access. although i found it to be a bit more sociological-esque criticism than formal criticism. unless i'm thinking of a different journal

Popular Music does have non-"sociological" pices, I remember an interesting analysis of Pulp's "This is Hardcore". At least I think it was in PM.

Also, amateurist, what do you think of writers like Philip Tagg and Richard Middleton?

It is? Explain how.

And how does this relate to pop, where most of what you actually hear is production?

i still have to form what i imagine will be a long post involving piet mondrian, captain beefheart, "swing," indeterminacy, elvin jones, and boogie woogie. we'll see if that ever comes out in a somewhat logical fashion.

I agree that the end goal is to be effective, yes. But what affects me may not affect you. Isn't it all a matter of personal taste and what the listener has went through and heard before to make it effective? For instance, if you have heard an album in the past that has the same theme/way of approaching things/just overall feeling of the album that you are listening to now, won't that affect your judgement on whether or not this one is effective? If you can relate to the lyrics won't that affect your view on if the album is effective or not?

And this, to me is where we need to look to the technical side of things. After all, to alot of people Avril Lavigne is effective. To me, she isn't, AND nobody in that band is challenging themselves as musicians. I don't think anybody can argue with that. So I think of that as a fact and the rest (if it is effective or not) taken with a grain of salt.

"How would it affect the quality of the music? Liking something because the musician "tried really hard" is just about the last criterion I would use, and I'm not even sure it's particularly complementary"

So, music critics should just not even think about the technical aspect of things? Technicality IS the "quality" of the music to the public. The intelligent song writing. You can walk up to somebody and say that, technically, X person in X band is a great guitar player. And, assuming you have basic knowledge of guitar players, this is a fact because ANYBODY who has basic knowledge of guitar players will agree. It's universal quality. How it makes you FEEL is the opinion.

And no, I'm not going to listen to something beacuse it is technical if it doesn't affect me. But I'm also not going to write a review of how bland the album is without even considering that they, themselves are good musicians and not totally worthless.

I mean, honestly, if you read a review of an album you have been intrested in for some time, and it says that it's unemotional, whatever but still is technically amazing are you not going to see if you agree that it's not effective? (Say this is the one who does consider the technical side.)

And how about if instead they wrote a review that said it was not moving at all and doesn't consider the technical aspects...would you still even bother with it? I know I wouldn't.

So yes, I think it is necessary in order to give a non biasreview. But I suppose we're getting off topic now.

>>I'll listen and take notes first, sometimes blind (not even knowing whom I'm listening to), then gather info. Promo sheets can be useful, but you have to bear in mind that their purpose is to try to get you to perceive the music in a certain way so that your review will send a pre-chosen message. (There's nothing inherently wrong with promo sheets playing that role; you just have to use your own judgment when reading.) And knowing lots about music and social contexts in general (which frankly I never feel I know very well) is more important than doing particular research on a particular band. And info gained from living your life and keeping eyes and ears open may be more crucial than any specific band- or genre-related research you do. And some unsolicited advice: The basic review game Name the genre, laud or criticize band for living/not living up to it, or laud/critice band for crossing genre boundaries, is really old and tired; so's the shtick of lauding band for resisting commercial or social pressure (or lauding yourself for resisting the same in your review)(or lauding yourself for resisting the impulse to do the foregoing), or criticizing the band for not resisting. Not that I don't do such things plenty in my reviews, since often I don't know what to say.
-- Frank Kogan (edcasua...), September 8th, 2004.

i hope i can write more later (i'm in a pinch at work), but suffice to say for the moment that the work this sort of criticism would be doing is less about reviewing a piece of music's "worth" or purchase-value as explaining how it functions.

xpost

chuck, how do you think frank's comments fit into the concerns of this thread?

At the point when music structure and arrangement becomes that closely linked to my experience with it, it's unfair/irresponsible/borderline dishonest *not* to mention it. And I think this happens a lot more than a lot of music writers give credit for it.

xpost

I don't understand how one negates the other at all.

I actually watched a little of that old PBS documentary on rock and roll last night and there was an interview with George Martin. He said that the strings on "Eleanor Rigby" were influenced by Bernard Herrman. The staccato strings, like the Psycho soundtrack! I never realized that.

