This chapter provide an overview of the ways that the bass guitar is most often used in popular music. Rather than discuss the instrument in terms of genre, I focus instead on its wider musical functions. As I argue, bass lines can largely be categorized by five common performative strategies: basic accompaniments, rhythmic- and groove-oriented approaches, melodic-oriented approaches, slap and pop styles, and the use of alternative instruments and techniques. While these strategies frequently overlap, this simplified taxonomy is intended to help listeners better appreciate how the bass shapes the overall sound and feel of a recording. By using a diverse cross-section of examples drawn from classic rock, metal, pop, R&B, soul, funk, reggae, disco, jazz, hip hop, and more, this chapter also highlights bass guitarists’ profound, wide-ranging impact on music history.

This chapter considers techniques of musical development through the lens of solo monodic (i.e. single line) musical works. It explores a range of approaches to melody, development, vertical-horizontal relationships, and expression, suggesting ways to unfold and expand musical ideas that are rooted in sonority and dramaturgy.

An exploration of Collins’s musical likes and dislikes. He particularly disliked ’German’ music of the nineteenth century, with particular scorn for Schumann and Beethoven, although he admired Mozart

As the popularity of K-pop has grown around the globe, the number and scope of K-pop studies have also expanded. While many have provided important insights into socioeconomic aspects of K-pop, the music itself has rarely been at the center of discussion. The purpose of this chapter is to help fill the gap by examining the sound of K-pop, focusing on its musical elements such as melody, rhythm, and instrumentation. This approach involves close listening and reading of select songs covering various stylistic genres and analyzing their sound using the language of music theory. By so doing, this study will identify and offer an understanding of common musical structures used in K-pop songs. Furthermore, the chapter attempts to respond to the question asked most frequently in the author’s K-pop class: How is K-pop different from popular music of the West? To that end, a comparative analysis is conducted between K-pop songs and Western pop music. Among the styles of songs examined are bubblegum popular music, ballads, and songs that quote Korean traditional music, the types of music that are most revealing in addressing the question of distinctiveness of K-pop songs.

The analogy between music and language is both problematic and essential for any rich understanding of musical Romanticism. Few commentators today would accept that music functions as a language; but the idea that music has poetic, literary, or dramatic substance is foundational to Romantic aesthetics and find expression in music as stylistically disparate as Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Schumann’s Papillons. This chapter explores the musical languages of Romanticism, focusing both on the melodic, harmonic, and formal dimensions of musical practice and on the literary and linguistic labour they perform. It explores music from Beethoven and Field at the turn of the nineteenth century to Brahms and Mussorgsky at the century’s end, paying attention to the contrasted thematic cultures that Beethoven and Field instantiate, the harmonic innovations of Schubert, Liszt, Brahms, and Mussorgsky, and the intersections of form and narrative in Schumann’s Second Symphony.

In her “Étude comparée des langages harmoniques de Fauré et de Debussy,” Françoise Gervais contends that “melody does not have an independent existence in Fauré’s music. It is born of the harmony and remains inseparable from it.”1 Moreover, not a single chapter of this book, which has stood now for more than forty years as a musicological summa on Fauréan harmony, is dedicated to melody.

Developing the thesis elaborated in the latter part of Chapter 4, I contend that the demise of the ballad-singer was primarily due to a shift in mainstream taste and musical potential, as the masses developed both the appetite for, and access to, a wide range of more sophisticated music. By 1864, when this book ends, the ballad-singer was almost entirely absent from the debate around the Street Music Act championed by Michael Thomas Bass MP, indicating the irrelevance of the ballad-singer to the contemporary street scene. This argument, predicated upon technological change, literacy, economics, and class consciousness, is essentially optimistic, running counter to the rhetoric of decline and nostalgia found in nineteenth-century elite writing on the subject. I contend that the primarily musical transformation by which melodic song became subordinated within a new and totalising conception of music, was itself symptomatic of the great historical forces of reform, education, improvement, and enfranchisement that were at work in Victorian London.

Expands on aspects of ‘affective sociability’, discussing its relationship to notions of expression, individuality and feeling. I discuss those gentler elements of the aesthetic of the time - simplicity, naturalness, moderation, grace - that have proved stumbling-blocks for later generations of critics, and the way in which they crystallized in the widespread vaunting of the powers of pure melody, discreetly accompanied. Pleasure and politeness are also discussed as parts of this same discursive field. On the other hand, just as fundamental to the music of the time is its ambivalence of tone: the uncertainty about whether a particular musical passage or gesture is to be taken on face value or not. This entails a consideration of various forms of double meaning - whether accounted for as humour, wit, comedy or irony - that are so common in this instrumental repertoire. A corollary of these is a decidedly anti-scholastic, anti-authoritarian orientation in a style that is keen to avoid any perceived pedantry. I then focus on works and movements set in the minor mode, the common critical praise of which is often directed against the sorts of attributes I have considered earlier in the chapter.

In this chapter we situate music education as ‘praxis’ (Alperson, 1991; Elliott, 1995; Regelski, 1998), encouraging personal agency and allowing children to become composers, performers and audiences as part of their daily lives. The importance of this approach is that musical learning and musical understanding occur in many ways: through listening, sharing, discussing, reflecting, performing, composing and recording. All of these processes should be conceived of culturally, socially and holistically in ways that enable children to explore connections between concepts, skills and understandings. In this approach, a music learning community of practice (Wenger, 2009) that encourages learning in multiple ways through learner agency can be established in your classroom.