Introduction

Abstract

The genesis of the present volume and its focus on issues of form in rock music was an SMT Popular Music Interest Group session entitled "(Per)Form in(g) Rock," presented at the November 2010 meeting of the Society for Music Theory in Indianapolis.The session title, devised by Brad Osborn, reflects its integration of formal theory ("Form in Rock") and performance ("Performing Rock").The session comprised four papers exploring issues of form in popular music, with a response by Mark Spicer.As a way of reflecting the aural and performative traditions of rock music and reconnecting the practices of theory and analysis to that of music making, each presentation-including the response-incorporated live music examples, which have been replaced in this volume by audio and video excerpts.These five papers are presented here in expanded form, along with three essays concerned with aspects of form in pop-rock music not addressed in the original session.[2] The Popular Music Interest Group decided to focus on the topic of form in rock music because it has been undertheorized compared to form in art music, and underanalyzed compared to other modes of popular music analysis such as hermeneutics, intertextuality, style analysis, and social and cultural contexts.Formal patterns in rock often feature greater complexity than is generally realized, particularly in regard to the interactions of form with domains other than pitch, such as rhythm, texture, and timbre.This holds true even for the apparently straightforward simple and compound strophic forms that abound in the pop-rock repertoire, as well as for more intricate multipart and through-composed forms.[3] Published scholarship on form in rock has been accumulating at an increasing pace over the last decade.Formal analyses have typically focused either on the delineation of sections through lyrics, chord patterns, texture, and key, with secondary considerations of rhythmic activity, register, dynamics, and timbre, or on the interaction of these sections with overall forms as regards repetition, ordering, thematic content and interrelationships, and rhetorical function.General discussions of formal sections and patterns include the brief definitions of basic section types in Stephenson 2002; a survey of the relationship of section types to larger formal patterns in Covach 2005; a detailed investigation of phrase, form, and function in Everett 2009; historic, cultural, and generic contextualizations in Middleton 1999; a model for the interactions of formal sections and tonal centers in Capuzzo 2009; and an exploration of large-scale dramatic structures in Spicer 2004.(1) There are also many studies of idiomatic formal structures and relationships within the works of a single artist or band-or genre or era, although these are less common-and comparisons of a given song's transformation through covers, remixes, and mashups.(2)

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