(x-post)

obv. this sort of criticism would not serve the same function as a consumer guide or even a record review. i don't expect it to serve the same function.

How does good rock criticism (whether it uses technical knowledge of music as its main tool or not) not already do this? (Not sure what "a lot of thinking prior to evaulation" means, though, since I have no idea how a writer could detach herself from her musical preferences, whether she actually incorporates them into her writing or not. And I don't understand what is *lost* by the act of incoporating them. And of course, evaluation *is* part of thinking, in and of itself.)

see my first example for, um, an example of where contemporary criticism possibly comes up short!

instead of saying "she sold out" or "she didn't sell out" or "this music is great!" or "it sucks!" (all more or less evaluative statements) why don't we talk about how the music works as music, and how its functioning differs from her earlier records.

i don't know why you are so combative. i'm not trying to put you out of a job or anything!

this is what i meant when i said you react to all criticism/comment defensively, as if someone is directly criticizing you.

chuck, why don't you come up with an example as per my request at the beginning of this thread? i'd like to hear it!

even if we judge criticism by its best examples (christgau?) there are lots of things it doesn't help me to understand.

And yes, I think "technical evaluation" is a GOOD thing. I've said that repeatedly; never once argued otherwise. I respect critics who can do it well. It SHOULD be part of music criticism. And it is! And so are lots of other things, many of them just as worthwhile!

so what are we arguing about? i agree.

(although i do feel that "technical evaluation" is more necessary now than other forms, with which we are already saturated and which have often descended into increasingly uncommunicative mannerisms. but that's a side point. my main point is just that it'd be nice to see some "technical evaluation" alongside the other forms of criticism. that's all.)

mostly clean gave an example of what I think is a good direction to go in:

"New More Informed Crit: This song rocks because the chords behind the guitar line make it sound like the tonal center is shifting which is spacy and cool. "

this is i think, right on the money. It's not overly theoretical, but it provides a reason for the feeling.

what makes a good music listener? does some theory help? I mean, you dont have to be classically trained, god knows i'm not, but what about a basic knowledge of intervals and rhythm?

what about a good reader? would you say that a good reader knows something about the theoretical elements of a story? character development, theme, symbols, images, conflict and resolution?

I would say yes to both. a little bit of begining theory goes a long way and is really valuable. I'd love to see music criticism in the style of the New More Informed Critic.

(i agree amateur!!st :) )

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0252/kogan.php

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0002/kogan.php

On Six by Seven's The Way I Feel Today, the singer puts Everlys-Beatles wiggles in his voice, but sings wistfully pale, so you think of sweet beauty off in the sorrowful mist; but the band will insert drones and dissonance. And then they'll hit you with a fast hard loud punk track. And then go back to fey'd-out McCartney, then grinding sound layers reminiscent of Sonic Youth. And then a Dylanesque voice through the roar. Tuneful sadness, at all speeds and volumes.

is descriptive in an impressionistic sense, not in a precise musicological sense. so it's limited in its ability to get me to understand how the music he's discussing works. not to say it doesn't achieve other things!!!!!!!! (i cannot make that point enough, apparently.)

but that's interesting to me! now i know a little bit abt what i'm hearing! and maybe i can be more precise in describing the relations b/t various bands in the future.... i mean, that's a really simple example. i think someone could get a lot more ambitious/even more precise about the components that make up the "sonic youth sound", where they come from, how they've been used differenly, etc.

However, to try and take that language and apply it to popular music is only going to get you so far.

i agree. i think it'd be possible to expand the musicological pallette to explain various musical phenomena in pop/rock though! a friend and i started to develop a kind of musical notation for dub music, based on the different techniques that dub remixers apply to tracks. it only had a glancing relation to classical musical notation but it was potentially useful/interesting (although we never got very far, out of laziness/being otherwise preoccupied).

also some musicologists have developed various sophisticated ways of talking about, say, blues music, or arabic music, that expand greatly upon conventional classical musicology. so anything's possible!!!

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0431/queen.php

chuck, that's a cool example! is dave queen the same as dave q???

now i'm even more confused.
amateurist, come quick with some examples.
haven't read the vv articles yet, but that quote you pasted was what i thought you wanted. can you rewrite it so it's more what you're after?
to me: "fast, hard, loud" is a very clear description of what's going on musically.
also: "fey'd-out McCartney" is a fairly precise way to explain how the music works. do you want an explanation of what makes it sound "fey"?

