Performing Popular Music


Book Description

This book explores the fundamentals of popular music performance for students in contemporary music institutions. Drawing on the insights of performance practice research, it discusses the unwritten rules of performances in popular music, what it takes to create a memorable performance, and live popular music as a creative industry. The authors offer a practical overview of topics ranging from rehearsals to stagecraft, and what to do when things go wrong. Chapters on promotion, recordings, and the music industry place performance in the context of building a career. Performing Popular Music introduces aspiring musicians to the elements of crafting compelling performances and succeeding in the world of today’s popular music.




The Practice of Popular Music


Book Description

The Practice of Popular Music is a music theory and musicianship textbook devoted to explaining the organization of contemporary popular music styles such as pop, rock, R&B, rap, and country. Rooted in recent research showing that the structure of popular music differs from classical music in important ways, this textbook offers an approach to teaching music theory that is fully oriented around popular and commercial genres. Beginning with fundamentals and requiring no previous training in music theory or notation, this book eventually guides the reader through a range of advanced topics, including chromatic mixture, secondary chord function, complex time signatures, and phrase organization. Each chapter develops concepts in tandem with aural comprehension, and the included exercises balance written tasks with listening activities. A companion website provides links to playlists of the music discussed in the book. With an innovative approach designed to broaden the reach of music theory coursework to a wide range of students, including non-majors and those in modern music degree programs such as audio engineering, songwriting, and music business, this textbook enables readers to gain a deep understanding of music theory in the context of popular music.




Revisiting Music Theory


Book Description

Revisiting Music Theory: A Guide to the Practice contains the basics of music theory with the vocabulary used in harmonic and formal analysis. The book assumes few music reading skills, and progresses to include the basic materials of music from J. S. Bach to the twentieth century. Based on Blatter’s own three decades of teaching music theory, this book is aimed at a one or two year introductory course in music theory, can serve for individual study, or as a review for graduate students returning to school. Drawing examples from well-known classical works, as well as folk and popular music, the book shows how theory is applied to practice. The book is divided into five parts. The first part introduces music notation, reviewing the basics of pitch, time, and dynamics as represented in written music. Part 2 introduces the concept of melody, covering modes, scales, scale degrees, and melodic form. Part 3 introduces harmony, dealing with harmonic progression, rhythm, and chord types. Part 4 addresses part writing and harmonic analysis. Finally, Part 5 addresses musical form, and how form is used to structure a composition. Revisiting Music Theory will be a valuable textbook for students, professors, and professionals.




Performance and Popular Music


Book Description

Since the emergence of rock'n'roll in the early 1950s, there have been a number of live musical performances that were not only memorable in themselves, but became hugely influential in the way they shaped the subsequent trajectory and development of popular music. Each, in its own way, introduced new styles, confronted existing practices, shifted accepted definitions, and provided templates for others to follow. Performance and Popular Music explores these processes by focusing on some of the specific occasions when such transformations occurred. An international array of scholars reveal that it is through the (often disruptive) dynamics of performance - and the interaction between performer and audience - that patterns of musical change and innovation can best be recognised. Through multi-disciplinary analyses which consider the history, place and time of each event, the performances are located within their social and professional contexts, and their immediate and long-term musical consequences considered. From the Beatles and Bob Dylan to Michael Jackson and Madonna, from Woodstock and Monterey to Altamont and Live Aid, this book provides an indispensable assessment of the importance of live performance in the practice of popular music, and an essential guide to some of the key moments in its history.




The Practice of Popular Music


Book Description

The Practice of Popular Music is a music theory and musicianship textbook devoted to explaining the organization of contemporary popular music styles such as pop, rock, R&B, rap, and country. Rooted in recent research showing that the structure of popular music differs from classical music in important ways, this textbook offers an approach to teaching music theory that is fully oriented around popular and commercial genres. Beginning with fundamentals and requiring no previous training in music theory or notation, this book eventually guides the reader through a range of advanced topics, including chromatic mixture, secondary chord function, complex time signatures, and phrase organization. Each chapter develops concepts in tandem with aural comprehension, and the included exercises balance written tasks with listening activities. A companion website provides links to playlists of the music discussed in the book. With an innovative approach designed to broaden the reach of music theory coursework to a wide range of students, including non-majors and those in modern music degree programs such as audio engineering, songwriting, and music business, this textbook enables readers to gain a deep understanding of music theory in the context of popular music.




