The ultimate aim of this paper is to suggest the necessity of re-evaluating the role and practices of music analysis along the lines of pragmatic semiotics and of intersubjective perception or phenomenology. The reasons for such re-evaluation are quite simple, at least in the field of popular music, whose practitioners have rarely pretended that their music is somehow devoid of affect, effect, signification, etc. Moreover, popular music has not until recently been the object of much systematic musical analysis. One reason for this apparent lack of interest is the epistemological impotence stemming from traditional musicology’s concentration on intramusical processes and its neglect of structures relatable to music’s role in society as a symbolic system. This is in turn connected to traditional musicology’s fixation on notation, a means of storage even less adequate for popular than for European classical music.1
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