Musical Language of Rock (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780190870522)

In all of the books about rock music, relatively few focus on the purely musical dimensions of the style: dimensions of harmony and melody, tonality and scale, rhythm and meter, phrase structure and form, and emotional expression. The Musical Language of Rock puts forth a new, comprehensive theoretical framework for the study of rock music by addressing each of these aspects. Eastman music theorist and cognition researcher David Temperley brings together a conventional music-analytic approach with statistical corpus analysis to offer an innovative and insightful approach to the genre.

With examples from across a broadly defined rock idiom encompassing everything from the Beatles to Deep Purple, Michael Jackson to Bonnie Raitt, The Musical Language of Rock shows how rock musicians exploit musical parameters to achieve aesthetic and expressive goals-for example, the manipulation of expectation and surprise, the communication of such oppositions as continuity/closure and tension/relaxation, and the expression of emotional states. A major innovation of the book is a three-dimensional model of musical expression-representing valence, energy, and tension-which proves to be a powerful tool for characterizing songs and also for tracing expressive shifts within them. The book includes many musical examples, with sound clips available on the book's website. The Musical Language of Rock presents new insights on the powerful musical mechanisms which have made rock a hallmark of our contemporary musical landscape.


Author: David Temperley
ISBN-10: 0190870524
ISBN-13: 9780190870522
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Language: English
Published: 02/22/2018
Pages: 312
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.00w x 0.70d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 09/01/2018

About the Author

David Temperley is Professor of Music Theory at Eastman School of Music. He has published extensively in the fields of music cognition, music theory, and linguistics. His first book, The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures, won the Society for Music Theory's Emerging Scholar Award. He is also a composer and songwriter.