After Relativism

DOI: 10.1111/musa.
12005
DAI GRIFFITHS
AFTER RELATIVISM: RECENT DIRECTIONS IN THE HIGH ANALYSIS OF

LOW MUSIC
Readers of Music Analysis may recall that my essay The High Analysis of Low
Music set so-called popular music in an imaginary but bitter fight to the death
with so-called contemporary classical music (Griffiths 1999). In the course of
time, it was gratifying to find Richard Cohn ending a dictionary entry on
harmony with these two sentences:
Several developments in the late 20th-century academy notably a suspicion of
historicising teleologies and the re-evaluation of the distinction between classical
and vernacular stimulated a recognition of diatonic tonality as a living tradition.
Perhaps the most important trend in practical harmony at the beginning of the
21st century is the reintroduction of contemporary music, in the form of folk
music, jazz, show-tunes, rock, and so on, into manuals of practical harmony, in
both Europe and North America, in the service of compositional and improvisa-
tional as well as analytical training. (Cohn 2001, p. 873)
That shift in the word contemporary rings true. I have served on the board of
Oxford Contemporary Music since 2003 and acted as its chairman between
2006 and 2011, and contemporary was used throughout that period to include
several types of interesting music and their mixture: sonic art, contemporary
classical, folk, jazz, rock and world music. A rare letter arrives from a disgruntled
supporter insisting that contemporary means, or ought to mean, contemporary
classical music, but this is a minority view: many people apparently accept
contemporary simply for its temporal connotations of the music of the present
and recent past. The highs and lows have gone, replaced by tolerance, pluralism
and inclusivity; but what next?
So embedded now is popular music in the academy, indicated for example by
the demand for its study and conversion into forms of academic validation which
has for some time generated textbooks, that it has extended into music analysis
itself. This condition provides the starting point of the current essay, in which I
review two volumes, Allan F. Moores Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting
Recorded Popular Song (2012; hereafter SM),1 and Philip Taggs Everyday Tonal-
ity: Towards a Tonal Theory of What Most People Hear (2009; hereafter ET),2 but
bring into the debate a third recent text, Walter Everetts Foundations of Rock:
from Blue Suede Shoes to Suite: Judy Blue Eyes (2009; hereafter FR). Moore was
author of one of the first, and best-established, general textbooks in the field
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382 CRITICAL FORUM
(1993; 2nd edn 2001). Its most important precursor was Richard Middleton
(1990), its most direct competitor Ken Stephenson (2002); John Covach (2006)
is also important.3 The titles of four of these texts mention rock music, while SM
specifies recorded popular song, with the two important little transplantations
of popular for rock and song for music; ET has both tonality and tonal
theory, suggesting the abstractions of theory over the empirical detail of analysis,
but also the provocation what most people hear. A final word of significance is
Moores interpreting, which goes beyond analysing. After brief accounts of
the three books, my essay will discuss their authors varied attitudes towards
their material and their treatment of harmony; I will conclude with a substantial
discussion of Moores innovative inclusion of interpretation in SM.
All three authors are knocking on and are able to look back over a lifetime
spent listening to popular songs; the sheer number of tracks referenced in all
three books is impressive, comparable perhaps to the wide-ranging examples in
classical harmony textbooks. My guess is that Moore and Tagg refer to around
900 tracks each, while Everett claims a total of well over sixty-five hundred
songs (FR, p. vi). Moores article Patterns of Harmony (1992) was a signifi-
cant precursor of large-scale data collection, with its appendix of around 24
pages containing hundreds of tracks organised by harmonic type. Given the
quantity of records referred to in the three volumes, readers are urged to employ
digital resources such as YouTube, iTunes, and so on (FR, p. xiii; and SM, p.
351), though Tagg is alone in discussing copyright issues (ET, pp. 1213).
Everett, then, emerges as the exception by virtue of his two organising prin-
ciples. First, by date: the subtitle refers to the Carl Perkins track Blue Suede
Shoes, recorded in 1955, and to Suite: Judy Blue Eyes, recorded by Crosby,
Stills and Nash in 1969, the books focus being on recorded popular music
between these dates; these two tracks also feature prominently in the books
conclusion (FR, pp. 38999). Second, by selection process: Everett covers
best-selling singles the Top 20 hits of charts listed in the American trade
magazine Billboard as well as a large number of complete rock album releases,
so that between the two sources he is able to demonstrate the foundations of
rock of his title. Only occasionally and with a light touch does Everett refer to
music from before his period or hint at developments to follow, but he does make
the reasonable if lavish claim that his principles might be useful for practically
... any popular song of the past century and more (FR, p. x).4
Moore and Tagg both range more widely in their chosen repertories, with
Tagg putting it comically in characteristic capitals as an alternative title for his
book: tonal elements in widely heard music diffused in mainly, but by no means
exclusively English-language cultures in the late twentieth century, i.e. music
that Philip Tagg has played, sung or heard (ET, p. 3). True to the broad title
Tagg ends up with, the range of music in ET encompasses all sorts of tonal
music, including jazz, folk, world and even so-called classical music. In a cau-
tious explanation of his repertory, Moore reveals that his original focus was the
pop/rock of the late 1950s and 1960s (SM, pp. 1617), signalling through a
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CRITICAL FORUM 383
footnote its similarity to the repertory covered in FR (p. 16). However, Moore
also occasionally draws on earlier sources, making curiously frequent reference
to the singer Al Bowlly (18981941), and often with the aid of Allen Fortes
study (1995) of the American popular ballad. He also turns very often to
post-1960s songs, with a particular expertise, familiar from his other work, in
1970s British rock music, progressive and otherwise, and a wide range of other
pop and rock recordings, including many from the last decade. All three have
much to say about the Beatles, in Everetts and Moores cases building on
previously published work (Moore 1997; and Everett 1999b and 2001) and
offering yet more to ponder with regard to the Fab Fours canonical status.
The structure of FR is essentially twofold, with both sections punctuated by
discussion of the same 25 representative tracks (pp. 8192 and pp. 294301).
The first part is a five-chapter examination of instruments and voices (drums,
guitars, keyboards, orchestral instruments and voices); the second, a seven-
chapter overview of the elements of tonal music (form, melody, harmony [four
chapters] and rhythm). Two concluding chapters cover recording technology
and interpretation. ET recycles a series of dictionary entries (Shepherd, Horn,
Laing, Oliver and Wicke 2003),5 which explains the expository nature of some of
the material presented. These combine to form a three-part scheme: five chap-
ters of rudiments (notes, tuning and intervals, modes, melody and polyphony),
three chapters on harmony (classical harmony, non-classical harmony and
chords) and five chapters on drones and repeated chord sequences (one-chord
changes, shuttles, loops, modal loops and a final case study on Yes We Can).6
Finally, SM consists of the two parts of its title, analysis and interpretation.
These are framed by an introductory methodological chapter (Moore casts his
book as methodology, not theory); connected by a fifth chapter (styles), which
offers an historical model; and concluded by an eleventh and final chapter that
consists of questions and keywords for further study. There are three chapters of
musical description that cover, in turn, instrumentation and recording technol-
ogy (shape); rhythm and harmony (form); and melody, voice and lyrics (deliv-
ery). After the historical interlude, there are five chapters on interpretation
(friction, persona, reference, belonging and syntheses), to which I will return in
my final section.
Attitude
Reflecting on the complex relationship between popular music and its intellec-
tual discourse, including teaching, Middleton has written:
A further issue debated in popular music studies often prompted by attacks on

the scholars by practitioners and critics, and sharpened by the impact of complex
cultural theory is the relationship between theory and practice. This was placed
in even higher relief by the introduction in the 1980s of the teaching of popular
music in some universities, conservatories and schools. While it can act as a
catalyst to the opening up of issues concerning educational aims and relative
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384 CRITICAL FORUM
cultural values, popular music placed in such contexts raises questions about the
desirability and implications of its own legitimation. On one level the questions
concern whether to teach the musics production or its understanding, and the
wisdom of teaching either aspect to young people who may well be closer to the
music, as consumers or as practitioners, than their teachers. It is not obvious
whose terms should be used, for example, or what should be the relationship
between academic and vernacular theory. But on a broader level these questions
are symptoms of problems that affect the study of popular music in general. The
questions are not just tactical (how to attain the best understanding): given that
the situation presents itself in terms of ordinary culture under the gaze of
experts, the people interpreted by the intellectuals, they must also be epistemo-
logical (how to define what is a true understanding of this music) and even
ethical (who is entitled to speak about this, and in what terms). (Middleton 2001,
pp. 1501)
These three books are aimed primarily at a school or university audience and
should therefore be evaluated in terms of pedagogic usefulness. Certainly Moore
and Tagg appear to have tried and tested their material in the classroom.
However, Everett is the most direct teacher of the three, aiming to enhance the
readers understanding through thousands of specific points backed up by exam-
ples on a supporting website that includes sound examples and photographs
(some of which are also in the book);7 furthermore, the reader-listener is directed
to examples in recordings, often to specific portions of the recording indicated by
a digital clock. The book works in tandem with the website, and the recordings
on it are most cheerful, with everything from comic texts to musical examples
(for example, web example 8.13 has the words this is a one chord, this is a six
chord, back to the one chord, neighboured by the six chord) and comic names
for Everett as performer (Reg Le Crisp, Eleanor Mackenzie, Stig OHara-Smith,
and so on). The reader has to go to the website for both track and artist indexes,
but since both indexes are extremely long, author and publisher may be forgiven
this decision. Everett refers to non-popular music only if he deems it necessary
or interesting, and his presentation of harmony follows in outline the headings of
a standard classical textbook. That said, one point needs underlining for anyone
who would cast Everett as the arch-Schenkerian who takes too much for granted:
the book is bereft of musical notation.
Tagg also has pedagogic clarity in mind, and plenty of musical notation is
provided, for which, in a phrase that may eventually strike the reader as ironic,
some acquaintance with the rudiments of music theory including conventional
Western (classical) harmony is probably an advantage (ET, pp. 23). Taggs
attitude towards the material is crucial in at least two ways. First is the nature of
his book as a book: in fact, ET is a .pdf file that can be purchased from Taggs
personal website,8 although it has subsequently appeared as a print book in
Italian (Tagg 2011). A minimum (and cheap!) price is suggested, and the
purchaser can then donate directly to Tagg as much as he or she likes. No doubt
the books accessibility will appeal to the student, for whom the Internet is all
and for whom print books are increasingly exotic adventures. By cutting out the