(obv the kind of shorthand in that article is somewhat necessary for a short piece like that, which still tries to cover a lot of ground. and some of that kind of impressionistic writing can be fairly precise by the standards of such things. kogan is very good at it, for one. so i'm not suggesting his article is *bad* or anything like that. just that there are other ways to describe things that i'd be interested in reading. that would teach me about different things. that would help me indentify the sources of certain sounds and their purpose within an overall structure of a piece of music.)

But how fast, how hard, how loud? I actually wouldn't mind seeing more quantification in record reviews. For example, when discussing a song, why not provide BPM, dynamic range in db, number of times the chorus is repeated, and so on? It would be interesting to see a critic try and find out how many possible ways of quantifying a piece of music they could find.

Bhat's cool, but I think what makes classical technical criticism (musicological as it being called on this thread, I'm not sure that's really the right way to use that word) work on western classical music is that western classical music has traditionally (not anymore, of course) had an agreed upon set of, well, *right* and *wrong* things to do against which the music could be judged. And that set of rights and wrongs has now, long after the fact, been "understood" and codified and set down, so that musicological criticism written of those works now *looks* so informative and enlightening vis a vis the effects of the music.

As it was being written, did the criticism of these classical artists tend toward the technical-musicological? Or were their critics writing impressionistically at the time? "the new mazurka by Chopin has the edges sanded off..." I've read some old criticism for classes but my recall of it isn't quick enough for this post...

Maybe (probably) there are other musics that also have this agreed-upon set of right/wrong/goals/techniques, but is pop one of them? Can any music being discussed/performed/recorded/listened to in the present be one of them without egregious calling out of value judgements?

the theory def. needs to change to fit the object under discussion. and it has! there's a lot of musicology that really departs from classical musical notation. just lot a whole lot of it relating to pop music (again, as opposed to blues, or arabic music, or hindi music, or whatever)

He's right that they're similar, though!

Can you notate the opening riff in "Down Boys" by Warrant now? I'm curious!

or, I should say it doesn't only equal music theory, taking into account cultural and historical aspects of music (ie, if chemistry, biology and physics are the "theory" of people, then musicology is more like sociology or psychology)

dominique: that's true. i've been stupidly conflating music theory and musicology. i wish i had my terms a bit straighter. thanks for the correction.

frankE, here's my attempt to answer why you actually might care (it's "Death Rock 2000," the second piece of mine that Chuck linked to above).

Technical vocabulary is neither good nor bad; like anything else, you need to make it part of a story or an idea. That is, if you say "Writer X uses a lot of compound adjectives," you haven't said much unless you say to what effect he uses them (though merely pointing out the use of those adjectives might nonetheless inspire someone else to go, "You're right; he does use a lot of compound adjectives; I wonder to what effect?")

You still might reasonably ask "So what?" But someone might be able to answer that question in an interesting way, once the phenomenon has been pointed out.

Not sure what Amateurist means by "problems," though I think "Death Rock 2000" states a couple, and states them as both formal problems and social problems, in that the relation isn't simply between musical elements but between people. ("Tensions" might be a better word than "problems," in that one plays with the tensions without any wish to "solve" them.) A lesson I hoped to impart was that not only is the "audience" literally part of the form of the music in call-and-response, but by analogy the audience can be part of the musical form even when not there at the music's creation. E.g., dance records. If you're making the record to accompany a particular dance step, or for a particular milieu, you're making it in relation to a particular response, even if the responder isn't in the room with you (and even if in actuality the record gets a different response). This is similar to what Tim Finney is saying.

Here's a small question (better word than "problem" for this one): When I first heard "Cathy's Clown" (1960), which was maybe a decade after I first heard the Beatles, I thought I'd discovered the Rosetta Stone. "That's where the Beatles got it from." But I never followed up, never actually tried to figure out how often and how closely the Beatles were doing "Cathy's Clown," or what other antecedents there might be. My question could be, why does it sound so Beatle-like?.

The drums in the recurring bridge in "Cathy's Clown" (you know, like the one that starts, "I"ve gotta stand tall" etc.) also sounds like the Beatles to me. Not sure what song, though.

