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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
1 Pop goes old theory indeed’ (The book was foreshadowed by an article, Allen Forte, ‘Secrets of Melody Line and Design in the Songs of Cole Porter’, Musical Quarterly, 77 (1993), 607–47.) In the late 1960s, while I was researching my Ph D on pop music, the social commentator Kenneth Allsop wrote an article entitled ‘Pop goes Young Woodley’ (in Class A Symposium, ed Richard Mabey, London, 1969, 127–43), in which he described how ‘classless’ 60s pop was being embraced even by the respectable young of genteel suburb and conservative country club. Some time later, the nadir of this tendency was reached when John Lennon's cri de coeur ‘Imagine’ was bellowed out, with no apparent irony, by the 1988 Conservative Party Conference. I leave it to readers to decide whether there is any similarity between this tributary of contemporary cultural history and the recent growth of interest in popular music among ‘music theorists’Google Scholar
2 I am not wanting simply to conflate Babbitt, Forte and any other theorists Nevertheless, the inextricable links between institutionalized postwar music theory as such and ‘modernism’ – with their shared ideological-grounding in formalism and positivism – are clear; see Kerman, Joseph, Musicology (London, 1985), ch. 3.Google Scholar
3 This has been widely theorized Two good sources are Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide. Mass Culture and Postmodernism (Bloomington, 1986), and Georgina Born, Rationalizing Culture. IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Berkeley, 1995)Google Scholar
4 This contradiction is inscribed within the term ‘standard’, which originally referred to the use of standard compositional conventions, but which came also to function as a marker of ‘staying power’ – the favourable judgment of posterity.Google Scholar
5 Fabbri, Franco, ‘A Theory of Musical Genres’ Two Applications’, Popular Music Perspectives, ed. David Horn and Philip Tagg (Gothenburg and Exeter, 1982), 52–81.Google Scholar
6 Hamm, Charles, ‘Genre, Performance and Ideology in the Early Songs of Irving Berlin’, Popular Music, 13 (1994), 143–50.Google Scholar
7 Hamm, Charles, Yesterdays’ Popular Song in America (New York and London, 1979), 337–40.Google Scholar
8 Forte suggests that blues form – the AAB ‘bar’ pattern of the conventional 12-bar structure – does percolate some ballads, coexisting with or overlapping standard ballad phraseologies (see p. 41) But this observation has no effect on his understanding of genre.Google Scholar
9 See p. 238 For a more worked-out definition of the torch-song genre, see Moore, John, ‘“The Hieroglyphics of Love”: The Torch Singers and Interpretation’, Popular Music, 8 (1989), 31–58.Google Scholar
10 Peter van der Merwe, Origins of the Popular Style The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music (Oxford, 1989).Google Scholar
11 Oddly, Forte takes the ballad repertory to function almost wholly in a two-to-the-bar metre But the alla breve time signature which is indeed usual is surely a notational convention left over from ragtime and early twentieth-century popular song. Recorded performance tends to confirm that the music actually works in four, just as the prevalent quaver syncopations would lose much of their force in any other performance contextGoogle Scholar
12 Given that this example occurs in a chapter in which Forte performs a commendable act of ‘rescue musicology’ on behalf of women ballad composers, it is tempting to hazard a feminist interpretation of the cross-rhythm's subversion of the ‘masculine regularity’ of the metrical framework. However, similar techniques appear in songs by men, so a gender-focused interpretation would need to be rather more subtle. Forte does not raise the question whether there might be a female style of balladGoogle Scholar
13 The representative quality of these tensions, striking though their appearance here is, continues into rock music, as, for example, in the E♭ major/C pentatonic ‘dual tonic’ processes of the Beatles’ ‘She Loves You’ see Middleton, Richard, Pop Music and the Blues (London, 1972), 170. I find such continuities intriguing, because most writers – including Forte (see pp 3–4) – assume disjunction between the two repertoriesGoogle Scholar