CRITICAL FORUM 385
publisher, Tagg has an immediate reach, and in fact some of the book is
duplicated elsewhere on his remarkable website. Who knows how this issue of
web-based publication will develop? On the one hand, I can point out that an
indefinite article has been lost from the end of line 6 at page 7, and that the
acknowledgements include two no. 5s (ET, p. 15), and that these glitches could
be corrected in only the time Tagg takes so to do; whereas Moores reference to
the keyboard player in Genesis as Peter Banks, presumably a close friend of the
bands singer, Tony Gabriel (SM, pp. 264 and 385 [in the index]) awaits the
second edition of the book for its correction.9 On the other hand, Taggs
approach is resolutely outside the world of peer review, with its blind readers; I
will not go into the way that ties into that hot potato of the UK academy, the
assessment of research. Tagg seems always to have set himself outside of the
administrative structures of higher education in not one but three countries
(Sweden, Great Britain and Canada), even while spending his working life inside
those structures a rare case perhaps of being inside the tent and pissing in.
Documents galore can be found on his website testifying to this, including the
fierce attack Audititis10 and a poignant if self-obsessed document in which Tagg
answers the apparently frequently-asked question, Why did you leave ... ? 11
I mention all of this because an oppositional stance is fundamental for ET in
content as well as context. For Tagg, popular music is peoples music, so that the
term can encompass any music people enjoy that blunt what most people hear
of his title.12 Yet this inclusive view of tonal music ends with an emphasis on
repeated chord sequences, alongside the aesthetic claim of musics consisting of
places to be rather than a means to an end (see ET, p. 223, for one of very
many versions of this dichotomy). The books proportions suggest a close
relationship between most people and places to be that I doubt; but, anyway,
his celebration of still life over story pales alongside the driving, negative, critical
aspect of ET, and one can only admire the verve of Taggs characterisations of
these unnamed and never-cited enemies. My guess is that he has in mind two
types: the kind of historical musicologists who taught him and with whom he
worked in various institutions over the years and, secondly, quite frankly, readers
of this journal, you. So in ET we find, in order of appearance: conventionally
trained musos (p. 5); conventional Euro-North-American music theory (p.
45); teachers of European art music history (p. 81); conventional historical
musicology (p. 87); seats of musical learning; that is, institutions rarely
renowned for serious interest in the tonal elements of everyday life for the
popular majority (p. 91); conservatism (p. 91); European art music (the
repertoire on which the conventional teaching of harmony is almost exclusively
based) (p. 91); many institutions of musical learning (p. 94); those seats of
musical learning again (p. 95); the rise and hegemony of the bourgeoisie in
Europe (!) (pp. 967); something ingrained and overtaught, ... established and
unquestioned (p. 101); music that conventional harmony experts have between
them spent countless lifetimes avoiding or trivialising (p. 115); some art music
buffs (p. 159); those who believe in hierarchically arranged tonal centres (p.

386 CRITICAL FORUM
180); a gullible harmony teacher (p. 188); something off the conventional
harmony teachers radar screen (p. 190), yes, classical harmonys radar screen
(p. 198); and, finally, something that you dont have to be a musicology
professor to work out (p. 210). One wearies of the onslaught, and it would be
interesting to get a hint of exactly who or where these people and places are. Only
in one final passage are a couple of culprits vaguely identified, and Im not sure
they themselves would have enjoyed sharing the taxi; note again the energy of
Taggs negatives (not ... nor ... nor):
Any sense of overall tonal process, narrative or form in this Police song, and in
countless others, derives not from modulation, nor from overriding tonal
schemes, nor deep structure la Schenker or Riemann, but from the juxtapo-
sition of distinct harmonic constellations and from the organization of those
different tonal states in terms of repetition, change, reprise and relative duration,
as well as from the order in which the distinct elements are presented. (ET, pp.
1889)
Tagg often explores linguistic roots, often with an impressive array of lan-
guages other than English to hand. Where Everett speaks effortlessly as you do
of the dominant function (FR, p. 222) or the deceptive cadence (FR, p. 135),
Tagg seethes, viscerally certain that those words are exactly the sort of baggage
that needs to be ditched in favour of a more precise and neutral terminology.
Deceptive cadence is thus the basis of a brief but stern warning about har-
monic cultural absolutism (ET, pp. 1034), while for the iniquity and inappro-
priateness of dominant he has at his website a filmed lecture of over twenty
minutes duration.13 It is a curious paradox, then, that for all the shadow-boxing,
Taggs presentation of musical categories is somewhat traditional and, as we
shall see, occasionally not so far from the enemy as he might imagine.
The name that often entered my mind as I was engaging with Taggs work was
unexpected but important in the early days of Music Analysis: Hans Keller.
Firstly, consider Kellers attentiveness towards attitude: There are three over-
lapping ways of writing about music. One is to write about music. The second is
to write about performance. The third, most popular among writers and readers
alike, is to write about oneself (Keller 1994, p. 3). Secondly, the claim that
Tagg was to British Higher Education as Keller was to the British Broadcasting
Corporation would be an interesting topic at the pub. Finally, Taggs audio-
visual correspondences to his written work may actually be just new-media,
downmarket heirs to Kellers functional analysis. Several passages of ET can be
found in their audiovisual form at his website.14 Included in addition to the
lecture on the dominant just mentioned are a sequence of Mixolydian loops, the
doo-wop progression to which I shall return and a suggestive set of harmonic
variations of the melody The Tailor and the Mouse. At their best, as in the
doo-wop montage, the audio examples hurtle along while the screen plays all
sorts of images: chord sequences (which rise in pitch as the montage progresses);
a piano playing chords; photos of the sheet music or record release; words from

CRITICAL FORUM 387
songs and other keywords; and photos of all description, often comic. All this is
a long way from the motivic structure of a late Beethoven string quartet, the BBC
Third Programme world of Kellers wordless functional analysis, yet they may
have the same motivation: to communicate the technical point directly through
musical invention, bypassing words of explication.
Ive spent a long time on Taggs attitude, since I think the reader must expect
to encounter and engage with it at length imagine the student asking, When
Professor Tagg says conventionally trained muso, does he mean me, sir? and
something of the same applies to Moore, too. Moore is more complicated than
the other two: he makes things more complex and can make the familiar seem
unfamiliar. His book is a real summary of a lifetimes work, and one feels there
is a great deal at stake for him, a sense underlined by the touching discussion at
the books very close of his own autistic spectrum disorder (SM, p. 329). SM
explores more deeply and widely a greater range of sources than the other two,
including literature often outside the musical domain. Not for Moore Taggs
do-it-yourself, available-on-my-website approach: chunks of Moores book
underwent the grind of peer review or were commissioned for collections; much
of it was aired at conferences and seminars; editorial positions on two very
different journals, twentieth-century music and Popular Music, gave him an imme-
diate gain on disciplinary trends; and in general, Moores commitment to public
engagement is both inexhaustible and admirable.15 That said, there are in fact
two types of books in SM.16 One is a kind of third edition of Moore (1993) and
(2001), and fans will spot some duplication from these texts: the texture of Def
Leppards Love Bites; the phrasing of the Kinks Waterloo Sunset; Nik
Kershaws The Riddle is like a change of film shot.17 The other, newer book
is about interpretation and would likely be called So What? (as in SM, p. 285),
a question or charge to which Moore appears to be especially sensitive. Those
two simple words, once voiced so memorably by the Anti-Nowhere League
(WXYZ, 1981), can encompass anything, from something as localised as F.R.
Leaviss quip at the seminar, This is so, isnt it? (Sansom 1992, p. 86), all the
way to the sense of lifes purpose for example, ones reaction to the realisation
that one has spent a lifetime writing about popular music, only for most of its
practitioners and consumers to regard the effort as entirely irrelevant.18
Moore is another devotee of the popular, feeling that recorded popular
music has its own processes and histories, so that, when Everett suggested (on
the basis of much evidence [including Everett 1999a]) that the music of Billy Joel
should be understood not in the tonal tradition of Howlin Wolf, but in that of
Brahms (Everett 2000, p. 303), Moore took umbrage at both the political
implications and the implied value judgment of Everetts comparison (Moore
2001, p. 62 n. 21). There is a certain tension between commitment to popular
music in SM (even given its limitation to song) and attention to interpretation,
since the latter is of a general nature. However, despite being tied up in all of this,
Moore remains absolutely committed to the listening experience and the need to
set up a meaningful connection between the primary text and real life. By

