analysing popular music - theory, method and practice by phi.pdf - music theory - Marian_Chomik

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2001-12-19 17:03

P Tagg, IPM, University of Liverpool

Analysing popular music:

theory, method and practice

by Philip Tagg

First published in Popular Music , 2 (1982): 37-65

Popular music analysis - why?

One of the initial problems for any new field of study is the attitude of incredulity it

meets. The serious study of popular music is no exception to this rule. It is often con-

fronted with an attitude of bemused suspicion implying that there is something weird

about taking ‘fun’ seriously or finding ‘fun’ in ‘serious things’. Such attitudes are of

considerable interest when discussing the aims and methods of popular music analysis

and serve as an excellent introduction to this article.

In announcing the first International Conference on Popular Music Research, held at

Amsterdam in June 198i, The Times Diary printed the headline ‘Going Dutch - The Don-

nish Disciples of Pop’ ( The Times 16 June 1981). Judging from the generous use of in-

verted commas, sics and ‘would-you-believe-it’ turns of phrase, the Times diarist was

comically baffled by the idea of people getting together for some serious discussions

about a phenomenon which the average Westerner’s brain probably spends around

twenty-five per cent of its lifetime registering, monitoring and decoding. It should be

added that The Times is just as incredulous about ‘”A Yearbook of Popular Music”

(sic)’ (their sic), in which this ‘serious’ article about ‘fun’ now appears.

In announcing the same conference on popular music research, the New Musical Express

(20 June 1981, p. 63) was so witty and snappy that the excerpt can be quoted in full.

Meanwhile, over in Amsterdam this weekend, high foreheads from the four corners of the

earth (Sid and Doris Bonkers) will meet for the first International Conference on Popular Mu-

sic at the University of Amsterdam. In between the cheese and wine parties, serious young

men and women with goatee beards and glasses will discuss such vitally important issues as

‘God, Morality and Meaning in the Recent Songs of Bob Dylan’. 1 Should be a barrel of

laughs...

This wonderfully imaginative piece of poetry is itself a great barrel of laughs to anyone

present at the conference with its zero (0 per cent) wine and cheese parties, one (0.8 per

cent) goatee beard and a dozen {38} (10 per cent) bespectacled participants. (As ‘Sid

Bonkers’, I do admit to having worn contact lenses). Talks were given by active rock

musicians, by an ex- NME and Rolling Stone journalist, by radio people and by Paul Ol-

iver, who may have worn glasses but who, even if maliciously imagined with a goatee

beard, horns and a trident, has probably done more to increase respect, understanding

and enthusiasm for the music of black Americans than the NME is ever likely to.

This convergence of opinion between such unlikely bedfellows as The Times and the

NME about the imagined incongruity of popular music as an area for serious study im-

plies one of two things. Either popular music is so worthless that it should not be taken

seriously (unlikely, since pop journalists obviously rely on the existence of popular mu-

sic for their livelihood) or academics are so hopeless — absent-mindedly mumbling

long Latin words under their mortarboards in ivory towers — that the prospect of them

No such talk was on the conference programme! Actually it is the title of Wilfrid Mellers’s article in Popular

Music 1 (1981, pp. 143-157).

P Tagg: Analysing Popular Music (1982)

trying to deal with anything as important as popular music is just as absurd. However,

The Times and NME are not alone in questioning the ability of traditional scholarship to

deal with popular music. Here they join forces with no mean number of intellectual

musicians and musically interested academics.

Bearing in mind the ubiquity of music in industrialised capitalist society, its importance

at both national and transnational levels (see Varis 1975, Chapple and Garofalo 1977,

Frith 1978, Fonogrammen i kulturpolitiken 1979) and the share of popular music in all this,

the incredible thing is not that academics should start taking the subject seriously but

that they have taken such a time getting round to it. Until recently, publicly funded mu-

sicology has passively ignored the sociocultural challenge of trying to inform the

record-buying, Muzak-registering, TV watching and video-consuming public ‘why

and how who’ (from the private sector) ‘is communicating what to whom’ (in the pub-

lic sector) ‘and with what effect’ (apologies to C S Peirce). Even now it does very little.

