Hearing Harmony
Toward a Tonal Theory for the Rock Era
Format:Hardback
Publisher:The University of Michigan Press
Published:30th May '17
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Hearing Harmony offers a listener-based, philosophical-psychological theory of harmonic effects for Anglophone popular music since the 1950s. It begins with chords, their functions and characteristic hierarchies, then identifies the most common and salient harmonic-progression classes, or harmonic schemas. The identification of these schemas, as well as the historical contextualization of many of them, allows for systematic exploration of the repertory’s typical harmonic transformations (such as chord substitution) and harmonic ambiguities. Doll provides readers with a novel explanation of the assorted aural qualities of chords, and how certain harmonic effects result from the interaction of various melodic, rhythmic, textural, timbral, and extra-musical contexts, and how these interactions can determine whether a chordal riff is tonally centered or tonally ambiguous, whether it sounds aggressive or playful or sad, whether it seems to evoke an earlier song using a similar series of chords, whether it sounds conventional or unfamiliar.
“Doll’s writing allows for a broad spectrum of musical literacy in his audience… It’s thorough enough for music scholars, but accessible enough to be suited for other scholars with some musical background, and perhaps even rock musicians and fans with intellectual interests.”
—Shaugn O’Donnell, Associate Professor of Music Theory and Director of Graduate Studies at the City College of New York
“In this impressive and ambitious book, Christopher Doll develops a new theory of harmony for a wide range of Western popular musics from the last six decades. In Doll’s hands, rock harmony becomes a rich site for both theorizing and analytical imagination—one hears familiar progressions anew.”
—Steven Rings, Associate Professor of Music at the University of Chicago, author of Tonality and Transformation (Oxford, 2011)
ISBN: 9780472073528
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
330 pages