388 CRITICAL FORUM
comparison, in FR and ET, Everett and Tagg are concerned with explicating
musical texts in their production and more or less leaving the matter there.
However, Tagg draws substantially on musical semiotics (see Tagg and Clarida
2003), including aspects of ETs concluding case study (see ET, p. 262), and has
another book on musics meanings (Tagg, 2012); ET must therefore be consid-
ered in that broader context.
Moores emphases on interpretative theory and listening can be illustrated by
the following four juxtapositions with FR. First, whereas Everett has a 38-page
chapter entitled Creating an Interpretation, of which seven pages provide tips
for further study, Moore requires 150 pages and four chapters. Secondly, Ever-
etts brief discussion of authenticity spans two pages (FR, pp. 3812); Moores
needs twelve (SM, pp. 25971), including a three-part schema (SM, p. 269).
Thirdly, whereas over the space of eleven pages Everett approaches words in
songs through lists of topics and techniques found in several tracks, including an
extended study of China Cat Sunflower by the Grateful Dead (FR, pp. 364
74), in a little more than nine pages Moore, surveying fewer tracks than Everett,
finds space for numerous theorists (Will Durant, Vyvyan Evans and Melanie
Green, Charles J. Fillmore, Allen Forte, Simon Frith, Dai Griffiths, Albert
Mehrabian, Richard Middleton, Gino Stefani, Leonard Talmy and Mark
Turner) and their theories (among them semantic frame, conceptual structure,
narrative, verbal space, euphonics and addressee) (SM, pp. 10818). The con-
trast is best brought out in the two authors approaches to recording technology,
demonstrated in Moores second chapter (SM, pp. 2949) and as a chapter of
FR entitled Engineering the Master (pp. 33361). Moores work in this area
has been influential ever since his brief but masterly presentation of his sound
box (1993, pp. 10510), and some of the presentation in SM is his evaluation
of the considerable developments in the area since then. But his emphasis
remains on the listener, and new work in SM gathers around imaginary photo-
graphs of the sound box, the visual image that the mind carries of a given
recording. Some new ideas have been added, such as the diagonal mix (SM, p.
32) and proxemics, the perceived distance between recorded voice and listener
(SM, p. 187). Everett, on the other hand, simply explains what techniques were
available to the engineer or producer so that, between book, musical examples
and website, one gains a direct understanding of techniques such as reverb, echo,
delay, filtering, compression, and so on. Moore doesnt aim for Everetts sys-
tematic clarity in the presentation of such technical terms, and Everett is happy
to leave the sound box to listeners (and doesnt use the term), although its
constituent elements (stereo separation and the foregrounding of some sounds
over others) appear at the appropriate points in his chapter.
In 1999, my head full of Adorno, I had these three authors as different types:
Moore was an earnest onlooker, Tagg a street-fighting man and Everett a
manager, and elements of those caricatures remain (see Griffiths 1999). A
veteran of the administrative structures of American music theory (Society for
Music Theory, Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Spectrum and Music Theory

CRITICAL FORUM 389
Online), Everett carries out a job with great efficiency, in research method and in
pedagogic communication; but he is a great wit as well, with little gags aplenty
often achieved by mixing music-analytical observations with words and ideas
derived from song titles or lyrics. Tagg is still certainly fighting the revolution,
although, because so-called popular music is now firmly embedded in the
academy, it is possible that the revolution has in fact moved on, not least in the
sense that students may be trained in music-analytical methodologies that have
moved on from the theoretical premises that Tagg assumes and describes.
Traces of Moores earnestness are still there,19 in his classic pinched oxymorons
or euphemisms rather extreme (SM, p. 55), fairly extreme (p. 106), pretty
precise (p. 51) and his judgement that John Lennons Cold Turkey displays
pain in fairly convincing terms (p. 298). But theres also a tremendous open-
ness in SM to ideas of all stamps and complexities, so that his book opens up a
different type of interdisciplinary pedagogic context. To use Middletons terms
from the opening of this section, both Moore and Tagg carry the epistemological
trace most visibly, Everett is more immediately tactical, and, as we shall see,
Moores particular brand of relativism highlights the ethical dimension.
However, I should make an important and quasi-ethical point (see Middletons
parenthesis, who is entitled to speak about this, and in what terms): all three
authors are great musicians, and there is a palpable sense in all three books of
commitment to and love for the material.
Harmony, and a Historical Model

There it was, back in 1999: how often do you see genuine, ordinary talk about
harmony anymore? (Griffiths 1999, p. 399). More than I imagined, no doubt,
but I had a sense of historical musicology as moving away from something so
internal to the musical text as chords, and of course post-tonal music by defi-
nition used different techniques. Explicitly in the title of ET, harmony is an
important element of all three books, in which we find a familiar tension between
harmony and voice leading on the one hand and chords assigned roman
numerals on the other, while a more repertory-specific question arises over the
degree of attention given to the old church modes (Aeolian, Dorian, and so on).
However, these internal matters in turn also involve the extent to which one
wants to think of so-called popular music as having its own history and set of
techniques, and so this is an important area of tension and debate.
Everett can again stand as the least contentious case, especially if the reader is
familiar with the teaching of harmony to undergraduates. His four chapters on
harmony (FR, Chs 811) build upon the model now established in textbooks
such as those by Edward Aldwell and Carl Schachter (1989) or Robert Gauldin
(1997; I shall often turn to this for comparison); an important element of this
outlook derives from such work as that of Felix Salzer and Schachter (1989),
with Heinrich Schenker strongly in the background. Thus, having already
introduced scales and modes in his chapter on melody, Everett surveys chords

390 CRITICAL FORUM
and notions of consonance and dissonance; the various seventh chords, ninths
and elevenths; a cluster of elements such as pedals and suspensions; and the use
of fourth-based chords that eventually border atonality (Frank Zappa, inevita-
bly). The remaining three chapters divide up diatonic functions, principally in
the major key; minor and other non-major modes (such as church modes and
pentatonic patterns); and, finally, chromatic harmony. Gauldin, by way of com-
parison, has a similar expository structure, except that modes are consigned to
a brief appendix (1997, pp. 62733). Within Everetts chapter on diatonic
harmony is found another familiar organising principle: root motion by fifth,
followed by root motion by third, the functions (dominant, pre-dominant and
tonic) and, significantly, the contrapuntal element in harmony: auxiliary and
passing chords (compare with Gauldin 1997, pp. 1989, on embellishing pre-
dominant chords within the phrase). The chapter on minor and other modes is
simply presented, organised in order of quantitative prevalence in Everetts
repertory. Under the heading of chromatic harmony, Everett includes aspects
such as secondary dominants, the double plagal, the cowboy cadence (VIIV),
major II as endpoint, and modulation and tonicisation, including the truck-
driver modulation.20 Principles are thus presented against the logical back-
ground of the harmony textbook, and it is important to recognise that every one
of those categories has an array of examples drawn from recordings within
Everetts period. To take one example, the principle that one of the more
exceptional functions of chromatic chords is to serve as an unorthodox cadence
point (FR, p. 278) generates references to records by Barry Mann, Bob Dylan,
Otis Redding and Joan Baez. Keith Negus is of the reasonable view that Bob
Dylan is rarely celebrated as a musician (Negus 2008, pp. 12754), so he would
do well to track through the many index references to Dylan in FR in which, by
simply setting examples from Dylan alongside contemporaneous records,
Dylans music emerges as full of common, simple and telling musical devices.
Everett is also precise and eloquent on Dylans voice, one that should be prized
for its humanity and range (FR, p. 121), with Janis Joplin as his female
counterpart (FR, p. 122).
Now, you might expect Tagg to oppose Everetts presentation of harmony
with great gusto, but that turns out not to be the case in a book in which
traditional categories continue to operate despite the seemingly uncongenial
context; indeed, the book contains many useful tables of chords and arrays of
examples. Concerning the modes, for example, although Tagg makes much
more of a song and dance about their non-classical status, his presentation is in
outline similar to Everetts: the Ionian, Aeolian, Dorian and Mixolydian are
found often, the Phrygian and Lydian less so, so that the progression IIIIV, for
example, is a definite no-no for lydian harmony (ET, p. 123). However, he
insists that we should replace the term major scale with heptatonic ionian
mode (p. 45) and also makes the bizarre suggestion that, in an A minor
context, C major be marked III (p. 138). Tagg gives weight to quartal chords
(pp. 12536) but lists not only fourth chords in the manner of the latter reaches

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of Schoenbergs Harmonielehre ([1911] 1978) but also chords clearly made of

suspensions (sus 2 for example); this makes for an interesting comparison with
Everett, for whom ninths, elevenths and thirteenths have contrapuntal functions
and some fourths have word-painting origins (FR, pp. 21112). As observed
earlier, Tagg eventually puts great emphasis on drones (such as in funk music, in
which the band sits on the I chord and action happens at the level of rhythmic
activity, voices, words, and so on) and repeated sequences (which are divided
into shuttles [from one chord to another and back] and loops [longer sequences
of repeated chords]).21 A clear diagram of a loop, its four chords labelled tonic,
outgoing, medial and incoming (ET, p. 212), could be compared in its
four-part neatness with Everetts SRDC scheme for form: statement, restate-
ment, departure and conclusion (FR, pp. 1401). Tagg is most attentive to the
duration of his loops, often measuring them by the clock. Drones and loops
account for over 100 pages of everyday tonality in a book that neglects to
mention something as common as Everetts truck-driver modulation (see FR,
pp. 2834; and, briefly, SM, p. 226); and perhaps ET follows Middleton
pre-eminently (Middleton 1990, pp. 11719) in finding, in repeated chord
sequences, historical connections and models that can encompass my example
the loops of Monteverdis Beatus vir alongside those of Zappas Joes
Garage. ET contains longer and interesting discussions of specific tracks by Pink
Floyd, the Human League and the Police and concludes with a lengthy analysis
of Yes We Can. However, it must be said bluntly: Tagg is some way behind the
current professional literature. Everett, for example, would surely expect to find
his work (1999b and 2001) referenced in Taggs short discussion of the Beatles
harmony (ET, p. 214); in fact, a point concerning mode and cadence in the
Beatles Not a Second Time (With the Beatles, Parlophone, 1963) (ET, p. 228)
is identical to one made in Everett (2001, p. 193). Although Tagg regards
counterpoint as consisting of imitations and canons (ET, pp. 8890), I suspect
it would have to be broken to him gently that some of his points head in a
Schenkerian direction: for example, the section G? Which G? (ET, pp. 16471)
contains some composing-out (one chord can be tonally expanded, p. 164),
with examples that could be analysed in terms of expansion through passing or
auxiliary notes (p. 165), and leads to the conclusion that chord means at least
two chords (p. 170), perhaps the beginnings of a foreground layer; the discus-
sion of the mediant as mediator resembles Schenkers third-divider (p. 239).22
Since his groundbreaking work on harmony in the 1990s, Moore has kept
faith with a system that assigns priority to modes but then uses roman numerals
to identify chords by root: the method is explained with some compression (see
SM, p. 73 and its supporting footnote). Like Tagg, Moore pointedly refers to the
major as Ionian and in some respects goes even further. For example, in labelling
a passage from Howlin Wolf (SM, p. 92) as Mixolydian, its melodic seventh
consistently flattened, Moore merrily removes one sharp from the notated key
signature: E mixolydian is thus the three sharps of A major.23 However, the
roman numeral continues to refer to E (not A) as the I chord, and to A (not D)

