Musical Language of Rock

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. <em>The Musical Language of Rock</em> 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. <p/>With examples from across a broadly defined rock idiom encompassing everything from the Beatles to Deep Purple Michael Jackson to Bonnie Raitt <em>The Musical Language of Rock</em> 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. <em>The Musical Language of Rock</em> presents new insights on the powerful musical mechanisms which have made rock a hallmark of our contemporary musical landscape.<br>