Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T00:39:19.305Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Deceptive love and denied endings: tropes in the music of Billy Joel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2018

Sean Atkinson
Sean Atkinson*
Affiliation:
Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX, USA E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The music of Billy Joel is long overdue for prolonged attention from the scholarly field. As Walter Everett has acknowledged (2000), Joel's music is often more in line with common-practice systems than with popular genres, and when combined with his intuitive understanding of numerous popular styles, makes for a rich trove of harmonic interest. One of the common-practice devices Joel utilises effectively is the evaded cadence (also called a deceptive motion). His use of this harmonic motion reveals two tropes in his music: Deceptive Love describes the complicated nature of love in ‘She's Got a Way’ and ‘She's Always a Woman’, while Denied Ending describes the unfinished and unresolved quality at the end of ‘Miami 2017’. Uncovering these tropes in Joel's songs leads to a better understanding of the lyrics and the harmonic progressions that underlie them.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , October 2018 , pp. 415 - 423
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Agawu, K. 1991. Playing With Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classical Music (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press)Google Scholar
Agawu, K. 2009. Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music (New York, Oxford University Press)Google Scholar
Caplin, W. 1998. Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (Oxford, Oxford University Press)Google Scholar
Cone, E. T. 1982. ‘Schubert's promissory note: An exercise in musical hermeneutics’, 19th-Century Music, 5/3, pp. 233–41Google Scholar
Duchan, J. S. 2017. Billy Joel: America's Piano Man (Lanham, MD, Rowman and Littlefield)Google Scholar
Everett, W. 2000. ‘The learned vs. the vernacular in the songs of Billy Joel’, College Music Symposium, 18/4, pp. 105–29Google Scholar
Everett, W. 2012. ‘The representation of meaning in post-millennial rock’. Analysen Populärer Musik, pp. 149–69Google Scholar
Hatten, R. 1994. Musical Meaning in Beethoven (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press)Google Scholar
Hatten, R. 2004. Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press)Google Scholar
MacFarlane, T. 2016. Experiencing Billy Joel: A Listener's Companion (Lanham, MD, Rowman and Littlefield)Google Scholar
Monelle, R. 2000. The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press)Google Scholar
Monelle, R. 2006. The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military, and Pastoral (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press)Google Scholar
Ratner, L. 1985. Classic Music: Expression, Style, Form (New York, MacMillan Publishing Company)Google Scholar
Schmalfeldt, J. 1992. ‘Cadential processes: the evaded cadence and the “one more time” technique’, Journal of Musicological Research, 12, pp. 1–52Google Scholar
Schruers, F. 2014. Billy Joel: The Definitive Biography (New York, Three Rivers Press)Google Scholar
Temperley, D. 2011. ‘The cadential IV in rock’, Music Theory Online, 17/1Google Scholar