Nevertheless, to view the academic world as being full of static and eternal ivory tower

stereotypes is to reveal an ahistorical and strangely defeatist acceptance of the schizo-

phrenic status quo in capitalist society. It implies atomisation, compartmentalisation

and polarisation of the affective and the cognitive, of private and public, individual and

collective, implicit and explicit, entertaining and worrying, fun and serious, etc. The

‘never-the-twain-shall-meet’ syndrome is totally untenable in the field of popular mu-

sic (or the arts in general). One does not need to be a don to understand that there are

objective developments in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music history which de-

mand that changes be made, not leas in academic circles.

{39} These developments can be summarised as follows: (1) a vast increase in the share

music takes in the money and time budgets of citizens in the industrialised world; (2)

shifts in class structure leading to the advent of socioculturally definable groups, such

as young people in student or unemployment limbo between childhood and adult-

hood, and their need for collective identity; (3) technological advances leading to the

development of recording techniques capable (for the first time in history) of accurately

storing and allowing for mass distribution of non-written musics; (3) transistorisation,

microelectronics and all that such advances mean to the mass dissemination of music;

(5) the development of new musical functions in the audiovisual media (for example,

films, TV, video, advertising); (6) the ‘non-communication’ crisis in modern Western

art music and the stagnation of official art music in historical moulds; (7) the develop-

ment of a loud, permanent, mechanical lo-fi soundscape (Schafer 1974, 1977) and its ‘re-

flection’ (Riethmüller 1976) in electrified music with regular pulse (Bradley 1980); (8)

the general acceptance of certain Euro- and Afro-American genres as constituting a lin-

gua franca of musical expression in a large number of contexts within industrialised so-

ciety; (9) the gradual, historically inevitable replacement of intellectuals schooled solely

in the art music tradition by others exposed to the same tradition but at the same time

brought up on Presley, the Beatles and the Stones.

To those of us who during the fifties and sixties played both Scarlatti and soul, did pal-

aeography and Palestrina crosswords as well as working in steelworks, and who

walked across quads on our way to the ‘Palais’ or the pop club, the serious study of

popular music is not a matter of intellectuals turning hip or of mods and rockers going

academic. It is a question of (a) getting together two equally important parts of experi-

ence, the intellectual and emotional, inside our own heads and (b) being able as music

teachers to face pupils whose musical outlook has been crippled by those who present

‘serious music’ as if it could never be ‘fun’ and ‘fun music’ as though it could never

have any serious implications.

Thus the need for the serious study of popular music is obvious, while the case for mak-

ing it a laughing matter, although understandable (it can be hilarious at times), is basi-

P Tagg: Analysing Popular Music (1982)

cally reactionary and will be dispensed with for the rest of this article. This is because

the aim of what follows is to present a musicological model for tackling problems of

popular music content analysis. It is hoped that this might be of some use to music

teachers, musicians and others looking for a contribution towards the understanding

of ‘why and how does who communicate what to whom and with what effect’. {40}

Musicology and popular music research

Studying popular music is an interdisciplinary matter. Musicology still lags behind

other disciplines in the field, especially sociology. The musicologist is thus at a simul-

taneous disadvantage and advantage. The advantage is that he/she can draw on soci-

ological research to give the analysis proper perspective. Indeed, it should be stated at

the outset that no analysis of musical discourse can be considered complete without

consideration of social, psychological, visual, gestural, ritual, technical, historical, eco-

nomic and linguistic aspects relevant to the genre, function, style, (re-)performance sit-

uation and listening attitude connected with the sound event being studied. The

disadvantage is that musicological ‘content analysis’ in the field of popular music is

still an underdeveloped area and something of a missing link (see Schuler 1978).