392 CRITICAL FORUM
as the IV chord. With two of the abstractions of notation (key signature and
roman numeral) not talking to each other, confusion ensues.24 Moore also has
little time for voice leading or counterpoint as theoretical necessities (the lineage
that underlies Everetts presentation), so that SM reaches its voice-leading
sketches the Slade example can be taken as representative (SM, p. 88) almost
by accident rather than by a view of a tonal piece in which harmony and voice
leading coexist from the start (see also Bernard 2003, p. 377). At two points in
the book, indeed, traditional nomenclature for chord inversions is invoked Ic
(SM, p. 88) and VIId, Vd and Ib (SM, p. 305) alarmingly, perhaps, since
inversions are key points for considering contrapuntal aspects of harmony.25
Tagg deals with inversions by taking another smack at European textbook
harmony (ET, pp. 1401) and insists that textbooks should label the first
inversion of the I chord as iii6 (p. 140).
The question that arises, then, is the extent to which modes ought to be given
priority, and this is an area of current debate. As David Temperley recently
observed:
Modality has also played a large role in my own work in popular music; in my
book The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures, I argued strongly for modality as an
organising concept in rock and listed ten well-known songs in Ionian, Mixolydian,
Dorian, and Aeolian modes. I now believe, however, that the role of modal
organization in rock has been somewhat overstated by these authors, myself
included. (Temperley 2011)
My own view is that what is specifically and conceptually lost in a modes-first

approach is minor scales with sharpened sevenths (that awkwardly titled pair, the
ascending melodic and harmonic minor) although of course Moores
roman-numeral system will simply convert a given v to V; at the same time, I
acknowledge the usefulness of viewing the Mixolydian as a major scale with
flattened seventh.26 My thinking also hinges on this question of whether one is
speaking about rock music, for which there seems to be some evidence of mode
centrality, or popular music (as does Moore), for which the case is more tenuous.
An example is a passage of The Happening by the Supremes (Motown, 1967)
in G major but including in a distinctive phrase chords built on B, E and A
(first heard at 017026), which Moore identifies as Phrygian (SM, p. 74).
From a non-modal perspective, one reaches that phrase by a number of small
and logical steps: a sequence with root movement by fifth (Gauldin 1997, p.
315), the mixture of major and minor to generate IIIb and VIIb (ibid., p. 397 ff.)
and the use of Neapolitan for IIb (ibid., pp. 40821). Everett has already made
the joke one might as well hear the Eroica Symphony in G Phrygian (Everett
2000, p. 307) but it could also be said that the mode evokes the wrong kind of
music-historical association, as though the pianist Bill Evans had entered for this
one phrase amid light-hearted Broadway-style material for Diana Ross. Else-
where, it is unfortunate that Moores reading of Richard and Linda Thompsons
Calvary Cross (with Linda consigned to the discography) contains an error: the

CRITICAL FORUM 393
chord sequence of the verse is given as A minorF majorG major, whereas the
correct version is F majorA minorG major, so that it isnt the case that we find
G [major] constantly going to the a [minor] (SM, p. 75). Likewise, Moores
suggestion that the interpretation turns on a choice between Ionian and Aeolian
listening demands much of a simple and familiar shift from minor to relative
major.27
There has been some dispute between Moore and Everett over the years,
although Everetts critical account (2000, pp. 3027 and 33940) of Moores
harmonic system was all but excised from the revised version that appeared in
Everett (2008).28 Moores suggestion that there is now only minor disagreement
between us may yet be wishful thinking (SM, p. 71), for, while Moore has an
admirable awareness of current debates, rarely does he build upon examples that
are offered elsewhere, preferring to supply seemingly endless examples of his
own. A key reference point in the professional literature is Becks superb Lone-
some Tears (Geffen, 2002), which has already received a Schenkerian (Everett
2004) and neo-Riemannian (Capuzzo 2004) analysis,29 thus making it an ideal
example for the harmony classroom. Moore intentionally avoids the Everett
analysis, since elsewhere (SM, pp. 701) he refers to Everetts typology of rocks
tonal systems (Everett 2004). The reasons for Moores deliberate oversight are
not hard to imagine, for in his analysis Everett sounds not just like a Schenkerian
but like Heinrich Schenker himself. With the subheading A Complex Tonal
Structure Yields Its Secrets, the analysis is organised so that the track is first
approached via the chords of a tablature site (OLGA, the Online Guitar
Archive)30 and then via roman numerals, as though Moore should take note.
Then Everett dons the guise of Schenker: only a consideration of voice leading
will lead to progress with this puzzle, and clearly, it would be senseless to try to
evaluate the harmony of this song by studying its OLGA roots alone, which are
nearly all of an illusory nature (Everett 2004).
Senseless is quite a charge for Everett to level at a reliance on roman-numeral
harmony. Be that as it may, both Everetts and Capuzzos accounts are convinc-
ing, Capuzzos for the way that the transformational network encloses the tracks
chords, its sneaky (or parsimonious) slithering between one chord and the next
helping to generate a tears motive (665), while Everetts contrapuntal graphs
provide a literal visualisation of the relative weight of the chords and their linear
progression. In teaching harmony over the years, and as part of my book on Elvis
Costello, I get considerable mileage out of putting the mixture of tonic major and
tonic minor close to the heart of things (Griffiths 2007, pp. 3840),31 and
mixture casts light on some of these examples too. Everetts conclusion about
Lonesome Tears is that the voice leading argues for a key of C-sharp major
coloured by a touch of mixture in the chorus (2004); Moores example The
Happening starts with a groovy riff in G minor, which gives way (at 011) to
tonic major as a tierce de Picardie, repeated for the truck driver modulation (up
by a semitone) at 154 (and mentioned by Moore in SM, p. 226); for Mott the
Hooples All the Young Dudes (Columbia, 1972), Moores ascription of Ionian

394 CRITICAL FORUM
and Mixolydian (SM, p. 230) seems to me to say little, but the songs shift from
major to minor (at 058104) opens up the dominant parallel minor as the
counterpart of the relative minor found earlier in the track (delinquent wrecks,
040042); and, finally, Taggs example of Dont You Want Me Baby by the
Human League (Virgin, 1981) employs the shuttle between F major and G
major in both verse and chorus (ET, pp. 1914), but this progression heads
resolutely to A minor, which also calls up the (parallel) A major briefly at 111.
Everett includes a welcome reference to classical music in order to introduce the
modes and is attentive again to sense:
Many who have had classical training might think of the minor mode as the
opposite of the major because most composers of the period roughly occupying
the years 1725 to 1900 would indicate that this or that piece is in A major or F
minor. But such an opposition makes no sense in rock music, because although
the minor mode does appear regularly, other non-major modes occur with com-
parable frequency. (FR, p. 166)
I dont dispute the point at all from the rock-music perspective, but, begging
Everetts tolerance of a point so simple, a classical piece in A major, for example,
has varied ways of including minor-key passages, not least because it has a
relative minor and a parallel minor.
By virtue of its varied presentation in these three books, harmony emerges as
a key issue for the study of popular music, and above the happily recondite issue
of modal harmony lies the question of whether popular music needs its own
analytical language or can be incorporated into a view of tonal music in general.
All three writers make much of that most familiar of chord sequences, IviIVV:
Everett has it as root motion by third (FR, p. 219) but moves on to an important
distinction between the harmonic and contrapuntal domain (pp. 21920) with
examples from doo-wop, early 1960s pop music, garage-band hits and numbers
by vocal soloists. In the context of intertextual links, Moore builds a remarkable
historical schema around the sequence (SM, pp. 27882), but he starts with
Hoagy Carmichael in 1938 and places emphasis on its status as the doo-wop
progression (p. 278). For Tagg, of course, the sequence is a loop (ET, pp.
2048); he christens it milksap music32 and includes a couple of Mozart
examples as a footnote (ET, p. 204 n. 7). There is little here to dispute and much
to celebrate, but I would add that the sequence is there in Gauldin (1997) as a
repeated sequence (p. 241, the harmonic basis for innumerable popular songs)
and with vi as a voice-leading chord (pp. 23940). In short, the progression
belongs to both popular and classical repertories. I think that what is principally
needed now is a harmony textbook that includes examples from both score-
based works and the so-called popular repertory, including recordings. Gauldin
includes examples from Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, the Beatles and a few
others (as indicated by copyright permissions listed in Gauldin 1997, p. 665),
but there could be many more, copyright permitting, with further chapter or

CRITICAL FORUM 395
sub-section headings also possibly, after relativism, generated by the popular

repertory. How this view might affect the theory textbook is a matter to which I
shall return.
Before I reach the interpretative chapters of SM, I have some critical comment
to dispose of with respect to Moores Ch. 5, Styles, and I apologise in advance
to reader and author for what will seem like a dark rainstorm before the clouds
lift. I understood the chapter to provide a historical framework for the change in
musical sound across the period in which recorded popular music is heard, as a
counterbalance to the necessarily diverse provenance of examples throughout
the book. This is achieved by small paragraphs and sentences in which selected
tracks are briefly mentioned: heres Rigor Mortis by the Meters (SM, p. 141),
theres Love Bites by Def Leppard (p. 156) and back there are versions of A
Foggy Day by Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald (p. 131). The problem is that
a historical account necessarily adopts a historical framework, and too much of
the chapter, which employs fewer footnotes than the others, recycles second-
hand truisms, such as the following three examples. First, that rock n roll gave
way to a new generation of insipid material in the early 1960s while black
artists became even more marginalised, their essential contribution unrecog-
nised (SM, p. 134; Tagg has a similar narrative in ET, pp. 21213). Brian Ward
(1998) has challenged the idea that the early 1960s presented the marginalising
of black Americans: for example, this was arguably the most racially integrated
popular music scene in American history (p. 124), and who can forget the
Shirelles and Ben E. King on the television series Dancing in the Street,33 while
also reflecting on how their hard-earned place in the charts was jeopardised by,
amongst other things, the covers of their own songs as performed by bands of the
so-called British invasion of 1964?34 Meanwhile, Albin Zak III (2010) challenges
the insipid material thesis as a historiographic clich (p. 207). Ironically, given
Moores position, Zaks argument often turns on the proper integration of
aspects of records other than chords and perceived authenticity, such as the way
a record was put together as a record, for example by the producer Mitch Miller.
Next, tucked away: The Drifters, c. 1953, were probably the best rhythm n
blues vocal group (SM, p. 133). Now, thats an assumption that must explain
why my CD collection includes their Let the Boogie-Woogie Roll: Greatest Hits
19531958 (Rhino, 1995), acquired years ago; but I havent checked the claim
and should prefer to trust Robert Christgau on the Five Royales: Competing
double-discs by Clyde McPhatters Drifters and Harvey Fuquas Moonglows
convince me that these guys were the shit (Christgau 1994). That is to say, with
such a vast historical narrative to recount, it is better to avoid value judgements
unless one is secure and supported. Finally, the description of Louis Jordan, the
first real example of African-American cross-over, full of sexual innuendo (SM,
p. 132): where do we even begin with that? Full of fun? Full of provocative fun?
Moores prose is especially unforgiving in this chapter, and not necessarily for
the gelidity he elsewhere identifies (p. 329), such that the quotation of four
sentences from Simon Frith on David Bowie arrive as a breath of much-needed