14 Jerome Kern's ‘ambitions to unify his songs’ is the substance of Milton Babbitt's warmest compliment to the composer in his article ‘All the Things they Are. Comments on Kern’, Newsletter of the Institute for Studies in American Music, 14/2 (1985), 8–9.Google Scholar
15 Rahn, Jay, ‘Turning the Analysis Around: Africa-derived Rhythms and Europe-derived Music Theory’, Black Music Research Journal, 16 (1996), 71–89 (pp. 71–2). Ironically, a further key source for Rahn's essay in turning rhythmic analysis around is Milton Babbitt's theory of time-points.Google Scholar
16 Actually it is pentatonic – but the movement by sequential fourths and fifths pulls it towards shapes more typical of diatonic melody.Google Scholar
17 Forte notes the use of ‘hooks’, but pays the phenomenon no attention They often function as markers of dialogue – for example, in the titular phrase of Gershwin's ‘How Long has This been Going On?’, which operates in a very similar way to Kern's ‘Can't help lovin’ dat man’ phrase, at the identical point in the structureGoogle Scholar
18 This ambivalence is encapsulated in the harmonic structure of 12-bar blues form But, in the light of the Schenkerian emphasis on the importance of the perfect cadence, it is the I–IV derivation from blues that is particularly striking As Forte points out, dominant-type seventh and ninth chords on IV, supporting a blue 
3, are favourite device of Gershwin, but are also commonplace throughout the ballad repertory.Google Scholar
19 See for example Berndt Ostendorf, Ethnicity and Popular Music, IASPM Working Paper no. 2 (Exeter, n.d.), Charles Hamm, ‘Irving Berlin's Early Songs as Biographical Documents’, Musical Quarterly, 77 (1993), 10–34.Google Scholar
20 Ostendorf, , Ethnicity, p. 4Google Scholar
21 Alec Wilder's book American Popular Song. The Great Innovators 1900–1950 (Oxford, 1972), though much more anecdotal, and much less analytically formalized, than Forte's, shares many of its aesthetic assumptions Nevertheless, one of the delights of Wilder's work is that he pays performers much of the attention they merit, in particular, he is quite ready to say that often a melodic, rhythmic or harmonic alteration to the score, initiated by performers and assimilated into the performing tradition, is superior to the original.Google Scholar
22 Recall too that, according to Hamm (see above), early Berlin songs could change genre depending on how they were sungGoogle Scholar
23 Forte himself refers to this (see, for example, pp 86–7, 93, 107, 250). For the general background, see also Wilder, American Popular Song, xxviiGoogle Scholar
24 I was reminded of Forte's strictures when reading Roger Scruton's review (The Times, 22 October 1996) of Simon Frith's book about popular music aesthetics, Performing Rites (Oxford, 1996) Scruton, uncritically self-confident in his musical values, writes. ‘It is surely not difficult to establish the superiority of Cole Porter over [the American pop group] R.E.M.; one only has to look at the incompetent voice-leading in Losing My Religion, the misunderstanding of chord relations, and the inability to develop a melodic line in which the phrases lead into one another with a genuine musical need.’Google Scholar
25 See especially Hamm, Yesterdays, 357–75.Google Scholar
26 I argue this myself in Studying Popular Music (Milton Keynes. 1990)Google Scholar
27 Peter van der Merwe (Origins of the Popular Style, v) believes that ‘all the essential features of twentieth-century popular music were already in existence by 1900, if not long before’Google Scholar
28 There is a considerable literature on the methodology and (questionable) credibility of music sales charts and other such measures of ‘popularity’, but Forte does not refer to it.Google Scholar
29 The discussion that follows is indebted to conversations I have had with Dai GriffithsGoogle Scholar
30 Martin Brody, ‘“Music for the Masses”. Milton Babbitt's Cold War Music Theory’, Musical Quarterly, 77 (1993), 161–92.Google Scholar
