With the publication of Rock: The Primary Text, Allan Moore became an influential figure within the international community of popular music scholars.Footnote ¹ In that book, he argued that a complete understanding of rock must closely consider its sounding materials, not simply the conditions and meanings surrounding its production and reception. In the ensuing twenty years, and by means of over fifty published essays, three edited collections, dozens of book reviews, countless conference presentations and radio broadcasts, and a further three monographs (including a second edition of Rock: The Primary Text), Moore has pursued that argument with unsurpassed curiosity and conviction.

Notwithstanding his role in advancing the musicological study of popular music, Moore has become increasingly critical of the gap between formalist and hermeneutic approaches. He charges that formalist studies too often fail to adequately consider the hermeneutic consequences of their findings, while hermeneutic studies tend to be insufficiently explicit about how musical details enable the meanings that they claim. Moore's most recent monograph, Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song, seeks to explore the terrain between these commitments – to develop the ‘what’ of analysis into the ‘so what’ of interpretation.

There is little question that Song Means will inspire like-minded work for many years. It is a well-written, wide-ranging, and solidly supported book, so much so that the Popular Music Interest Group of the Society for Music Theory recognized Moore with its inaugural (2012) publication award. Moore gathers together foundational and contemporary developments in music theory, hermeneutics, and psychology and demonstrates in fresh ways the implications that these varied fields hold for the interpretation of popular song recordings. His approach is interrogative, culminating (strategically) in a series of questions that listeners may ask about recordings, rather than a theoretical model or series of analyses. This is not to say that theory is absent from the book. Moore supplies explicit theoretical support for his observations and methods. In some chapters, those theories could be more systematically presented without distracting from the methodological focus of the book – I will say more about this below – but the theoretical underpinnings are never in doubt.

Song Means is organized by Moore to parallel his interpretive method. He begins with what can be observed in the sounds of a recording, considers the meanings that those sounds might hold, and then reflects upon the mental steps he uses to proceed from those sounds to those responses. In practice, Moore's procedure is not strictly linear, a fact that he acknowledges. He occasionally finds it desirable to set aside a train of thought, taking it up again in a later chapter. To his credit, Moore handles these connections without the prose becoming desultory. But the book would be easier to navigate if the Table of Contents included subheadings; some of the one-word chapter titles, as we will see, are rather enigmatic. Also, the reference potential of the book is hampered by its haphazard system of indexes. Some recordings discussed in the book appear in both the ‘Index of Names and Topics’ and the ‘Index of Recordings Cited’, while other recordings (particularly those discussed in later chapters) appear only in the latter index. Consequently, the reader must flip between two indexes to track down all references to a particular recording.

In order, the chapters proceed as follows. In the introductory chapter, titled ‘Methodology’, Moore sets forth his guiding assumptions and practices. First, his method proceeds from close, personal listening. He acknowledges that the meanings he arrives at through listening may or may not resemble the meanings that groups of listeners attach to music. Although Moore does not altogether dismiss ‘socio-cultural’ meanings, he paints them as comparatively unnuanced and uninteresting: ‘those meanings lose their grip once a listener begins to take interest in the activity of listening’ (7). A second guiding assumption is that the meanings discovered in music are always contingent upon a listener's competency in the stylistic norms for that music: ‘all questions imply some sort of norm, deviation from which is a prime carrier of signification’ (8). Third, Moore asserts that interpretation is, by any method, a subjective endeavour. Although the meanings arrived at by competent listeners may have ‘many points of contact’, complete correspondence is neither likely nor desirable (9). Moore allows that an interpretation can be more or less persuasive, but refuses to allow that meaning can be imposed, whether by expert critics or the creators of a recording. Authoritative pronouncements defeat what Moore takes to be the fundamental value of music analysis, which is to reveal something to the analyst about his or her own responses. Furthermore, Moore asserts that sharing one's discoveries is a moral imperative: ‘if we find some music meaningful, if we find meaning in a song, that finding is incomplete until we have passed it on’ (215).

Following this methodological introduction, Moore offers a series of analytical chapters in which he sketches out some conventions of song recordings: ‘Shape’ (timbre, texture and sound design); ‘Form’ (rhythm, harmony and formal structure); and ‘Delivery’ (melody, voice and lyrics.) The coverage is intended to be more comprehensive than that offered elsewhere in the literature. Within the form chapter alone, Moore condenses ‘the conventional substance of most analytical discussion of music’ (7). In this condensation, some vital nuance is lost; nevertheless, Moore realises his aim of broadening the analytical base from which interpretations may be extended. The analytical chapters are followed by a short style history of Anglophone popular song, in which Moore devotes particular attention to developments in the UK. The presentation is at times overwhelmingly dense; nevertheless, no survey that I am aware of delivers worthwhile insight in so few (forty-two) pages.