396 CRITICAL FORUM
fresh air (p. 146). The final irony of Styles is that at two subsequent points, it
seems to me that Moore does a far more interesting music-historical job: one is
a fascinating consideration of the term authenticity, with a lengthy but breath-
taking single paragraph dipping in and out of five events in the terms develop-
ment (pp. 2602), while another is his observation of how the word here
operates in examples in songs as diverse as those by Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix,
Queen and Sparklehorse (pp. 2402). A British emphasis is hinted at early in the
chapter (p. 119) and may have been a good thing,35 but this would only
underline how much social context is crucial for history (art schools, the music
press, venues, the BBC, and so on).36 Analysts beware: writing history is a
different game.37
Interpreting Popular Music

Moores book now deserves special treatment, since in its interpretative chapters
(Chs 610) SM operates at a more speculative end of research, producing a wide
and impressively interdisciplinary bibliography. Ch. 6 introduces the useful term
friction, which I took to mean the contradiction of expectation, or bending the
rules. Three large chapters follow. Ch. 7, Persona, includes work on prox-
emics and much interesting and pioneering material on the relationship between
the singer and accompaniment. Ch. 8, Reference, includes a discussion of
music semiotics, more on harmony and melody and two innovative theories to
use their sub-division headings, embodied cognition and ecological perception.
Finally, Ch. 9, Belonging, divides neatly into two topics, authenticity and
intertextuality. A final large chapter, Syntheses, is a personal trip through
several tracks that grabs ideas from earlier in the book; arranged by song title, it
covers at least, and probably more than, the following aspects: riffs, voice,
backing voices, harmony again, texture, phrase structure and verbal space.
Beginning with a review of this material, I shall go on to discuss in greater detail
the problems of interpreting popular music in the manner suggested by SM and
will conclude with my own reflections on developments in this area.
Three points in brief. First to celebrate Moores dependability as a guide to
theories, with three examples representative of many more: the brilliant little
summary of six (Keith Swanwick, Nicholas Cook, Howard Gardner, David
Elliott, Theodor Adorno and Mark DeBellis) theorised versions of Toveys nave
listener (but no Tovey!) (SM, pp. 45); the lucid summary of Taggs semiotics
(pp. 21724), put to terrific use in subsequent examples; and the summary of
Mark Johnsons work (pp. 23940) effortless, and leading to All Along the
Watchtower and the discussion of here, already mentioned.
Secondly, with conspicuous use of interpretative theories, and partly as a
matter of proportion, Moore nevertheless also brings out the limitations of
Everetts approach, and this I think again turns on using the word song rather
than rock. Everett covers lyrics in his chapter on interpretation (FR, pp.
36474), but they surely deserve a chapter of their own, not least because the

CRITICAL FORUM 397
period 195569 sees a crucial shift, so that the I of the Elvis record (written by
Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman) differs immediately from the my of Carl
Perkinss shoes, even when worn by Elvis, and significantly so from the post-
Dylan I of Stephen Stills in Suite: Judy Blue Eyes. Moore is right to compli-
cate and disentangle all those issues of persona and authenticity within the text,
let alone among the listeners. There is much analytical work to be done on words
in songs for example, deeper inside rhyme and alliteration (Griffiths 2003 and
Salley 2011) and Moores presentation of euphonics is useful and suggestive
(SM, p. 1146).
Thirdly, both Everett and Moore include discussion of intertextuality: style
and influence is included in Everetts chapter on interpretation (FR, pp. 3748),
and the topic forms the second major sub-section (following authenticity) in
Moores Ch. 9 (SM, pp. 27184). Everett is on the case, I think, using two
words, influence and intertextuality, that have been usefully defined and
discussed by Helen Regueiro Elam (1993a and 1993b); and, being of the view
that the terms can together generate a productive tension, I have elsewhere
summarised their difference:
Influence suggests a search for stable meaning within the confines of a given form,
where authorial intention is key. Intertextuality starts from a limitless range of
potential connection with less regard for disciplinary boundaries, valuing the
critics ability to form links between disparate works with no explicit reference to
authorial intention. (Griffiths 2007, p. 13)
The integration of listener theories defines the innovative and pioneering

aspect of SM. They are likely to be its most debated element, not least in the field
of music analysis: this is the material that is going to keep the grad students busy,
both bright ones who like numbered theoretical schemes and ambitious ones
attracted to scholarly disputes. One important aspect for Moore is relativism,38
which provides SM with its provocative envoi: if you encounter claims purport-
ing to identify the meaning of a particular song, or claims as to the way to
hear something, with the implication the only way ..., or the right way ...,
disbelieve them (SM, p. 330). Moore is zealously committed to the idea that,
owing to differing personal histories, any given interpretation can be assigned
only to the particular person making that interpretation, as though there are as
many meanings to be found in a song as there are inhabitants in a town.
However, this could immediately be countered with the claim that a single song
will generate only a limited number of possible meanings.39 Elsewhere a
philosopher-wit comments: relativism at the level of good for me has so little
to recommend it that its popularity with ordinary people is truly astonishing
(Coady 1995, p. 757). And of course Moore constantly presents his own truthful
readings, if only then to defer to this insistence, chacun sa vrit, reminiscent of
an observation made by William Empson in 1949: it is a familiar paradox; any
serious attempt at establishing a relativity turns out to establish an absolute
(Empson 1987, p. 212). Moore works hard, page upon page, example upon

398 CRITICAL FORUM
example, to integrate the listener into the musical text, with an interest in
hermeneutic theory prepared early on (SM, pp. 1014). Moores later discussion
of the more recent theories of embodied cognition and ecological perception is
both drawn out and tough going (pp. 2438). However, it is decisive for the
interpretative material of SM, as indicated by the heartfelt remark that [f]or me
this is absolutely crucial (p. 237). Noting in passing that a very fine version of
Moores general approach informs his excellent study of Jethro Tulls Aqualung
(Moore 2004), I shall take just three examples from the very many that Moore
provides, with subsequent discussion focused on my scepticism of the analytical
gain offered by these theories, disagreement over which turns on songs use of
both words and music.
The Beach Boys Good Vibrations (Capitol, 1966) appears at three points in
SM, but its chord sequence (given on p. 219) was discussed by Daniel Harrison,
where it marches through its transpositional structure in retrograde (Harrison
1997, p. 44), and labelled by Philip Lambert as a step-mirror motif (2007, p.
258). Moore passes over these authors in his account, in another instance of his
avoidance of American music theory. Moore does provide an interesting discus-
sion of different versions of Good Vibrations, including Brian Wilsons belated
version on Smile (2004) and the wretched Troggs cover of 1974 (SM, pp.
2767). However, Moores more innovative contribution is found immediately
after ecological perception is presented (SM, pp. 24850). In this passage of SM,
there are some intertextual references: Moore has Happy Together, a 1967
record by the Turtles, for the opening descent (SM, p. 249), where Harrison by
way of contrast has the time-honoured ground-bass tetrachord (1997, p. 44)
while, as befits his books premise, Lambert identifies references to the Beach
Boys earlier work (2007, p. 255). The tracks famous theremin generates
Tagg-related semiotics (SM, p. 249). We are left with these observations:
There is no introduction, simply the announcement of the singers almost breath-
less identity, followed by an empty bar before we find out what this I is all about.
The I specifies a source, an individual speaker, whom we encounter unplanned
(that lack of introduction), suddenly, in a way (I would suggest) that will always
be with some apprehension; the immediacy of the encounter is dependent on the
metaphorical space that surrounds the I ... . [I]n the competing melodic lines at
the end, for example, we are given a choice as to which to identify with. Perhaps
most importantly, we can choose to switch our identification from one time to
another. Do we exult in the vibrations (good, good, good vibrations) or do we
keep an eye on the relationship (shes giving me ...)? (SM, pp. 2489)
Metaphorical space and identification are surely the key words, revealing
personal involvements and psychological investments in the details of the track.
Offering little significant gain in analytical wisdom, they seem to me like so much
first-time listening, and I prefer the attentions to the musical properties of this
and other Beach Boys tracks in Harrison and Lambert.
The analysis of Bridge of Sighs (Chrysalis, 1974) by Robin Trower is a most
instructive example of how Moores method works and what its endpoint is (SM,