There might be other "Cathy's Clown" elements in Beatles songs, too, but I'm not sure where offhand. Something about the verse structure and the way it's sung in harmony? (I do know that the Beatles played the song in their early days.)

And, of course, they both have a descending melismatic trajectory.

What I'm wondering - idly - is, if I heard wiggles with family resemblances to Clown-Do, would they generally register to me as Everly-Beatles voice wiggles, or old rock 'n' roll, or what? (Wish I could find that Six By Seven CD.) (And though the piece isn't short, the treatment of Six By Seven is short, as is the treatment of each of the other 24 bands I mentioned, so Amateurist is right about my working with space constraints. But even if I hadn't been, in that context [i.e., not raising the specific Beatles-Everlys question that I raise on this thread] I wouldn't have gotten more technical.)

Somehow, it still seems like it might be a "Cathy's Clown"-ism, though. The fact that they both have that pentatonic-like skipping of the fourth in the melody might be significant.

(Since I don't know music theory, I'm not sure how exciting I would be if I were reading this about a song I had never heard though.)

Here's the argument in brief: It's possible that "Cathy's Clown" is the source of the Beatles vocal wiggle even if no Beatles song ever had the precise notes of the Cathy wiggle.

(Polanyi, Kuhn, and Wittgenstein to thread.)

well, i don't mean to suggest that there isn't considerable overlap. it's less a matter of formal vs. impressionistic than precise vs. imprecise. i could stand for crticism, not to forgo evaluation, but to perhaps deemphasize it to make room (since there are always space constraints) for more precise stylistic description and careful arguments based on same.

Also, for descriptive purposes, "Everly-Beatles' vocal wiggles" conveys the sound far better than does "la-so-la-so-mi" to anyone who's heard the Everlys and Beatles, since 99.999% of the readers (incl. me) would either be completely at a loss reading "la-so-la-so-mi" or they'd have to spend time translating it (and anyway it leaves out the rhythm, so you still don't get the riff). But, again, what you write depends on what question you're asking, what you're trying to accomplish.

another "problem": explain exactly which set of music proclivities induce people to call steely dan "slick"

Which is my point, sorta. Whether you’re getting all musicologically formalist, or using deconstruction-y and/or heavy theory means to address the music at hand, you’re gonna leave some people going Wha?, or risk adopting an exposition heavy lecture on readers who will rightly despise you for it, or seem a self-satisfied prick.

Then there’s the problem/challenge of subjectivity, which I think no reviewer can be humble about enough, and, for me, is the most odious thing in music writing, except when it works. (I’m thinking James Baldwin’s essays on film, Mikal Gilmore’s "Night Music", or Andrew Vachss’ first-person in-novel odes to Judy Henske.)

To me, the main villain is word count, which superimposing a style right off, most often characterized by pushing the language/reference envelope at all times to create a sort of expressionistic sense of the musical piece, but most often at the expense of conveying basic considerations like, Dude, does this suck or what?

Which, in the extreme, leaves you with writing for academia or Maxim.

Me, I’d love to write about music from a sort of psycho-acoustic pathology POV, but I doubt I’m gonna find many buyers that way. It would be formalistic tho.

sorry ian not ignoring your post--will post more later

OTM OTM OTM OTM OTM

I imagine some musicologists would say this has already happened, at least in theory (npi). In practice, because classical western music theory is so ingrained in academia and so 'known', it will still be taught generally whereas any other systems (like what?) will only be taught via specialization. Maybe time and a poetics of pop can/will change this.

i do not think the future of music should be all nirvana play-it-by-ear, but i do think microacoustics (not glitch so much as more complex scales. why can't i think of his name... jackson, j-ugh. i can't even think of the name of the scales he was foxing with) and indian/gamalan (sp) (TRITE!) ideas aren't necessarily primitive, and dance music was a result of phillip glass, who obv uses an arpegiator. yeah, i'm getting a little uppity.

but then doesn't everyone review pop formally?

boulez analyzes classical music using a method of formal analysis appropriate to classical music, so a pop equivalent of orientations would analyze pop music using a method of formal analysis appropriate to pop music (developing such a method is itself part of the "project" i'd like to see). my comparison was less about the specific methodology employed by boulez as about the rigor and precision of his thinking, the clarity of his rhetoric, and the ambitiousness of his project, i.e. breaking down a piece of music into all its constituent elements and finding out how it "works." i imagine this could be done for a pop record as well as a symphony.

as i've noted a few times upthread, music theory has already been adapted/revised/rebuilt for the purposes of analyzing different styles of music. the few examples of a precise music criticism that i've mentioned so far (franklin bruno etc.) themselves do this, in a somewhat casual fashion.