Popular Music Fandom


Book Description

This book explores popular music fandom from a cultural studies perspective that incorporates popular music studies, audience research, and media fandom. The essays draw together recent work on fandom in popular music studies and begin a dialogue with the wider field of media fan research, raising questions about how popular music fandom can be understood as a cultural phenomenon and how much it has changed in light of recent developments. Exploring the topic in this way broaches questions on how to define, theorize, and empirically research popular music fan culture, and how music fandom relates to other roles, practices, and forms of social identity. Fandom itself has been brought center stage by the rise of the internet and an industrial structure aiming to incorporate, systematize, and legitimate dimensions of it as an emotionally-engaged form of consumerism. Once perceived as the pariah practice of an overly attached audience, media fandom has become a standardized industrial subject-position called upon to sell box sets, concert tickets, new television series, and special editions. Meanwhile, recent scholarship has escaped the legacy of interpretations that framed fans as passive, pathological, or defiantly empowered, taking its object seriously as a complex formation of identities, roles, and practices. While popular music studies has examined some forms of identity and audience practice, such as the way that people use music in daily life and listener participation in subcultures, scenes and, tribes, this volume is the first to examine music fans as a specific object of study.




Genre in Popular Music


Book Description

The popularity of the motion picture soundtrack O Brother, Where Art Thou? brought an extraordinary amount of attention to bluegrass, but it also drew its share of criticism from some aficionados who felt the album’s inclusion of more modern tracks misrepresented the genre. This soundtrack, these purists argued, wasn’t bluegrass, but “roots music,” a new and, indeed, more overarching category concocted by journalists and marketers. Why is it that popular music genres like these and others are so passionately contested? And how is it that these genres emerge, coalesce, change, and die out? In Genre in Popular Music, Fabian Holt provides new understanding as to why we debate music categories, and why those terms are unstable and always shifting. To tackle the full complexity of genres in popular music, Holt embarks on a wide-ranging and ambitious collection of case studies. Here he examines not only the different reactions to O Brother, but also the impact of rock and roll’s explosion in the 1950s and 1960s on country music and jazz, and how the jazz and indie music scenes in Chicago have intermingled to expand the borders of their respective genres. Throughout, Holt finds that genres are an integral part of musical culture—fundamental both to musical practice and experience and to the social organization of musical life.




Theory and Practice of Technology-Based Music Instruction


Book Description

Technology is an increasingly popular part of music education in schools that attracts students to school music who might not otherwise be involved. In many teacher preparation programs, music technology is an afterthought that does not receive the same extensive treatment as do traditional areas of music teaching such as band, orchestra, choir, and general music. This book helps to establish a theoretical and practical foundation for how to teach students to use technology as the major means for developing their musicianship. Including discussions of lesson planning, lesson delivery, and assessment, readers will learn how to gain comfort in the music technology lab. Theory and Practice of Technology-Based Music Instruction also includes "profiles of practice" that dive into the experiences of real teachers in music technology classes, their struggles, their successes, and lessons we can learn from both. In this second edition, new profiles feature Teachers of Color who use technology extensively in their varied types of music teaching. This edition encourages readers to think about issues of inequity of social justice in music education technology and how teachers might begin to address those concerns. Also updated are sections about new standards that may guide music education technology practice, about distance and technology-enhanced learning during the global pandemic, and about ways to integrate technology in emerging contexts.




Sites of Popular Music Heritage


Book Description

This volume examines the location of memories and histories of popular music and its multiple pasts, exploring the different ‘places’ in which popular music can be situated, including the local physical site, the museum storeroom and exhibition space, and the digitized archive and display space made possible by the internet. Contributors from a broad range of disciplines such as archive studies, popular music studies, media and cultural studies, leisure and tourism, sociology, museum studies, communication studies, cultural geography, and social anthropology visit the specialized locus of popular music histories and heritage, offering diverse set of approaches. Popular music studies has increasingly engaged with popular music histories, exploring memory processes and considering identity, collective and cultural memory, and notions of popular culture’s heritage values, yet few accounts have spatially located such trends to focus on the spaces and places where we encounter and engender our relationship with popular music’s history and legacies. This book offers a timely re-evaluation of such sites, reinserting them into the narratives of popular music and offering new perspectives on their function and significance within the production of popular music heritage. Bringing together recent research based on extensive fieldwork from scholars of popular music studies, cultural sociology, and museum studies, alongside the new insights of practice-based considerations of current practitioners within the field of popular music heritage, this is the first collection to address the interdisciplinary interest in situating popular music histories, heritages, and pasts. The book will therefore appeal to a wide and growing academic readership focused on issues of heritage, cultural memory, and popular music, and provide a timely intervention in a field of study that is engaging scholars from across a broad spectrum of disciplinary backgrounds and theoretical perspectives.




Contemporary Music Theory - Level One


Book Description

(Piano). The Music Theory series is designed from the ground-up to explain the terminology and musical structures needed for modern applications. Level One is an introductory course which covers music notation, key signatures, basic scales, intervals, modes, diatonic relationships and 3-and 4-part chords. Includes reference appendices, a complete glossary of terms, and hundreds of written theory exercises with answers.