CRITICAL FORUM 399
pp. 299302). Moore is inspired especially by the governing riff or melodic

motive of the track, played by guitar and first heard at 015025, and ends his
discussion with the italicised phrase what the track I am listening to teaches me
about my own actions and responses. Between the riff and the italics are a few
germane points, starting (as Moore always does) with the tracks musical detail.
There follows a presumption that the track is concerned with resistance, which
(following Talmy 2003, p. 416) requires two forces; this leads Moore to seek a
causative relationship between the cold wind which blows, and the tracks
persona, who spends time crossing (SM, p. 301). Moore now ponders the
image of the cold wind and its effect, whereupon the memory of seeing the band
on television leads him to contemplate the desert and ideas about the way strong
winds work in reality. Indeed, actual recorded wind enters at 230 on a track
that lasts more than five minutes (Everett would include the sound effect in his
list in FR, p. 348). Now here comes the body: ones body leans into the wind.
It is that sense of leaning that is so crucial, that specifies the action of walking in
the wind, and it is that action that, it seems to me, is captured by Trowers
opening riff that subsequently is heard through (i.e. despite) the whirling wind
(SM, p. 301). But Moores still not finished: he spells out precisely the relation-
ship between the bodily action of leaning into the wind and Trowers riff. Finally
Moore goes off into his perennial concerns that hes only one reader, and that
every listener might have his or her own reading, that theres no accounting for
taste but spelling out this time the order of service: what is objectively present
in the music, followed by my own response and ending with that italicised
passage.
What are we to make of that? Moore really believes all of this, so we need to
consider it seriously too. Moores attention to the objective musical detail is
exemplary: whatever one makes of his harmonic theory, his close listening is
always accurate and germane. I like the integration of memoir and feel that this
could inspire writers both in the scholarly world and in the blogosphere: a Music
Analysis that includes music hermeneutics may be no bad thing. Im entertained
by the deserts and strong winds, although I can imagine Middleton, the author
of Voicing the Popular, grumpily exclaiming, He (Moore) should (at p. 9) accuse
me of being too prone to flights of fancy! However, I stop well short of the
direct connection between musical material and metaphor, partly because I
understand the words differently; but also, and more important, Im simply not
engaging in those bodily performances.
Finally, Moores discussion (1992) of Annie Lennoxs Walking on Broken
Glass (Arista, 1991) is another great lesson for the reader. Such richness of
observation: the rhythmic interaction of piano and strings (or their synthesised
equivalents), Lennoxs voice doubled at the octave in the opening, the many
precisions of the sound box. But again, Im not sure I commit to the idea of
embodiment sufficiently to come up with this: it is easy to creatively imagine
walking across a floor, reaching broken glass, treading very carefully so as not to
injure oneself (SM, p. 254). With this Moore is referring to the interaction of

400 CRITICAL FORUM
piano and strings at the opening, their little shared silences providing a literal
correspondence to the words of the title. After close observation of the tracks
often fussy textural details, Moore is happy to note the consistent textural
positioning of details that sustain his metaphor so that, again, the groove rep-
resents the placing of the protagonists feet on broken glass (p. 255) and, yet
again, our own actions if we were walking, carefully, on broken glass (p. 256).
While this may seem like so much high-class word-painting and onomatopoeia,
Moore nevertheless grasps the metaphor as a unifying element, not unlike the
way that Rudolph Rti finds motivic unity (1962), that David Lewin focuses on
the word Rinde in a Schubert song (2006, p. 112) or that Lawrence Kramer
sees imitation as the creation of sonorous images that mimic the mimetic
quality of a feeling or a natural process, the second of a three-part schema of text
setting as rewriting (1984, p. 148). Be that as it may, my own enjoyment from
listening to this track is nevertheless concerned with the unity of pitch and
harmony; and in this brief discussion I leave aside Lennoxs vocal contribution,
which is far from saying that it is of little importance. However, the opening
material in piano and strings presents at least three melodic lines in counter-
point: the piano provides the melodic notes 3 4 3 2 1 at the very top of the
texture, with a rising 5 6 7 8 in the strings (gaining a little eighteenth-century
decorative turn between 7 and 8 at 230238) and the bass strings providing
3 4 5 as support. The material gravitates towards the section that I think
matters, at 042058, in which Lennox has the space to be a Nobly Suffering
Diva; chords turn to the relative minor, with the melodic notes 3 4 from the
opening material composed out (as 3 3 4 3 ) within the plagal cadence Amin
CFC, and the 3 4 5 motion of the opening bass strings composed out into
the chords iiiIVV towards the cadence (followed later, at 310318, by a
great big dominant). In passing, a disappointing bridge section four dull
repetitions, at 156230 sometimes ensured that the track was turned off.
Moore has already spotted this return to the inner workings of the track as
talking of music, familiar in positivist musicology, in internal, formally rela-
tional terms, in a hermetic aestheticised space,40 and that trying to go beyond
all of that carries a morally imperative charge, no less (SM, pp. 21415).
Embodiment and ecology appear not only as a way forward, but as the answer,
its celebration instigated as early as p. 14 (that evidence, that justification, it
seems to me, we finally have). So where does the divergence occur? Attitude
again, perhaps. At Moores italicised endpoint, I dont especially like teaches me
about my own actions and responses because it sounds too much like church or
primary school. Over-affected as I was at a decisive time by the Clash and the
Gang of Four (Griffiths 1999, p. 393), I would say that the words letness (SM,
p. 250), thirdness (p. 250), ecological perception (p. 243), embodiment (p.
238), affordance (p. 243) and blended space (p. 251) are a bunch of hippies
gathered inside a yurt. More important, where Moore wants to bring together
words and music through a unifying metaphor, I keep them as separate strands
in a songs analysis (Griffiths 2007). With the last point in mind, here are two

CRITICAL FORUM 401
differing directions, one to do with political criticism, the other with thinking
through the next stage of attention to what I call the singer-song.
Firstly, criticism in general and political criticism in particular. Having praised
and pinpointed Dylan as a great singer, Everett goes on immediately to castigate
Art Garfunkel (the voice is tiny next to Dylans) and Rick Nelson (an empty
voice with no vibrato, no support) (FR, p. 121), acting like an examiner marking
a parade of singers for their technique. But the readiness to evaluate the material,
deftly and sometimes wittily done, is a feature of FR that I enjoyed and admired:
here the doubling of voice by trombone works out rather disastrously, to my ear
(p. 105), there a song is so simple and repetitive its dull (p. 184, and a verb.
sap. for Taggs milksap), while elsewhere a particular truck-driver modulation
is an overblown attempt to compensate for a weak formal structure (p. 283).
Though Tagg is full of seething contempt for music theorists and musicologists,
his many examples emerge critically unscathed, no doubt for being what most
people hear; similarly, once a track has merited Moores attention, it can do no
wrong and, of course, even if it is faulty, 30,000 potential truth claimants in the
town of Earley in Berkshire have every right to protest otherwise. Moore down-
plays the role of critics as mediators, whereas I would defer in the first instance
to the critics track record rather than disbelieve a truth claim. I dont suppose
I ever agreed with the great critic Steven Wells (19602009), who died too
young, but I enjoyed immensely the quality of his writing in the NME, and I
recognised his critical consistency strict admiration of only the most commer-
cial teen-oriented pop music and the most forbidding hardcore rock music and
dislike of everything in between.41
Moore the relativist is consistent and patient in insisting that any statement
can be taken only as one persons standpoint, and an important run of pages
starts (SM, pp. 2067) as the culmination of work on the persona and subject
position, leads to a discussion of intention that stars Amy Winehouse (pp.
20810) and ends with, among other things, a phrase sure to concern scholars in
popular musics sociological or cultural-studies wing: I do believe the market to
be pretty irrelevant in terms of the interpretations we make (p. 214). Well,
Walking on Broken Glass was a hit single on the Arista label, so whatever
glass-avoiding subtlety is found in the opening seconds is firmly trounced by a
rhythm arrangement that (starting at 016), far from gingerly avoiding the glass,
positively struts right across it. But this is also where words come with special
properties, offering scope for critical and political engagement found, to be sure,
firmly inside the text. There is a kind of pinched detachment in Moores
further-study questions (SM, pp. 3345), such as question 7.12, which might in
this sense be the Big One: [h]ow does the environment relate to the persona?
With what consequences? What is missing here is history and its struggles and
gains. I dont see that feminism, anti-racism or homophobia has to be sneaked
in only as an aspect of ecology or environment. Here for example is Christgau
at his even-by-his-standards best, talking about two tracks on an album by Toby
Keith (I hadnt heard of him, either) and torn in the grading as rarely before:42

402 CRITICAL FORUM
Toby Keith: Unleashed [DreamWorks, 2002]
With America lighting up one too many places like the Fourth of July, I went back
and tried to hate Courtesy of the Red[,] White and Blue like I oughta, but it was
still too pithy and heartfelt, and the album still gave up a colloquial aptness and
easy masculinity Id overlooked. But obscured by the uproar is a piece of work as
immoral as One in a Million or Black Korea no, worse. I can forgive duet
partner Willie Nelson almost anything, but Im appalled that he lent his good
name to Beer for My Horses, which not only naturalises lynching but makes it
seem like fun on a Friday night. True, the horses the mob rides evoke Hollywood
westerns. Right, there is too much corruption, though somebody should tell
these yokels that crime in the streets dropped in the good old days when we had
an economy. But the racial coding of the gangsters the song sends to their maker
needs no explanation. And those evil forces who blow up a building aint
bomber pilots, now are they? B/E (Christgau 2002)
Here I admire the critic full-on in the moment of writing, and thus, over in
Moores summary questions and italicised keywords (SM, pp. 3345), there is to
my mind a set of questions and answers that goes like this:
Do the words to the track contain material offensive to any social group (race,
class, religion, gender, sexuality, age, nation)? If so, criticise that offence.
Are there contradictions between real life and the views contained in the words to
the song? If so, criticise that contradiction.
Does the industrial context (for example, producer, label, publisher) suggest
contradictions between real life and views contained in words to the song? If so,
criticise that contradiction.
Second is the question of where so-called popular-music studies goes now that
the battles are won. I think that Tagg wants more attention given to lots of other
contexts world music, music in different media, music for different ages, and
so on while Moore aims to establish and celebrate a common truth of listener
response by integrating research in psychology and cognition. Im with Bob
Dylan:
Of course, most of my ilk that came along write their own songs and play them.
It wouldnt matter if anybody ever made another record. Theyve got enough
songs. To me, someone who writes really good songs is Randy Newman. Theres
a lot of people who write good songs. As songs. Now Randy might not go out on
stage and knock you out, or knock your socks off. And hes not going to get people
thrilled in the front row. He aint gonna do that. But hes gonna write a better
song than most people who can do it.
You know, hes got that down to an art. Now Randy knows music. He knows
music. But it doesnt get any better than Louisiana or Cross Charleston Bay
[Sail Away]. It doesnt get any better than that. Its like a classically heroic
anthem theme. He did it. Theres quite a few people who did it. Not that many
people in Randys class. (Cited in Zollo 1997, pp. 734)43