We could carve up the domain of historical poetics in still other ways. Following R. S. Crane, we could distinguish studies of precompositional factors (sources, influences, cliches, received forms) from compositional ones (normalized principles of combination and transformation within works) and from postcompositional ones (effects, reception, varying responses in different contexts). For example, Noel Burch's To the Distant Observer treats Japanese cinema as the legatee of stylistic practices from earlier centuries, while Vance Kepley's In the Service of the State, using a different precompositional focus, traces more proximate influences on Dovzhenko's films. The work of Charles Musser, Tom Gunning, and Andre Gaudreault has demonstrated that pre-1915 films obey coherent compositional norms. And recent work in reception by Janet Staiger has revealed how audiences' varying construals of the same film presuppose historically variable viewing conventions. In my own studies of Dreyer and Ozu, I have tried to relate the three domains by suggesting historically determinate gaps among them. In the works of Ozu, for instance, source material and contemporary conventions are transformed by specific compositional procedures, but the results have been appropriated differently by various audiences.

Recognizing that linguistic analogies are notoriously shaky in film studies, I will risk one more mapping of the field. Like linguistics, film poetics has its "semantics," the study of how meaning is produced. It has its "syntactics," the study of rules for selecting and combining units (with respect to style, Raymond Bellour's micro-analyses; with respect to compositional form, Thierry Kuntzel's study of openings, Peter Wollen's applications of Propp, or Rick Altman's "dual-focus" narrative). And poetics has its "pragmatics," the study of how relations between viewer and text develop in the process of the film's unfolding (e.g., accounts of narration or of filmic "enunciation"). Meaning, structure, and process--these three aspects of any representational system are also central to poetics.

These equable mappings of the terrain conceal, of course, how much territory is in dispute. I have already suggested several issues about which poeticians wrangle; two more divergences seem to me worth brief discussion.

Across history, poetics has had to steer a course between strictly "immanent" accounts and strictly "subsumptive" ones. Few poeticians have been willing to accept the consequences of an utterly intrinsic account of constructional processes; even Wolfflin, mistakenly treated as the model of the pure formalist, explained changes in artistic styles partly by changes in a culture's visual habits. On the other side, very few poeticians have sought to account for every phenomenon by appeal to processes in other social domains; even the Zhdanovite recognizes some special quality in art. For most poeticians, the constructional principles studied are not self-sealed, but they are also not in every respect subsumable to other principles.

Assuming that the escape hatch of "relative autonomy" is of no help, we can distinguish two tendencies within poetics. One tendency hypothesizes that the phenomenon we study has a considerable degree of self-regulated coherence. The early Shklvosky seems to hold this view; he seeks to explain the laws of fairy tale composition by purely poetic principles like repetition, retardation, and so forth. He gives theoretical priority to such factors. In film poetics, perhaps Burch's Theory of Film Practice approaches this position. The second tendency, articulated by the later Russian Formalists and the Prague Structuralists, gives immanent factors only a methodological priority. For example, as Tynianov and Jakobson point out, even if the immanent evolution of literature can explain the direction of change, it cannot explain timing, which must be governed by extraliterary causes. A comparable position is taken by Staiger, Thompson, and myself in studying the history of the classical Hollywood cinema. Here the analyst looks first to the "immanent" factors that might be the most proximate and pertinent causal factors but also assumes that virtually every explanatory task will require moving to those mediations that lie in "adjacent" domains.

To continue the geographical metaphor, poetics is less a field with distinct boundaries than a kind of Alsace-Lorraine constantly being claimed by interested neighbors. On one side is Aesthetics, which, in the eighteenth century, replaced the study of poetic praxis with a concern for the philosophical problems involved in the creation and appreciation of beauty. On another side lies Semiotics, which seeks to subsume poetics into a general theory of the production of meaning. Interestingly, poeticians have been drafted into both camps. Aristotle, the Russian Formalists, and the Prague Structuralists can play roles in the history of aesthetics, as in Beardsley's survey history, or they can be promoted to the rank of proto-semioticians, as Peter Steiner does.