The remaining half of the book explores several paths a listener can take from musical detail to interpretation. In the first of these chapters, ‘Friction’, Moore reasserts that meaning is neither entirely imposed by those who make recordings, nor entirely constructed by listeners. Instead, meaning emerges in an encounter between the listener, whose lifetime of musical experiences and associations is necessarily unique, and the track, which presents a unique configuration of musical sounds. The chapter title references the ‘friction’ that obtains between conventions evoked by the track, which the listener registers as expectation, and those features of the track that foil expectation. The pressing question that emerges is, What meanings and responses does this instance of friction enable? The analytical exposition of the opening chapters is critical here: a listener is able to sense friction and contemplate its significance only to the extent that he or she is acquainted with the relevant stylistic norms.

A further five chapters extend connections from musical detail to other questions of song meaning. In ‘Persona’, Moore shows how a song's protagonist arises from the singer's voice, the position of the voice within the track's sound design, and the song lyric, and demonstrates the potential for other musical elements to support or undermine listener confidence in that protagonist. ‘Reference’, one of the longer chapters in the book, addresses the question, How does popular song refer to matters outside itself? Moore considers and rejects those semiotic approaches that assert fixed, arbitrary relationships between signs and referents, preferring a position informed by embodied cognition (especially the work of Mark Johnson) and ecological perception (especially the work of James Gibson, developed for musicology by Eric Clarke.)Footnote ² In summary, Moore proposes that experiences of the musical and material worlds are similar in that: (1) one's responses to music, like any cognitive activity, are conditioned by patterns observed in the material world; and (2) elements encountered in both musical and material environments afford responses which vary according to the observer. In this, the chapter supplies theoretical support for Moore's general project, which is to trace connections between objective musical detail and subjective musical interpretation. The chapter titled ‘Belonging’ asks the question, To whom do musical materials belong? Here, Moore examines the bases upon which listeners ascribe authenticity to a recording, and draws the conclusion that ‘every music… can conceivably be found authentic by a particular group of perceivers’ (271). Moore similarly extends the notion of intertextuality, broadening it to include the wide range of associative practices that enable both the composition and interpretation of song recordings.

In the penultimate chapter, ‘Syntheses’, Moore draws together the full complement of analytical and interpretive questions developed over the preceding nine chapters (specific questions are listed in the book's short, final chapter). In this cumulative demonstration, Moore explicitly resists the trajectory followed by some scholars, which is to conclude with a series of extended song analyses that are relatively more complete than those presented in earlier chapters. Instead, Moore pursues an associative path – navigating via shared riff, or similar harmonic progression, or similar discontinuity in texture, etc. – through four dozen tracks, sometimes devoting several pages to a track and sometimes just a line or two. The presentation is as fragmentary as it is idiosyncratic as it is virtuosic: ‘there is no natural, logical nor inevitable end to this chain of links’ (326). Moore wonders whether some readers will find the absence of ‘complete’, song-length analyses frustrating. To such readers, Moore recommends his study of Jethro Tull's Aqualung.Footnote ³ But he reiterates that his commitment in Song Means is to model a process reproducible by readers, not to enshrine the outcomes of his own engagement in that process. As this commitment is developed over the course of the entire book, it is by no means out of place here, at the conclusion.

Still, I must admit to feeling some bewilderment with the associative presentation in the chapter. This is a fast-moving stream of consciousness, flowing back and forth between musical details, interpretations (plural), and references to earlier chapters. In the several pages that explore Jimi Hendrix's ‘If 6 was 9’, for instance, the following themes/elements are considered: the ‘new consciousness’ of the Woodstock generation; Platonic idealism; implications of the song's final ‘freak out’; the tension between self-distinction and convention in the song's blues structure; echo effects in the song which suggest by association the suspension of material-world categories and laws; densification of texture as an instance of the path schema; correspondences between features of the song's sound design and lyrics; and finally, a one-bar guitar figure via which Moore makes an associative transition to the next song he examines (287–91). Moore covers a lot of ground and his destination is not always clear: the associations sometimes build towards a cumulative interpretation, but at other times seem only adjacent. This evokes (for me) the early, generative stages of music interpretation – close listening, responding, and interrogating one's responses – which are precisely Moore's concern in Song Means. However, I wonder what conclusions some readers, particularly students, may draw concerning those stages of interpretive work that come later: sorting, pruning, and so forth.

