Title: Hearing Harmony: Toward a Tonal Theory for the Rock Era. By Christopher Doll
Abstract: Hearing Harmony by Christopher Doll represents “the first academic monograph devoted entirely to chords in the popular sphere” (1). This claim is somewhat surprising, because popular-music analysis to date has focused more on pitch structures—tonality, harmony, and melody—than any other musical parameter, which is likely due to the influence of the many detailed and powerful theoretical models developed to address these aspects in art music. The claim, however, is true: prior scholarship on harmony in popular music has been largely confined to articles, book chapters, and dissertations (including Doll’s own 2007 dissertation, on which this book is based), while existing monographs were intended as manuals for a lay audience.1 Doll’s stated goal is to derive a tonal theory out of rock harmony, minimizing the dependence of his framework on models inherited from art music (7), and he succeeds in this aim to some degree. Nevertheless, one of the significant strengths of Hearing Harmony is that its concepts and terms are broadly applicable across tonal musics, as suggested by its short title; Doll’s orientation toward rock music in particular is specified only after the colon. The examples are drawn primarily from rock and related genres, but include some excerpts from a wider variety of popular-music styles, such as hip hop and musical theater. The jacket copy and promotional materials foreground the idea that Doll’s theory is listener-based, but it is not grounded in music-perception research and does not attempt to model the experience of an average listener: as he acknowledges, it reflects his highly subjective interpretations, with the goal of attaining “the richest possible listening experience” (5). Similarly, Doll’s claims about the relative frequency of chords and progressions in the repertoire are based on his own intuitions, and are not supported by empirical evidence in the text—although as Trevor de Clercq has noted in his own review of this book, some claims accord with the findings of his and David Temperley’s corpus study of rock harmony.2
Publication Year: 2020
Publication Date: 2020-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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