| ||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £3.00
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Interpreting Popular Music for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £3.00, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
"With this book, David Brackett takes his place among the handful of musicologists who are leading the development of a critical musicology for popular music. In clear prose, through a thoughtful, engaging authorial voice, Brackett offers six essays that are unified by his desire to create and refine ways of talking about how popular music works. . . . [Brackett's book] is not only much more illuminating and theoretically sophisticated than nearly all of its predecessors, but also more so than most of what has appeared subsequently."--Robert Walser, "Notes"
Product Description
There is a well-developed vocabulary for discussing classical music, but when it comes to popular music, how do we analyze its effects and its meaning? David Brackett draws from the disciplines of cultural studies and music theory to demonstrate how listeners form opinions about popular songs, and how they come to attribute a rich variety of meanings to them. Exploring several genres of popular music through recordings made by Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Hank Williams, James Brown, and Elvis Costello, Brackett develops a set of tools for looking at both the formal and cultural dimensions of popular music of all kinds.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
In 1965, a recording by Gary Lewis and the Playboys, "This Diamond Ring," shot up the popularity charts shortly after its release, eventually reaching the number one position in February. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
In 1965, a recording by Gary Lewis and the Playboys, "This Diamond Ring," shot up the popularity charts shortly after its release, eventually reaching the number one position in February. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
David Brackett's work is a major contribution to the field of popular music scholarship, as well as to the growing debates about the future of music studies. It's wonderfully readable, thoughtful and wide-ranging, and he challenges some sacred cows in both musicology and popular music studies.
There's something for everyone here: chapter topics range from Hank Williams to James Brown to Elvis Costello. And Brackett smoothly uses a stunning array of approaches tailored to each of these widely varied musics. If you're interested in popular culture, popular music, or music studies, DON'T MISS THIS BOOK!
--Anahid Kassabian
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3 reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Must-read for anyone into music or pop culture studies.
6 Jun 1997
Format:Hardcover
David Brackett's work is a major contribution to the field of popular music scholarship, as well as to the growing debates about the future of music studies. It's wonderfully readable, thoughtful and wide-ranging, and he challenges some sacred cows in both musicology and popular music studies.
There's something for everyone here: chapter topics range from Hank Williams to James Brown to Elvis Costello. And Brackett smoothly uses a stunning array of approaches tailored to each of these widely varied musics. If you're interested in popular culture, popular music, or music studies, DON'T MISS THIS BOOK!
--Anahid Kassabia
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Brilliant, Eclectic. Rigorous, and Open-Ended.
10 Aug 2004
Format:Paperback
David Brackett's "Interpreting Popular Music" is a very valuable addition to the field of popular music scholarship. It self-consciously avoids a general theory of popular music scholarship, but rather makes the case that a wide variety of individual approaches, best tailored to 1) the music involved, and 2) the relative, changing stance of the interpreter to the kind of music at hand, provide the most honest and productive hermeneutic. Add this to a forceful defense of paying attention to popular music (take note, musicologists and ethnomusicologists!) and you have a brilliant, rigorous, but open-ended approach to an area of music until recently mostly ignored by musicology.
Having said that, Brackett takes several subjects for analysis: Hank Williams "You're Cheating Heart," Billie Holiday and Bing Crosby's "I'll Be Seeing You", James Brown"s "Superbad," and Elvis Costello's "Pills and Soap." At each point he critiques and complicates some commonly-held notions, such as biographical relationships between artists and their music (Holiday), notions of immediate 'authenticity' (Williams), and the notions that one can't really write about music, or that musical difference and marketability are at odds (Costello). Drawing on the work of Richard Middleton, Simon Frith and other music scholars, Brackett builds his case at each turn with the help of speech-act theory, African-American literary theory, and "spectrum graphs"-- pitch vs time graphs that help the reader analyze and compare inflection, timbre, style and scope in a more tangible way that simple adjectives. But for the more casual reader, the writing itself is easy and unencumbered. This is a good introduction (without intending to be so) for the beginning scholar of cultural music studies, as the reader really gets a good look at the wide variety of tools available to examine music--not just formal analysis.
Having said that, Brackett takes several subjects for analysis: Hank Williams "You're Cheating Heart," Billie Holiday and Bing Crosby's "I'll Be Seeing You", James Brown"s "Superbad," and Elvis Costello's "Pills and Soap." At each point he critiques and complicates some commonly-held notions, such as biographical relationships between artists and their music (Holiday), notions of immediate 'authenticity' (Williams), and the notions that one can't really write about music, or that musical difference and marketability are at odds (Costello). Drawing on the work of Richard Middleton, Simon Frith and other music scholars, Brackett builds his case at each turn with the help of speech-act theory, African-American literary theory, and "spectrum graphs"-- pitch vs time graphs that help the reader analyze and compare inflection, timbre, style and scope in a more tangible way that simple adjectives. But for the more casual reader, the writing itself is easy and unencumbered. This is a good introduction (without intending to be so) for the beginning scholar of cultural music studies, as the reader really gets a good look at the wide variety of tools available to examine music--not just formal analysis.
Too much academic prose but some good anaysis
10 April 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
The analyses are interesting but I found myself skipping over parts that would have read better if Mr. Brackett had used simpler style that was not so over-worked with academic pedantry (Superbad) "Other utterances that might be considered marginal from and Eurocentric viewpoint, including a variety of grunts and groans, also occur on the latter part of beat four . . . ". The overflowing of original terminology reminds me more of the Saturday Night Live skits that referred to the obtuse and obscure phraseology of self-made Black intellectuals who were prisoners in jail. Ouch.
Attempting to work in a reference to the "golden section" in "Superbad" is not legitimate, IMHO. Such proportions do not hold up during a live performance where changes would naturally occur.
Attempting to work in a reference to the "golden section" in "Superbad" is not legitimate, IMHO. Such proportions do not hold up during a live performance where changes would naturally occur.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Music, Stage & Screen > Music > Styles > Rock & Pop > Styles
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
