Listening Through Popular Music

Abstract

What are those listening expectations associated with the popular music that

surrounds us, and how do we use them to make sense of this music? The sphere

of contemporary Western popular music (roughly post-1955) embodies a rich,

ever-evolving syntactic and semantic language. I present a new high-level model

for this music’s textural design and apply it to numerous examples from today’s diverse

stylistic spectrum. I further discuss this music’s formal language and investigate

how these structural principles facilitate appreciation within this “listener-oriented”

music. I demonstrate these textural and formal principles across subgenres,

examining how this design facilitates specific perceptual inroads audiences might

use to connect to this music. I subsequently repurpose V. Kofi Agawu’s application

of Topic Theory toward contemporary Western popular music, revealing how

this music constructs rich semantic networks which help explain “how the work

means”.