In my view, the tension between semiotics and aesthetics has been immensely fruitful. There remains, however, a core of questions and issues that cannot be wholly absorbed into the adjacent areas. It is useful to differentiate between the practical theory of an art and the philosophy of it. The "practical theory" of music or poetry, for instance rests upon a posteriori questions, involving empirical generalizations about conventions and practices in these arts. From this perspective, film poetics is a systematizing of theoretical inquiry into cinematic practices as they have existed. The philosophy of an art, on the other hand, inquires into the a priori aspects of it; it involves conceptual analysis of its logical nature and functions. On the whole, aesthetics concentrates upon such matters. As for semiotics, it concentrates on matters of meaning, which is only part of the effects for which a poetics seeks to account; on the other hand, if semiotics seeks to explain "the life of signs in society," it encompasses far more than any poetics can. Yet one should not discourage border crossings; if Barthes' S/Z offers a semiotics and Goodman's Languages of Art offers an aesthetics, both are splendid contributions to poetics.

(apologies if you have)...

This was an interesting thread.

Except the actual answer was Lionel Hampton.

It's possible that "Cathy's Clown" is the source of the Beatles vocal wiggle even if no Beatles song ever had the precise notes of the Cathy wiggle.

is this what's meant by "leaving yrself wiggle room"??

This is an interesting thread. I guess the stuff I've been doing on production / compression / sound is related to this; it's certainly an attempt to engage with music on a physical / technical level as well as a cultural / personal one. I'm not really interested in just saying "this record sounds bad", but rather "this record sounds bad because..." and then trying to extrapolate reasons for decisions in the process of production.

It's difficult though because I know for every one person who understands it, there are 100 who don't, and not because they can't, but because they don't think they're not bothered.

Gordon Brown's probably not bothered about it at the moment.

I'm not really interested in just saying "this record sounds bad", but rather "this record sounds bad because..." and then trying to extrapolate reasons for decisions in the process of production IT WAS OVERCOMPRESSED

amirite?

Not quite. WHY WAS IT OVERCOMPRESSED? is the question.

Thrusting Thatcherkids always need a bigger sonic hit.

"Wrongly compressed" might be more apposite here than "overcompressed" since many of the best records of the sixties benefited markedly from the latter.

Aye, I'd go along with that. If XTRMNTR was uncompressed it'd sound daft.

i like this paragraph from the wikipedia page on usher's climax:

"Climax" is a quiet storm slow jam set in common time.[6][7][8] It is written in the key of C minor, and Usher's voice ranges from B♭3 to G5.[8] The music is built around a haunting riff, complemented by sparse drum machine and some musical accompaniment.[9] Its varying soundscape incorporates electronic effects such as clicks, hisses, whooshes, and low-frequency synths,[6][10] as well as subtle strings and scattered piano notes.[7] Music writers have noted Diplo's production as uncharacteristically reserved and understated.[9][10][11][12]
The song's musical structure is characterized by intervals in which the music builds to a potential break, but softly decrescendos instead.[11] As each verse concludes, the song's snapping, electronic rhythm track gradually softens and rippling synth chords repeat throughout the song.[7] Marc Hogan of Spin writes that Diplo "teases us with the sort of wubba-wubba subwoofer noises that have become inescapable in the past year or so of pop radio. But he never actually gives in with the full dubstep drop [...] the song keeps swelling to one big wave after another, without ever really reaching a single, song-stopping crescendo."[7] Hogan cites the bridge at around the three-minute mark as "the closest thing to a climax" on the song, "when the track gets as quiet as it ever has before becoming as lush as it ever gets."[7] Pitchfork Media's Carrie Battan calls the song "an exercise in the power of restraint", commenting that "Diplo shows uncharacteristic subtlety behind Usher's sentiment, with a beat that seems to hang suspended in midair."[11]

i mean that isn't exactly what i had in mind when i started this thread but it was kind of refreshing to read in a wikipedia entry.