There is much to gain by having students read Song Means. First, the book draws readers into that activity which is critical to any liberal-arts education: interrogating one's responses – in this case, beliefs about music. Second, Moore does an exceptional job of representing the discipline at work. In every chapter, he gives close and generous consideration to the work of other scholars: extending, synthesizing, and sometimes confronting that work. Third, the topical focus of chapters is clear: each begins with framing questions, gathers/formulates answers and relevant terminology, and supplies a steady stream of musical examples. As such, most chapters could be excerpted for stand-alone reading assignments, although doing so would undermine the book's pursuit of an integrated analytical and interpretive method. And finally, the book admits a wide potential readership. Throughout, Moore uses language that is only as technical as it needs to be to get at the questions he is pursuing, and he takes care to define his terminology. Some chapters assume the reader's ability to handle musical notation and basic harmonic analysis, but many chapters are entirely manageable by students with little or no formal training in music.

Notwithstanding these many virtues, I submit that the analytical foundation laid in Song Means could sometimes benefit from a more systematic presentation. Without an adequately explicit typology of norms, readers will find it difficult to develop the sorts of nuanced interpretations that Moore models. He makes this very point in the chapter on form: ‘this process of naming is more important than it is often given credit for being, since by naming a discreet [sic] unit, we are comparing it to similar units in other songs, and thus developing the norms by which we understand how to orient ourselves temporally in relation to that to which we are listening’ (82). I do not mean to point out the obvious, which is that the analytical chapters are only intended as survey. Moore periodically reiterates that his purpose is to set forth a methodology rather than a theory, and refers readers to more fully explicated theoretical work elsewhere in the literature (some written by himself). But I expect that some readers, particularly those who are new to popular music analysis, will find the more systematic exposition in these other studies co-requisite reading alongside Song Means.Footnote ⁴

To illustrate my point, I offer some selected instances where greater analytical precision would be welcome. Moore presents a 16-bar excerpt from the Kinks' ‘Waterloo Sunset’ as a normative example of 4-bar hypermetre (57). The example is well chosen, but the description that follows is confusing. First, the transcription frames the wrong 16 bars: a melodic pickup is counted as bar 1, thus the transcription cuts off before the proper final bar. And second, the passage is claimed as an example of AABA form (I use bold type to designate formal labels). Strictly speaking, this is true: the excerpt presents a 4-bar idea, repeats that idea, introduces a contrasting 4-bar idea, and concludes by reprising the initial idea. However, Moore proceeds to draw an association between this 16-bar pattern and 32-bar song form, represented by ‘I've Got You Under My Skin’. Readers that examine the complete songs will detect a problem with this comparison. The 16 bars in ‘Waterloo Sunset’ are analogous to just the 16-bar A portion of ‘Under My Skin’, rather than the full AABA pattern to which the label ‘32-bar song form’ refers. Furthermore, ‘Under My Skin’ presents a common (but complicating) variation upon 32-bar song form: B is rounded by the final phrase of A, rather than being followed by a full reprise of A. A more systematic comparison of the songs might point out that both ‘Waterloo Sunset’ and ‘Under My Skin’ deploy primary (A) and contrasting (B) materials: the former deploys these materials as an ABA pattern; the latter deploys them as AAB A-tail. A third example, of garden-variety 32-bar song form, would lend further clarity. The label ‘aaba’ (lowercase) could be applied to the 16-bar A sections of both songs, clarifying the difference in structural levels (i.e. A=aaba). Later in the chapter, Moore does note that the AABA pattern can be manifested at different levels of structure. But by this point, the distinction has become muddled.

Likewise, the discussion of phrase structure would benefit from a systematic presentation and more transparent examples. The Who's ‘Anyway Anyhow Anywhere’ is presented as a standard example of elision: the song's 8-bar verse is shortened by the early onset of transitional material. Unfortunately, the transitional material is metrically unstable, making this a challenging (first) example to digest. ‘All the Young Dudes’, by Mott the Hoople, is an equally perplexing choice of example. Moore states that the final bar of the chorus loses a beat to elision. But viewed against the prevailing 4-bar hypermetre, that shortened bar sounds more consistent with extension than elision, as it is the final bar in a 5-bar phrase. Joan Jett's ‘I Love Rock and Roll’, which Moore mentions in passing, is a much more straightforward example of elision. Moore eventually introduces the typology of phrase structure proposed by Ken Stephenson.Footnote ⁵ That typology is useful here, but in Moore's condensation of it, worthwhile precision is lost. For instance, Moore gives 10cc's ‘Rubber Bullets’ as an example of Stephenson's ‘extension-overlap model’; in fact, its phrase structure is identical to ‘Help Me, Rhonda’, which Stephenson cites as a definitive ‘2+2’ structure. If it is vital to Moore's interpretive method to set forth these kinds of norms, then it is also vital to set them forth clearly.

My sensitivity to these rough spots in Moore's coverage of form is certainly conditioned by my investment in that particular topic. It is possible that other readers, with different research commitments, may observe opportunities for clarification in other parts of the book. Regardless, I think that few will dispute Moore's unprecedented achievement in drawing together so many threads. And I sincerely hope that his passion for the field will be no less evident in future editions of this remarkable book.