Corpus Analysis: Song Form and Harmony in the Repertoire
of the Rolling Stones While many detailed analyses on the music of the Beatles have been published, almost no research has been conducted focusing on the music of the Rolling Stones who are rather dealt with from a cultural point of view. Evidently, the Beatles’ melodic songs, their harmonic ‘richness’ and colourful instrumentation seemed to offer more to originally classically-trained scholars than the Stones’ approach. Our corpus analysis of c.
300 songs by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards aims to characterise their
idiolect and its development over the course of their 50-year career. The
first focus is on how song forms like AABA, simple verse, verse/chorus and the
uses of non-repeating sections develop towards what fits the Stones’ aesthetic
best. The second focus is on
harmonic structures. The prevailing verdict of harmonic simplicity wrongly
equates a limited range of chords to harmonic paucity. It thereby ignores the
variety of shades provided by the famous intervening of guitars making the
chords “move within themselves”, the harmonic ambiguity caused by
bi-tonicality, and the reinterpretation of chords by means of syntactical
rearrangement. More generally, we will
talk about the Stones' aesthetic apparent from our analytic results. Whereas
the Beatles’ songs are often discussed as works of art, many listeners
interpret the Stones’ music as an expression of a certain lifestyle.
Descriptions like hedonistic, passionate, or ‘elegantly wasted’ come to mind.
Moore’s recent concept of how a fictitious persona is constructed through the
design of a musical environment will be used to tackle the question of whether
musicological analysis can actually show correspondences in the music that
trigger and support such ascriptions. Ultimately, we present results valid for many kinds of music that refuse to comply with the prevailing aesthetics of artistic sophistication and progress. |
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