The Musical Language of Rock

In all of the books about rock music, relatively few focus on the purely musical dimensions of the style: dimensions of harmony and melody, tonality and scale, rhythm and meter, phrase structure and form, and emotional expression. The Musical Language of Rock puts forth a new, comprehensive theoretical framework for the study of rock music by addressing each of these aspects. Eastman music theorist and cognition researcher David Temperley brings together a conventional music-analytic approach with statistical corpus analysis to offer an innovative and insightful approach to the genre.

With examples from across a broadly defined rock idiom encompassing everything from the Beatles to Deep Purple, Michael Jackson to Bonnie Raitt, The Musical Language of Rock shows how rock musicians exploit musical parameters to achieve aesthetic and expressive goals-for example, the manipulation of expectation and surprise, the communication of such oppositions as continuity/closure and tension/relaxation, and the expression of emotional states. A major innovation of the book is a three-dimensional model of musical expression-representing valence, energy, and tension-which proves to be a powerful tool for characterizing songs and also for tracing expressive shifts within them. The book includes many musical examples, with sound clips available on the book's website. The Musical Language of Rock presents new insights on the powerful musical mechanisms which have made rock a hallmark of our contemporary musical landscape.

David Temperley is Professor of Music Theory at Eastman School of Music. He has published extensively in the fields of music cognition, music theory, and linguistics. His first book, The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures, won the Society for Music Theory's Emerging Scholar Award. He is also a composer and songwriter.

Preface
About the Companion Website

1. Introduction
1.1 The music of rock
1.2 What is rock?
1.3 Controversial issues
1.4 The corpus

2. Scales and Key
2.1 Scales in rock: Previous views
2.2 A corpus approach to scales in rock
2.3 Key-finding
3. Harmony
3.1 The chordal vocabulary
3.2 Harmonic progression
3.3 The Line-of-fifths Axis
3.4 Common harmonic schemata
3.5 Linear and common-tone logic
3.6 Tonicization, cadences, and pedal points

4. Rhythm and Meter
4.1 Meter in rock
4.2 Syncopation and cross-rhythm
4.3 Harmonic rhythm
4.4 Hypermeter
4.5 Irregular meter

5. Melody
5.1 Melodic grouping
5.2 Motive, repetition, and rhyme
5.3 "Melodic-harmonic divorce"
5.4 Mediant mixture and "blue notes"

6. Timbre and Instrumentation
6.1 Approaches to timbre
6.2 Guitar
6.3 Drums
6.4 Other instruments
6.5 The recording process

7. Emotion and Tension
7.1 The valence dimension
7.2 The energy dimension
7.3 Complexity and tension
7.4 Groove

8. Form
8.1 Basic formal types
8.2 The blues progression
8.3 Verse and chorus
8.4 Other section types
8.5 Ambiguous and unusual cases

9. Strategies
9.1 The VCU boundary
9.2 The cadential IV
9.3 Tensional curves
9.4 Shaping a song
9.5 Scalar and tonal shift

10. Analyses
10.1 Marvin Gaye, "I Heard it Through the Grapevine"
10.2 Elton John, "Philadelphia Freedom"
10.3 Fleetwood Mac, "Landslide"
10.4 U2, "Sunday Bloody Sunday"
10.5 Alanis Morrisette, "You Oughta Know"
10.6 Destiny's Child, "Jumpin' Jumpin'"

11. Rock in Broader Context
11.1 The roots of rock
11.2 Stylistic distinctions and changes within rock
11.3 Interactions and fusions
11.4 Rock after 2000

References
Index