Analyzing 3 Icelandic music videos

Math rock’s most salient compositional facet is its cyclical repetition of ostinati featuring changing and odd-cardinality meters.

Musicologists have recently begun applying the diverse philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari to music. Most contributors strive for rigorous adherence to early Deleuzian principles-a position I refer to as “orthodox”-and are therefore hesitant to posit any sort of musical objecthood or listener subjectivity. By contrast, this article espouses an…[Read more]

Since the dawn of experimental rock’s second coming in the new millennium, experimental artists have begun distancing themselves from Top-40 artists through formal structures that eschew recapitulatory verse/chorus conventions altogether. In order to understand the correlation between genre and form more thoroughly, this paper provides a t…[Read more]

Radiohead’s music regularly confronts the listener with structural elements—in the domains of pitch/harmony, timbre, form, and rhythm—which exist in a space between pure Top Forty convention and sheer experimentation.

This article defines and demonstrates a formal type I call ‘‘terminally climactic forms.’’ These forms, which appear frequently in rock songs after 1990, are characterized by their balance between the expected memorable highpoint (the chorus) and the thematically independent terminal climax, the song’s actual high point, which appears only once…[Read more]

A great deal of the harmony and voice leading in the British rock group Radiohead’s recorded output between 1997 and 2011 can be heard as elaborating either traditional tonal structures or establishing pitch centricity through purely contrapuntal means. This mode of hearing Radiohead’s music departs from theories of rock harmony that (1) focus on…[Read more]

Osborn, Brad. 2018. Review of Christopher Doll Hearing Harmony: Toward a Tonal Theory for the Rock Era (University of Michigan Press, 2017). Samples 16