CRITICAL FORUM 403
Gauldin (1997) includes as case studies three works: the Minuet and Trio of
Beethovens Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 2 No. 1; Wagners old chestnut, the
Prelude to Tristan and Isolde; and the four songs of Alban Bergs Op. 2 (pp.
33346, 54558 and 60520). My question is: what does it take for popular
music to occupy a chapter in such a book, and in what way (and not as
tokenism, as we used to say)? The harmony textbook is a good spot where
theory meets analysis, and a context in which music analysis meets its educa-
tional mass market. As Cohn could be said to suggest, the great achievement of
writers like Moore, Everett and Tagg is the relativism of tonal harmony, as
though that point even needed to be made. A strong case could be made for
popular musics becoming part of the theory book of the future in which
recordings are described, while any textbook presentation of rhythm surely needs
examples from rock, funk and jazz.
I also suggest that popular musics chief claim, with the relativism battles
ended, is to the creation of poetic worlds, and that this depends on exactly
Moores insistence that the words and voice in song bring their own baggage. In
passing, Moore claims that we are more interested in the actions of the per-
former than the composer, at least with this repertory (SM, p. 91), but Im not
so sure, since our interest also concerns precisely the blurring of that distinction.
One of the hardest things to do is to come up with a term to describe a deeply
established aspect of this repertory, and I find myself tending these days towards
singer-songs, in order to evoke the singer-songwriter, but freed from singer-
songwriter as a kind of 1970s sub-genre, a representative of which is likely to
perform sensitively at an open-mic night near you this evening. Van Morrison
was only one extraordinary example among several at the time, especially in
Great Britain, emerging from a band of competent musicians convinced that he
was also a poet of sorts, making up the words; Elton John is less compelling in
this sense, since his words are provided by someone else, often Bernie Taupin,
and thus closer to Schubert-via-Mller or Eisler-via-Brecht.44 The singer-song is
triumphant and can therefore enable Moores iPod selection (King Crimson
Slade, Ray Davies and Kathy Kirby), but its triumph centrally concerns Bob
Dylans influence, longevity and hegemony, as well as the hegemonic Beatles as
both song writers and performers of cover versions.45 As well as all the people
who were influenced directly by Dylan, brilliantly captured in Loudon Wain-
wright IIIs Talking New Bob Dylan (History, Charisma, 1992), so Dylan in
that Bloomian way influenced the ones whod gone before, with Woody
Guthrie, Hank Williams, Buddy Holly and Jimmie Rodgers only in the front line
(see Bloom 1973). What defined this particular repertory was a bringing together
of two strands that reside in words-in-music: a collection of technical innova-
tions usually borrowed from unpredictable aspects of poetry and the creation
and even discovery of poetic worlds, for which the word poetics might suffice
(see Lewin 2006, p. 101; and Krims 2003, pp. 2035). Christgau has the best
paragraph on this development, especially the list of no fewer than eleven
adjectives in the penultimate sentence:

404 CRITICAL FORUM
Its folkies, whether they call themselves that or not, who are forever revitalising
outmoded musical resources they discover on old records. And bigger than that,
folkies turn out to care a lot about words. Bob Dylan sold out faster than swing,
and trailing behind him came a multitude of troubadours manqu who turned out
their own thousands of great songs sometimes with bridges and changes
attached, sometimes strophic versifying, sometimes three-chord rants, laments, or
anthems. The urbane wit and commonplace succinctness prized by classic pop
never died out, but rocks vernacular was more all-embracing slangy or raunchy
or obscene, earnest or enraged, confessional or hortatory, poetic or dissociative or
obscure or totally meaningless. Some lyricist is recombining a personalised selec-
tion of those qualities as you read this sentence. (Christgau 2000)
Genuine technical innovators are of course few (for instance, Bob Dylan, Patti
Smith, Mark E. Smith, the Last Poets, the Watts Prophets and Chuck D), as are
song writers who rise to the challenge and carve out the space in languages other
than English (for example, Meic Stevens or David R. Edwards in the Welsh
language; see Hill 2007).
Beyond that, the ones who remain are those who create compelling musico-
poetic worlds and expand our sense of what the song could contain. For
example, Loudon Wainwright III has a poetic world as distinctive as Philip
Larkins it is that good although I prefer Larkins tough self-editing (one
volume per decade) to Wainwrights prolixity (an album every two years).
Wainwrights theme46 is the family the dad he argued with, the wife he
divorced, the daughter whose birthday he misses all played through tiny details
in which the persona and authenticity of which Moore writes are nicely blurred:
the persona Loudon Wainwright III is often teasingly and exactly the same as
Loudon Wainwright III the person. The musical tricks are easily heard and often
turn on a simple but distinctive formal device, which is to repeat the first verse
as the songs conclusion a kind of meta-formal device that gently reminds us of
the songs construction while recalling the songs subject matter. In White
Winos (Last Man on Earth, Evangeline, 2001), Wainwright recalls how his
mother used to enjoy ending her day with a glass of white wine, and one of the
immediate things is that even though it seemed so true, Id never spotted that in
a song: who wouldnt want to end the day with a chat over a glass of white wine?
In this case the opening line (mother liked her white wine) returns and, on the
recording,47 eventually provides a hearty conclusion. The trick is that when
Wainwright broaches dark memories, the deceptive cadence appears, followed
by a cut in the sentence, either back to the first line or to the instrumental
opening: these cadence-cut pairs are found at 027033 (first line); 051
057 (instrumental) and 123129 (first line); 147152 (instrumental);
222228 (first line); and 245 (first line as cadence).
In the sense that all three books are centrally concerned with song, we argue
about poetic worlds, in a canon-forming game, as much inside as outside the
academy (Wyn Jones 2008, pp. 10917), and Id be at least louder than everyone
else in insisting on the inclusion of Randy Newman, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon,

CRITICAL FORUM 405
Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, Robert Wyatt and Morrissey, who offer poetic
worlds as distinctive, sustained and convincing as those of Larkin, Seamus
Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell and August Kleinzahler. No doubt
this has something to do with a relationship to real life, but it also concerns an
interest in what the song could or even should contain in the future. The work
is going to be inside the words as they relate to music.48 In my version of how
things move on, selection is all; and as all things must pass, to borrow the
George Harrison title (Apple, 1970), one should never underestimate how
significant the death of Paul McCartney will be for even the Beatles, and the
subsequent, eventual conclusion of copyright issues. Note too that my view is,
riskily no doubt, far less affected by downloadings decisive shift towards the
isolated track, and that I still think in terms of the oeuvre and the work, including
the album as a determined sequence of tracks.
To summarise, SM is a tremendous work, a lifetime achievement (as they say

in award ceremonies), meandering like a great river or the first movement of
the last Schubert piano sonata. It will set agendas for some time to come and,
in its integration of literatures on embodiment and ecological perception, will
be much used and debated. Im not convinced, though, that these theories
merit the space given to them, so to me the book overly compresses what I see
as its most valuable material: the detailed attention to words and music in
song. I do hope that the book gets used, especially its syntheses, as there is
every chance that it could inspire new kinds of writing that integrate creative
work and memoir alongside analysis. FR is the one to find space for in the
curriculum, since it provides the basis for systematic work on popular music
before and after its stated period. ET is a rich source of ideas and material,
often provocative, and a useful foil to the other two books. The varieties of
relativism found in these three books and their thousands of examples are now
the end of an era, following which the hardest questions arise about popular
musics place in the musical curriculum: not the curriculum of popular music,
just that of music. When a track by Beck that uses a majorminor mixture can
appear alongside an example in a Schubert song, one job is done. However,
the singer-song and its poetic worlds valued so highly that the distribution of
chapters in the music-history book needs to be reconfigured? Well see.
NOTES
1. Allan F. Moore, Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular

Song (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012). xvi + 412 pp. 70.00 (hb) 19.95 (pb).
ISBN 978-1-4094-2864-0 (hb) 978-1-4094-3802-1 (pb).
2. Philip Tagg, Everyday Tonality: Towards a Tonal Theory of What Most

People Hear (New York and Montreal: Mass Media Music Scholars Press,

406 CRITICAL FORUM
2009). iv + 334 pp. Suggested Donation 8.50. ISBN 978-0-9701684-4-3

(e-book).
3. Griffiths (1999) was a review of another useful volume, Brackett (1995).
4. Everett does include an important limit with regard to recording technol-
ogy with reference to the digital age; FR, p. 361.
5. Duplications between ET and Shepherd, Horn, Laing, Oliver and Wicke
(2003) include in the latter most of the entries in the chapter Harmony at
pp. 52159, the entry for melody at pp. 56784 and some others.
6. A track by will.i.am produced during the U.S. presidential election cam-
paign of Barack Obama in 2008.
7. See http://www.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780195310245.
8. See www.tagg.org.
9. Moore also hears the chorus of the Mott the Hoople track as All the young
dudes, carry the nudes, finding it a striking image (SM, p. 230), but Im
quite sure it is the news that they carry. That said, both Moore and
Everett maintain a high level of error avoidance, and as for Tagg, who
presumably did all his own copy editing, errors are remarkably rare.
10. See http://tagg.org/rants/audititis/audititis.html.
11. See http://tagg.org/zmisc/WhyLeave.html.
12. Quite where Taggs political stance originated is one for the detached
biographer. I see to my surprise from his CV (http://tagg.org/ptcv.html)
that he attended an expensive school (the Leys) in Cambridge and stayed
in that city to attend its prestigious university.
13. See http://tagg.org/ptavmat.htm#Dominants.
14. See http://tagg.org/ptavmat.htm.
15. For example, younger or non-British readers may not remember Moores
series of radio programmes on songs, with the poet Simon Armitage, for
BBC Radio 4.
16. Here are three editorial suggestions for a better second edition of Song
Means: more use of clock timing inside tracks (a consistent virtue of both
FR and ET), more precise cross-reference across the text (theres too much
see chapter x rather than see p. y) and considerably more precise
pagination in the footnotes.
17. Found respectively on pp. 108, 3940, and 170 of Moore (1993), and on
pp. 156, 57, and 169 of SM.

