Popular Music Theory and Analysis: A Research and Information Guide uncovers the wealth of scholarly works dealing with the theory and analysis of popular music. This annotated bibliography is an exhaustive catalog of music-theoretical and musicological works that is searchable by subject, genre, and song title. It will support emerging scholarship and inquiry for future research on popular music.

The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches widens the scope of analytical approaches for popular music by incorporating methods developed for analyzing contemporary art music. This study endeavors to create a new analytical paradigm for examining popular music from the perspective of developments in contemporary art music. "Expanded approaches" for popular music analysis is broadly defined as as exploring the pitch-class structures, form, timbre, rhythm, or aesthetics of various forms of popular music in a conceptual space not limited to the domain of common practice tonality but broadened to include any applicable compositional, analytical, or theoretical concept that illuminates the music. The essays in this collection investigate a variety of analytical, theoretical, historical, and aesthetic commonalities popular music shares with 20th and 21st century art music. From rock and pop to hip hop and rap, dance and electronica, from the 1930s to present day, this companion explores these connections in five parts: Establishing and Expanding Analytical Frameworks Technology and Timbre Rhythm, Pitch, and Harmony Form and Structure Critical Frameworks: Analytical, Formal, Structural, and Political With contributions by established scholars and promising emerging scholars in music theory and historical musicology from North America, Europe, and Australia, The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches offers nuanced and detailed perspectives that address the relationships between concert and popular music.

The Musician’s Guide to Theory and Analysis is a complete package of theory and aural skills resources that covers every topic commonly taught in the undergraduate sequence. The package can be mixed and matched for every classroom, and with Norton’s new Know It? Show It! online pedagogy, students can watch video tutorials as they read the text, access formative online quizzes, and tackle workbook assignments in print or online. In its third edition, The Musician’s Guide retains the same student-friendly prose and emphasis on real music that has made it popular with professors and students alike.

The study of popular music composition is a new field in which the standard rules of traditional music theory do not apply. Learn how to write top 40 hits in every style from alternative rock to country pop. Discover the way chords are constructed and used in pop music, the Nashville numbers system and the role of scales in pop music harmony. Learn how to arrange a lead-sheet chart for a small ensemble so your entire band can learn a song in minutes. No more listening to a cd over and over to figure out a guitar riff when you can learn to recognize chord progressions and easily transcribe music from recordings. You will master the ability to play chord changes for self-accompaniment as well as composition. Finally you will learn how to use the scales for improvisation and "ad libbing" so you can become a soloist with your own unique sound.

There have been far-reaching changes in the way music theorists and analysts view the nature of their disciplines. Encounters with structuralist and post-structuralist critical theory, and with linguistics and cognitive sciences, have brought the theory and analysis of music into the orbit of important developments in intellectual history. This book presents the work of a group of scholars who, without seeking to impose an explicit redefinition of either theory or analysis, explore the limits of both in this context. Essays on the languages of analysis and theory, and on practical issues such as decidability, ambiguity and metaphor, combine with studies of works by Debussy, Schoenberg, Birtwistle and Boulez, together making a major contribution to an important debate in the growth of musicology.

This book introduces a theory of music analysis that one can use to explore aspects of segmentation and associative organization in a wide range of repertoire including Western classical music from the Baroque to the present, with potential applications to jazz and popular music, and some non-Western musics. Rather than a methodology, the theory provides analysts with precise language and a broad, flexible conceptual framework through which they can formulate and investigate questions of interest and develop their own interpretations of individual pieces and passages. The theory begins with a basic distinction among three domains of musical experience and discourse about it: the sonic (psychoacoustic); the contextual (or associative, sparked by varying degrees of repetition); and the structural (guided by a specific theory of musical structure or syntax invoked by the analyst). A comprehensive presentation of the theory, with copious musical illustrations, is balanced with close analyses of works by Beethoven, Debussy, Nancarrow, Riley, Feldman, and Morris. Dora A. Hanninen is professor of music theory at the University of Maryland. She received the 2010 Outstanding Publication Award from the Society for Music Theory.

Reading Pop collects together key essays on the interpretation of pop songs previously published in the journal Popular Music. In sixteen varied studies by many of the best-known scholars, all the most influential approaches are represented. An introduction by leading pop academic Richard Middleton puts them into context and outlines the main debates. A select bibliography of other writings on pop music analysis adds to the usefulness of the book, which will become a central text in popular music studies. - ;Reading Pop collects together key essays on the interpretation of pop songs previously published in the journal Popular Music. In sixteen varied studies by many of the best-known scholars, all the most influential approaches are represented. An introduction by leading pop academic Richard Middleton puts them into context and outlines the main debates. A select bibliography of other writings on pop music analysis adds to the usefulness of the book, which will become a central text in popular music studies. - ;extensive introduction is particularly valuable ... the paperback price is worth it for the introduction, and the Bjornberg and Tagg essays, alone. - Allan More, British Journal of Music Education