Music analysis and the communication process

Let us assume music to be that form of interhuman communication in which individu-

ally experienceable affective states and processes are conceived and transmi8tted as hu-

manly organised nonverbal sound structures to those capable of decoding their

message in the form of adequate affective and associative response (Tagg 1981b). Let

us also assume that music, as can be seen in its modes of ‘performance’ and reception,

most frequently requires by its very nature a group of individuals to communicate ei-

ther among themselves or with another group; thus most music (and dance) has an in-

trinsically collective character not shared by the visual and verbal arts. This should

mean that music is capable of transmitting the affective identities, attitudes and behav-

ioural patterns of socially definable groups, a phenomenon observed in studies of sub-

cultures and use by North American radio to determine advertising markets (Karshner

1971).

Now, although we have considerable insight into socioeconomic, subcultural and psy-

chosocial mechanisms influencing the ‘emitter’ (by means of biographies, etc.) and ‘re-

ceiver’ of certain types of popular music, we have very little explicit information about

the ‘channel’, about ‘the music itself’. We know very little about its ‘signifiers’ and ‘sig-

nifieds’, about the relations the music establishes between emitter and receiver, about

how a musical message actually relates to the set of affective and associative concepts

presumably shared by emitter and receiver, and how it interacts with their respective

cultural, social and natural environments. In other words, reverting to the question

‘why and how does who say what to whom and with what effect?’, we could {41} say

that sociology answers the questions ‘who’, ‘to whom’ and, with some help from psy-

chology, ‘with what effect’ and possibly parts of ‘why’, but when it comes to the rest of

‘why’, not to mention the questions ‘what’ and ‘how’, we are left in the lurch, unless

musicologists are prepared to tackle the problem (Wedin 1972: 128).

P Tagg: Analysing Popular Music (1982)

Popular music, notation and musical formalism

Fig. 1 Folk, art and popular music: an axiomatic triangle.

Folk

Music

Art

Music

Popular

Music

CHARACTERISTIC

Produced and

transmitted by

primarily professionals

primarily amateurs

Mass

distribution

usual

unusual

oral transmission

Main mode of storage

and distribution

musical notation

recorded sound

nomadic or agrarian

Type of society in which

the category of music

mostly occurs

agrarian or industrial

industrial

Written theory

and aesthetics

uncommon

common

Composer /

Author

anonymous

non-anonymous

There is no room here to define ‘popular music’ but to clarify the argument I shall es-

tablish an axiomatic triangle consisting of ‘folk’, ‘art’ and ‘popular’ musics. Each of

these three is distinguishable from the other two according to the criteria presented in

Figure 1. The argument is that popular music cannot be analysed using only the tradi-

tional tools of musicology because popular music, unlike art music, is (1) conceived for

mass distribution to large and often socioculturally heterogeneous groups of listeners,

(2) stored and distributed in non-written form, (3) only possible in an industrial mone-

tary economy where it becomes a commodity and (4) in capitalist society, subject to the

laws of ‘free’ enterprise, according to which it should ideally sell as much as possible

of as little as possible to as many as possible. Consideration of these three distinguish-

ing marks implies that it is impossible to ‘evaluate’ popular music along some sort of

Platonic ideal scale of aesthetic values and, more practically, that notation should not

be the analyst’s main source material,. The reason for this is that while notation may be

a viable starting point for much art music analysis, in that it was the only form of stor-

age of over a millennium, popular music, not least in its Afro-American guises, is nei-

ther conceived nor designed to be stored or distributed as notation, a large number of

important parameters of musical expression being either difficult or impossible to en-

code in traditional notation (Tagg 1979: 28-31). This is, however, not the only problem.