31 Of course, what this still does not explain is how Babbitt's exclusion of ‘cultural populism’ could coexist with his pleasure in some genres of popular music for this, it may be that some psychoanalysis is needed. To the best of my knowledge, Babbitt has never offered a rationale for this contradiction It would be most interesting to hear one.Google Scholar
32 This is to oversimplify Schenker's intellectual roots were varied, and his interest in Vienna Circle positivism was over-determined by his debts to Goethe, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche What is interesting, nevertheless, is how an idea of the positivity of ‘the work’ and a sense of its ideality could converge in the overwhelming importance of its singularity At least as interesting is the way that Schenker's reception in the postwar USA (by Forte among others) reconstructed him in a much simpler way as a rigorous neo-positivist See Whittle, Barbara, ‘The Cultural Context of the Theories of Heinrich Schenker’ (Ph.D dissertation, The Open University, 1993).Google Scholar
33 Kerman, , Musicology, ch 3, esp pp 75, 82–3, 97–102Google Scholar
34 Treitler, Leo, ‘Towards a Desegregated Music Historiography’, Black Music Research Journal, 16 (1996), 3–10Google Scholar
35 Ibid., 3, 5Google Scholar
36 Kramer, Lawrence, ‘Powers of Blackness: Africanist Discourse in Modern Concert Music’, Black Music Research Journal, 16 (1996), 53–70 (p 53)Google Scholar
37 At the same time, to read Kramer on Charles Ives's usages of African-American elements (Kramer, ‘Powers of Blackness’, 57–60) after reading Forte on the popular ballad is to raise the question whether there are not some hidden historical links to be excavated here.Google Scholar
38 See, for example, Edward Shils, ‘Daydreams and Nightmares: Reflections on the Criticism of Mass Culture’, Swanee Review, 65 (1957), 587–608.Google Scholar
39 Lawrence Alloway, ‘The Long Front of Culture’, Pop Art Redefined, ed. John Russell and Suzi Gablik (London, 1969), 41–3 (p. 43).Google Scholar
40 It should be pointed out that the work of Philip Tagg, Allan Moore, Robert Walser, David Brackett, Stan Hawkins and Alf Bjornberg (for example) all focuses its attention squarely on ‘the music’, but would be placed by Forte, I am sure, in the ‘sociological’ camp. Such work far surpasses the efforts so far of his ‘small group of energetic persons’, in quantity and (I would judge) in quality. This is without going outside the ranks of those trained as musicians, into the writings of Dave Laing, Simon Frith, Greil Marcus and many others, who have also had many remarkably insightful things to say about ‘the music'.Google Scholar
41 Cook, Nicholas, ‘Music Minus One. Rock, Theory, and Performance’, New Formations, 27 (1996), 23–41 (p. 23).Google Scholar
42 Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz since 1945 Essays and Analytical Studies, ed Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann (Rochester, 1995)Google Scholar
43 'The Beatles as Composers’ The Genesis of Abbey Road, Side Two’, ibid., 172–228Google Scholar
44 Headlam, Dave, ‘Does the Song Remain the Same’ Questions of Authorship and Identification in the Music of Led Zeppelin’, ibid., 313–63Google Scholar
45 Gilroy, Paul, in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London, 1993), argues for the inescapable hybridity of both black culture (including music) and the broad constellations of Western moderntiy of which the ‘black Atlantic’ is, he insists, a constitutive partGoogle Scholar
46 Interestingly, Headlam notes the congruences between the attitudes to popular music of Adorno, Schenker and Babbitt ('Does the Song Remain the Same?’, 314–15); but I am not sure that he draws all the right conclusions from these.Google Scholar
47 John Covach, ‘Stylistic Competencies, Musical Humour, and “This is Spinal Tap”’, Concert Music, Rock and Jazz since 1945, ed. Marvin and Hermann, 399–421 (p. 400).Google Scholar
48 Cook, Nicholas, ‘Music Theory and the Postmodern Muse An Afterword’, ibid., 422–39 (p 432)Google Scholar
49 Ibid., 433Google Scholar
50 Ibid., 432Google Scholar