The published version of my invited response to the special session on “(Per)Form in(g) in Rock” from SMT Indianapolis.

This article explores the sometimes tricky question of tonality in pop and rock songs by positing three tonal scenarios: 1) songs with a fragile tonic, in which the tonic chord is present but its hierarchical status is weakened, either by relegating the tonic to a more unstable chord in first or second inversion or by positioning the tonic…[Read more]

The introductory essay to my edited volume *Rock Music*, from the Ashgate Library of Essays in Popular Music series (2011).

This chapter focuses on the work of the Electric Light Orchestra (ELO), a group that emerged in the immediate wake of the Beatles and whose anxiety of influence towards the Beatles is especially apparent. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, for example, was paralyzed by his anxiety of influence, but Jeff Lynne, ELO’s leader and main composer, saw t…[Read more]

In a seminal 1985 article, Robert Hatten outlines a theory of musical intertextuality with the potential for a broad range of application. He suggests that intertextuality in music operates on two essential levels: stylistic and strategic. Stylistic intertextuality occurs when a composer adopts distinctive features of an earlier style without…[Read more]

In this essay, I present a methodology for analyzing style in pop and rock that confronts the issue of stylistic eclecticism, focusing on a body of work that offers a particularly interesting case study in this regard, namely the music of the Police. Formed in London in 1977, a particularly turbulent year in the history of British pop, this…[Read more]

In *Expression in Pop-Rock Music: Critical and Analytical Essays*, 2nd ed., ed. Walter Everett (Routledge, 2008).

This article examines a variety of compositional procedures that give rise to what the author defines as “accumulative” and “cumulative” forms in pop-rock music, formal processes which are directly linked to the rapid advances in recording technology that occurred mainly from the late 1960s to the 1980s. The article includes detailed…[Read more]