Allowing for certain exceptions, traditional music analysis can be characterised as for-

malist. One of its great difficulties (criticised in connection with the analysis of art mu-

sic in Rösing 1977) is relating musical discourse to the remainder of human existence in

any way, the description of emotive aspects in music either occurring sporadically or

being avoided altogether. Perhaps these difficulties are in part attributable to such fac-

tors as (1) a kind of exclusivist guild mentality amongst musicians resulting in the abil-

P Tagg: Analysing Popular Music (1982)

ity and/or lack of will to associate items of musical expression with extramusical

phenomena; (2) a time-honoured adherence to notation as the only viable form of stor-

ing music; (3) a culture-centric fixation on certain notatable parameters of musical ex-

pression (mostly {42} processual aspects such as ‘form’, thematic construction, etc.),

which are particularly important to the Western art music tradition. This carries with it

a nonchalance towards other parameters not easily expressed in traditional notation

(mostly ‘immediate’ aspects such as sound, timbre, electromusical treatment, ornamen-

tation, etc.), which are relatively unimportant — or ignored — in the analysis of art mu-

sic but extremely important in popular music (Rösing 1981).

Affect theory and hermeneutics

Despite the overwhelming dominance of the formalist tradition in university depart-

ments of musicology, such non-referential thinking should be seen as a historical pa-

renthesis in the area of verbal discourse on music, this being bordered on one side by

the Baroque Theory of Affects and on the other by the hermeneutics of music (Zoltai

1970: 137-215). The doctrinal straitjacket of Affect Theory, a sort of combination of feu-

dal absolutism and rationalist curiosity, and its apparent tendency to regard itself as

universally applicable (Lang 1942: 438; Zoltai 1970: 177), render it unsuitable for use in

popular music analysis which must deal with a multitude of ‘languages’, ranging from

film music in the late romantic symphonic style to punk and from middle-of-the-road

pop to the {43} Webernesque sonorities of murder music in TV thrillers.

Musical hermeneutics, as a subjectivist, interpretative approach, is often violently and

sometimes justifiably criticised. Indeed, from time to time it can degenerate into exeget-

ic guesswork and to intuitively acrobatic ‘reading between the lines. (Good examples

of this are to be found in Cohn 1970: 54-55; Melzer 1970: 104, 153; Mellers 1973: 117-118).

Nevertheless, hermeneutics can, if used with discretion and together with other musi-

cological approaches, make an important contribution to the analysis of popular music,

not least because it treats music as a symbolic system and encourages synaesthetic

thinking on the part of the analyst, a prerequisite for the foundation of verbalisable hy-

potheses and a necessary step in escaping from the prison of sterile formalism.

The semiology and sociology of music

The transfer of structuralist and semiotic methods, derived from linguistics, to the

realm of music seemed initially highly promising (see Bernstein 1976). However, sev-

eral musicologists of semiotic bent (for example Francès 1972, Lerdahl and Jackendoff

1977, Keiler 1978 and Stoïanova 1978), have pointed out that models constructed to ex-

plain the denotative aspects of verbal language can by no means be transplanted

wholesale into the field of music with its connotative, associative-affective character of

discourse (see Shepherd 1977). Unfortunately, a great deal of linguistic formalism has

crept into the semiology of music, the extrageneric question of relationships between

musical signifier and signified and between the musical object under analysis and so-

ciety being regarded as suspect (Nattiez 1974: 67), or as subordinate to congeneric rela-

tionships within the musical object (Nattiez 1974: 72-73 and 1975: 414-416).

The empirical sociology of music, apart from having acted as a sorely needed alarm

clock, rousing musicologists from their culture-centric and ethnocentric slumbers, and

notifying them of musical habits amongst the population at large, can also provide val-

uable information about {44} the functions, uses and (with the help of psychology) the

effects of the genre, performance or musical object under analysis. In this way, results

from perceptual investigation and other data about musical habits can be used for

crosschecking analytical conclusions and for putting the whole analysis in its sociolog-

ical and psychological perspectives.

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