CRITICAL FORUM 407
18. A rare case of positive endorsement from a practitioner is the tribute from
Robert Fripp (cited in Green 2002, pp. ixx); perhaps more typical is the
critical comment by Tom Constanten, of the Grateful Dead, made of
Boone (cited in Boone 1997, p. 205).
19. Moore has the distinction of being pilloried by the novelist Nick Hornby
for attending a concert by Jethro Tull in 1996: But even so! Jethro Tull! In
1996! (Hornby 2003, p. 18), a comment made in a review of the hilari-
ously dry Analyzing Popular Music in which almost none of the essays has
been written with a view to being read, and including chapters by both
Moore and myself; see Moore 2003.
20. Truck-driver modulation is the name used consistently by Everett for the
process by which songs, be they on record or in performance, modulate
usually by a semitone or tone and usually upwards. Such modulations
happen most frequently towards the end of the song. See Everett (1997),
p. 151 n. 18.
21. A helpful analogy is used to distinguish between them: swimmers swim
lengths to and fro (shuttles) while runners run laps (loops) (ET, p. 200).
22. See for example Drabkin (2002), pp. 81821, for a definition of layer
(Schicht), and pp. 8219 for composing-out (Prolongation and Auskompo-
nierung); see Forte and Gilbert (1982), p. 105, for third-divider.
23. This point was also made in Bernard (2003), p. 377, in a review of Moore
(1997).
24. Better the system of Boone in a study of Dark Star of the Grateful Dead,
in which A Mixolydian has the key signature F, C and G; Boone (1997),
pp. 17981.
25. For example, Gauldin (1997), pp. 21124: the 6/4 and other linear
chords. Moores use of Ic (etc.) is consistent with the system employed
in the traditional theory exams of the Associated Board for the Royal
Schools of Music (ABRSM).
26. Tagg covers Mixolydian harmony in ET at pp. 1245 (the cowboy
cadence), Mixolydian loops on pp. 2216 and yet more Mixolydian melo-
dies on pp. 2745. The example I use in teaching is the remarkable essay
in Mixolydian invention that is Marquee Moon by Television (Elektra,
1977), where almost all of the guitar improvisations are in that mode and
rendered as octaves at 813841.
27. A less significant error is found in the Inspiral Carpets example on p. 88,
where Moore has ivVI for viIV.
28. See also Lori Burnss chapter in Burns and Lafrance (2002), pp. 3161.
Moore is cheerleader for the back cover of Everett (2008).

408 CRITICAL FORUM
29. The publication dates presumably explain why the readings do not refer to
each other.
30. The Online Guitar Archive (OLGA) was closed down in 2006 for reasons
relating to copyright.
31. See Gauldin (1997), pp. 390407. Everett employs mixture in FR (pp.
2446), Tagg only in passing (ET, p. 118).
32. See also the discussion of his audiovisual examples above.
33. First broadcast in the UK in 1996.
34. A classic example is Do Wah Diddy Diddy, recorded by the Exciters in
1963 and a hit single when covered by Manfred Mann the following year.
35. Moore (1993), it will be remembered, first appeared in a series entitled
Popular Music in Britain.
36. One more small complaint: in SM (p. 14), Moore writes that sheet music
transcriptions can be notoriously inaccurate. I tend to find published
transcriptions not notoriously inaccurate but impressively accurate, and
examples that I regularly use include full scores of the Bill Evans Trio and
Steely Dan and the note-for-note vocal transcriptions of the Carpenters, all
published by Hal Leonard. The accuracy of a transcription also depends on
when it was made; there is a world of difference between the old Northern
Songs collections of Beatles songs and recent full-score versions.
37. See Griffiths (2004) for my attempt to do so.
38. This has been the case for many years: [t]he extreme relativism that this
implies is both unavoidable and to be embraced, for it asserts that not only
musics meaning, but its values too, are the preserves of listeners; Moore
(1993), p. 185.
39. Interesting similarities with SM can be found in John Careys energetic
book What Good Are the Arts? Carey the relativist: if this seems to plunge
us into the abyss of relativism, then I can only say that the abyss of
relativism is where we always have been in reality if it is an abyss; Carey
(2005), p. 30. Carey with Moore: [a] work of art is not confined to the way
one person responds to it. It is the sum of all the subtle, private, idiosyn-
cratic feelings it has evoked in its whole history; ibid., p. 31. Carey and
Moore on analysis: those particular words in that particular order; ibid., p.
174. Moore: the issuing of an invitation to hear a particular sample of
music in a particular way; SM, p. 2. But Carey on repertory: [i]f it is asked
how, in this relativist world, one decides which artists or writers or musi-
cians to pay attention to, my own view is that Dr Johnsons argument
carries weight: What mankind have long possessed they have often

CRITICAL FORUM 409
examined and compared: and if they persist to value the possession, it is

because frequent comparisons have confirmed opinion in its favour. In
other words, if you stick to the canon you are less likely to waste your time;
Carey (2005), p. 252. Exit Moore, high analyst of low music.
40. To find a perfect visual image of hermetic aestheticised space, look no
further than the cover of SM, where a woman lies on the floor listening
through headphones to a collection of CDs (long since ripped and traded on
eBay). Fundamental in SM, the sound box relies on headphone listening for
its precision so that, in Walking on Broken Glass, Moore has at 138,
three cymbal crashes to the extreme right; SM, p. 255. In fact there appear
to be two separate cymbals, panned right and left, and played in the
sequence rightleftboth right and leftright, with the drummer imitating or
reinforcing the piano in its descent from the I chord to vi (at 139140).
So much for these small portions of one song, Moore eventually observes
(p. 255), reflecting in the phrases insouciance that the sound box presents
that familiar analytical problem of not seeing the wood for the trees.
41. At the time of writing, see http://www.thestevenwells.com.
42. Christgau began awarding grades to record releases as early as 1969. In the
case of this record, the B grade indicates an admirable effort that aficio-
nados of the style or artist will probably find quite listenable, while records
that gain the E grade are frequently cited as proof that there is no God;
Christgau (1982), pp. 212. On Christgaus grades, see Frith (2002),
pp. 667.
43. The interview dates from 1991.
44. A distinction could be made between Brittens setting the long-dead poet
John Donne and the living poet W.H. Auden in the 1930s, the latter
connected to Carole King and Gerry Goffin as inventors of, respectively,
music and words, working in collaboration. In contemporaneous collabo-
rations and inventions, a shared aesthetic between words and music con-
stitutes the point of connection.
45. McCartney proves an enduring master of the cover version on Back in the
USSR (Melodiya, 1988) and Run Devil Run (Parlophone, 1999).
46. The subject matter of a song is only one of its important aspects, and Moore
makes the point that an attention to syllabic proportion within the sung line
may be as valuable as any amount of content analysis; SM, p. 114.
47. David Mansfields string arrangement for Last Man on Earth (2001) is
tasteful and brings out the formal cuts, but Id recommend a performance
found in an interview with an enthusiastic and most likeable Dutch jour-
nalist on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQHs8HJmzmM),
where Wainwright performs White Winos, there and then, at 1155
1500.

410 CRITICAL FORUM
48. The worst thing that could possibly happen is that a book be produced with
examples of lyrics by all of these songwriters not least because such a
book is going to make the words look like poems rather than respecting
their place in the melodic line, line being the element consistent between
poem and song (see Griffiths 2003, p. 43), the verbal space suggested
by the musics hypermetrical structure and the words that occupy that
space.
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______, 2004: Making Sense of Rocks Tonal Systems, Music Theory Online,
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______, 2008: Pitch down the Middle, in Walter Everett (ed.), Expression in
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______, 2009: Foundations of Rock: from Blue Suede Shoes to Suite: Judy Blue
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412 CRITICAL FORUM
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CRITICAL FORUM 413
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NOTE ON CONTRIBUTOR
DAI GRIFFITHS is Senior Lecturer in Music at Oxford Brookes University and the
author of monographs on Radiohead and Elvis Costello. His research is now
mostly on words in songs, while his teaching is mostly in tonal harmony and
analysis.


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After Relativism

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DOI: 10.1111/musa.

AFTER RELATIVISM: RECENT DIRECTIONS IN THE HIGH ANALYSIS OF

Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012) 381

2013 The Author. Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

A further issue debated in popular music studies often prompted by attacks on

Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012) 2013 The Author.

2013 The Author. Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012) 2013 The Author.

2013 The Author. Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012) 2013 The Author.

2013 The Author. Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

Harmony, and a Historical Model

Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012) 2013 The Author.

2013 The Author. Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

of Schoenbergs Harmonielehre ([1911] 1978) but also chords clearly made of

Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012) 2013 The Author.

My own view is that what is specifically and conceptually lost in a modes-first

2013 The Author. Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012) 2013 The Author.

2013 The Author. Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

sub-section headings also possibly, after relativism, generated by the popular

Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012) 2013 The Author.

Interpreting Popular Music

2013 The Author. Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

The integration of listener theories defines the innovative and pioneering

Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012) 2013 The Author.

2013 The Author. Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

pp. 299302). Moore is inspired especially by the governing riff or melodic

Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012) 2013 The Author.

2013 The Author. Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012) 2013 The Author.

Toby Keith: Unleashed [DreamWorks, 2002]

2013 The Author. Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012) 2013 The Author.

2013 The Author. Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

To summarise, SM is a tremendous work, a lifetime achievement (as they say

1. Allan F. Moore, Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular

2. Philip Tagg, Everyday Tonality: Towards a Tonal Theory of What Most

Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012) 2013 The Author.

2009). iv + 334 pp. Suggested Donation 8.50. ISBN 978-0-9701684-4-3

2013 The Author. Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012) 2013 The Author.

2013 The Author. Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

examined and compared: and if they persist to value the possession, it is

Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012) 2013 The Author.

2013 The Author. Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

Drabkin, William, 2002: Heinrich Schenker, in Thomas Christensen (ed.), The

Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012) 2013 The Author.

2013 The Author. Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012)

Sansom, Anne, 1992: F.R. Leavis (Buffalo, NY and Toronto: University of

Music Analysis, 31/iii (2012) 2013 The Author.

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