Music analysis
September 19, 2010 9:26 PM Subscribe
Are there any websites or blogs that completely break down and analyze the musical composition and/or production of modern songs?
Well, a guy named Alan W. Pollack analyzed the composition of every Beatles song. (Appears to have been noted on the blue a while back.)
posted by Dixon Ticonderoga at 9:59 PM on September 19, 2010 [2 favorites]
posted by Dixon Ticonderoga at 9:59 PM on September 19, 2010 [2 favorites]
My friend Larry wrote down a detailed analysis of two New Pornographers songs on his blog. All composition, nothing about production.
posted by escabeche at 10:28 PM on September 19, 2010
posted by escabeche at 10:28 PM on September 19, 2010
If there isn't one, it sounds like a really run project!
posted by jnrussell at 11:42 PM on September 19, 2010
posted by jnrussell at 11:42 PM on September 19, 2010
Ugh, I mean 'fun,' not 'run.' My point was that it would be really cool to see if other mefites would be interested in putting something together if there isn't already a good source. I know I'd be interested in participating (I have some compositional/theory knowledge).
posted by jnrussell at 11:43 PM on September 19, 2010
posted by jnrussell at 11:43 PM on September 19, 2010
There is no such thing as a definitive compositional analysis or a "complete break down" of a piece of music. There is an entire discipline -- Music Theory -- devoted to the question of what an "analysis" of a piece of music might be. The theory literature is full of pop music work these days, a lot of which says that conventional modes of analysis don't tell us much about how pop music works, and a lot of which argues that "production" is not distinguishable from "composition" in the creation of popular music, which is of course primarily consumed in recorded form.
If you're looking for serious musical analysis of popular music, as well as some insights into what that might be, you could do worse than starting with David Brackett's fine book *Interpreting Popular Music.*
If all you want is harmonic structures, there are millions of sites out there that give you tab and notation transcriptions, chord charts, etc. That's not analysis.
posted by fourcheesemac at 4:32 AM on September 20, 2010 [6 favorites]
If you're looking for serious musical analysis of popular music, as well as some insights into what that might be, you could do worse than starting with David Brackett's fine book *Interpreting Popular Music.*
If all you want is harmonic structures, there are millions of sites out there that give you tab and notation transcriptions, chord charts, etc. That's not analysis.
posted by fourcheesemac at 4:32 AM on September 20, 2010 [6 favorites]
Check out stevegoldbergmusic.com. He has done some analysis of his own songs and says he plans to do others.
posted by useyourmachinegunarm at 6:35 AM on September 20, 2010
posted by useyourmachinegunarm at 6:35 AM on September 20, 2010
and a lot of which argues that "production" is not distinguishable from "composition" in the creation of popular music, which is of course primarily consumed in recorded form.
fourcheesemac is right on the money about this, the best thinking/writing I've read over the past decade considers production as part of the compositional process. One of the musicologists who advanced this perspective quite a bit is Albin Zak, and I recommend his terrific and accessible The Poetics of Rock. His newest book, to be released tomorrow, also looks pretty good (I Don't Sound Like Nobody). As to websites that do this kind of comprehensive analysis regularly, I am not aware of any.
posted by LooseFilter at 8:41 AM on September 20, 2010
fourcheesemac is right on the money about this, the best thinking/writing I've read over the past decade considers production as part of the compositional process. One of the musicologists who advanced this perspective quite a bit is Albin Zak, and I recommend his terrific and accessible The Poetics of Rock. His newest book, to be released tomorrow, also looks pretty good (I Don't Sound Like Nobody). As to websites that do this kind of comprehensive analysis regularly, I am not aware of any.
posted by LooseFilter at 8:41 AM on September 20, 2010
audio.tutsplus is devoted to mostly "production" tutorials, but they'll occasionally discuss traditional theory and often break down songs...though they usually aren't well-known commercial songs.
Seconding fourcheesemac and LooseFilter on the concept that, especially when it concerns pop music, production and composition are one in the same.
A site that's devoted *only* to the harmonic analysis of pop music would get boring fast. Pop music isn't harmonically complex (that's part of the appeal), hell for that matter a lot of really wonderful concert music isn't complex either...there's all kinds of other stuff to consider: instrumentation, medium, context, history, etc... all of which seems mighty ambitious for a blog.
That being said, I did find the following after a quick google search against "pop music analysis":
Analysing R.E.M.'s It's the End of the World As We Know It
Elements of Popular Music Analysis
Critical Approaches to Popular Music (ok this last one is just a course bibliography for a class at George Mason, but it might be a good starting point for a reading list)
posted by jnrussell at 2:51 PM on September 20, 2010
Seconding fourcheesemac and LooseFilter on the concept that, especially when it concerns pop music, production and composition are one in the same.
A site that's devoted *only* to the harmonic analysis of pop music would get boring fast. Pop music isn't harmonically complex (that's part of the appeal), hell for that matter a lot of really wonderful concert music isn't complex either...there's all kinds of other stuff to consider: instrumentation, medium, context, history, etc... all of which seems mighty ambitious for a blog.
That being said, I did find the following after a quick google search against "pop music analysis":
Analysing R.E.M.'s It's the End of the World As We Know It
Elements of Popular Music Analysis
Critical Approaches to Popular Music (ok this last one is just a course bibliography for a class at George Mason, but it might be a good starting point for a reading list)
posted by jnrussell at 2:51 PM on September 20, 2010
There are now courses taught on popular music analysis at many universities, including my own once very conservative department. There are several senior music theorists and musicologists who have written extensively on the subject, and a burgeoning article literature, not to mention rafts of dissertations out or on the way. A lot of us have been thinking about popular music as an analytic object for a long time. (I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis (over 20 years ago) on the micro-poetics of vocal style in a particular pop genre.)
It's hardly a new field. It's an established academic area now (broadly speaking, "popular music studies," although that also incorporates historical, ethnographic, and cultural studies work). Analysts of popular music are now tenured in many university music departments.
The International Association for the Study of Popular Music has an annual conference at which I'd estimate about 25% of the papers given are close analytic studies of popular music style or performance. A glance at some of their recent programs will give you a sense of the range of work being done. But one now routinely sees analytic work on pop music at the conferences of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory (both meeting together in Indianapolis in a few weeks) as well as, with a longer history, the Society for Ethnomusicology and the Society for American Music. (SEM has a popular music section which sponsors a number of its paper sessions every year).
So it's not a new field, there's a literature, and the subject really is too vast and complex to reduce to a web project, or to imagine you'd be reinventing something. Most of the really interesting work is pursuing questions in the domain of timbre, production, technology, or structural domains like micro-rhythmic structure. One of my favorite scholars is Tom Porcello, whose work on the actual process of high end studio recording and the key role played by engineers in "composing" popular music is groundbreaking stuff.
I'd just repeat that there is no such thing as a definitive "breakdown" of a piece of music. Under the influence of classical music's huge emphasis on harmonic structure, we tend to think of chordal or harmonic analysis as the "breakdown" of a piece. That's one reason popular music analysis languished for so long -- we didn't have too much to say about harmony, really. Three chords and the truth and all that (actually, some popular music can be quite harmonically complex, however -- ever try to figure out the chords on a Burt Bachrach number?). But the classical music scholars had almost nothing to say about rhythmic feel or drive, micropoetics of timing, timbre, or technology of production. Ethnomusicologists have, since the 1890s, been pushing western music theory to expand its analysis of modal structures, group dynamics, different tuning and temperament systems etc.
And this is not even to touch the question of singing style or song text (see Frith, "Why Do Songs Have Words?"), the major foci of popular music analysis over all.
So I want to emphasize that the idea of "completely breaking down" a piece of music is a fiction, an illusion that there is a definitive analytic model that works for all music, that we even known what the relevant constituent parts are of musical experience (since the "piece of music" is irrelevant, ultimately, compared to how it is *heard* and experienced in a particular musical/cultural context -- you might hear an improvised passage of Arabic music as "out of tune," but someone who knows the quarter tone scales and tetrachordal structures would hear it as fantastically complex and inventive. A classical musician might hear "All You Need Is Love" and find the 3 chord structure utterly boring. But someone who has worked in recording studios would note the use of tape manipulation techniques as a major innovation in popular music recording (and give George Martin more credit as a "composer" than a producer).
Chord charts are easy to find if that's all you want. Just don't confuse them with "analysis."
posted by fourcheesemac at 5:03 AM on September 21, 2010 [1 favorite]
It's hardly a new field. It's an established academic area now (broadly speaking, "popular music studies," although that also incorporates historical, ethnographic, and cultural studies work). Analysts of popular music are now tenured in many university music departments.
The International Association for the Study of Popular Music has an annual conference at which I'd estimate about 25% of the papers given are close analytic studies of popular music style or performance. A glance at some of their recent programs will give you a sense of the range of work being done. But one now routinely sees analytic work on pop music at the conferences of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory (both meeting together in Indianapolis in a few weeks) as well as, with a longer history, the Society for Ethnomusicology and the Society for American Music. (SEM has a popular music section which sponsors a number of its paper sessions every year).
So it's not a new field, there's a literature, and the subject really is too vast and complex to reduce to a web project, or to imagine you'd be reinventing something. Most of the really interesting work is pursuing questions in the domain of timbre, production, technology, or structural domains like micro-rhythmic structure. One of my favorite scholars is Tom Porcello, whose work on the actual process of high end studio recording and the key role played by engineers in "composing" popular music is groundbreaking stuff.
I'd just repeat that there is no such thing as a definitive "breakdown" of a piece of music. Under the influence of classical music's huge emphasis on harmonic structure, we tend to think of chordal or harmonic analysis as the "breakdown" of a piece. That's one reason popular music analysis languished for so long -- we didn't have too much to say about harmony, really. Three chords and the truth and all that (actually, some popular music can be quite harmonically complex, however -- ever try to figure out the chords on a Burt Bachrach number?). But the classical music scholars had almost nothing to say about rhythmic feel or drive, micropoetics of timing, timbre, or technology of production. Ethnomusicologists have, since the 1890s, been pushing western music theory to expand its analysis of modal structures, group dynamics, different tuning and temperament systems etc.
And this is not even to touch the question of singing style or song text (see Frith, "Why Do Songs Have Words?"), the major foci of popular music analysis over all.
So I want to emphasize that the idea of "completely breaking down" a piece of music is a fiction, an illusion that there is a definitive analytic model that works for all music, that we even known what the relevant constituent parts are of musical experience (since the "piece of music" is irrelevant, ultimately, compared to how it is *heard* and experienced in a particular musical/cultural context -- you might hear an improvised passage of Arabic music as "out of tune," but someone who knows the quarter tone scales and tetrachordal structures would hear it as fantastically complex and inventive. A classical musician might hear "All You Need Is Love" and find the 3 chord structure utterly boring. But someone who has worked in recording studios would note the use of tape manipulation techniques as a major innovation in popular music recording (and give George Martin more credit as a "composer" than a producer).
Chord charts are easy to find if that's all you want. Just don't confuse them with "analysis."
posted by fourcheesemac at 5:03 AM on September 21, 2010 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
Composition, not so much.
posted by rhizome at 9:36 PM on September 19, 2010