Listening to chords in a rock song can be a rich and varied experience. Whether consciously or not, a rock fan often hears tonal centres, predicts where chords will resolve, and notices a web of references to similar songs and schematic patterns. Doll's Hearing Harmony aims to provide a comprehensive theory that models this hearing but avoids assumptions about chordal behaviour derived from common-practice classical harmony. The book, the author claims, represents ‘the first academic monograph devoted entirely to chords in the popular sphere’, and it results from listening to ‘tens of thousands’ of songs (p. 4) and engaging in a combination of focused ‘aural introspection’ and historically informed meticulous analysis (p. 9).

The book's theory is, primarily, one of hearing harmony – that is, describing, rather than prescribing, how listeners can perceive chords in a rock track. The term effect recurs throughout the book, which Doll defines as a subjective ‘quality’ of a perceived sonic object. He uses the term effect to describe the function of different chords, as when they are stable enough to preclude resolution, which is a tonic effect, (p. 20) or when they have a strong predictive quality towards the tonic (p. 25), which is a pretonic effect. Scales, chord qualities, and hierarchy – that is, when listeners attribute relative weights to chords – are also described as effects. Even a chord itself is an effect, since parsing a song into discrete harmonic units is a subjective act of perception – constrained by the input of the song, of course.

This approach allows Doll to assert that functional effects are independent from traditional Roman numerals. Instead, they result from a listener's perception of the amalgamated predictive tendencies and stability of a chord's members. Thus, Doll adapts Harrison's (Reference Harrison1994) language and states that dominant and subdominant are types of pretonic chords defined by their voice-leading qualities. Other functions (softeners, delayers, neighbours, etc.) result from listener's hierarchical interpretation of a passage; yet others (prepretonic, gamma, anchor, etc.) are more general terms for prediction and hierarchical superordination.

Doll's extensive lexicon of newly minted harmonic functions might initially seem unwieldy. Yet there is a clear rationale for each of his terms, and they provide a valuable corrective to rock analyses that unquestioningly rely on common-practice assumptions. Separating the label dominant from Roman numerals, for example, allows an analyst to describe situations where this function accrues in a scale-degree assembly that is not V, and it allows analysts to precisely describe when a V chord plays a different role in a progression. The vocabulary allows an analyst to describe harmonic hearing at different levels of specificity and hierarchy, and to state with precision when a particular effect, such as a scale, is given by a passage. While Doll's theory can potentially describe any reading of a passage, the hearings he offers are based on the criteria of affording the richest interpretation and being historically informed. Readers who are willing to hear through the book's lens will delight in Doll's interpretive acuity and encyclopaedic knowledge of rock history.

One area of Doll's functional theory could be improved: readers might be frustrated by some interpretive inconsistencies in his descriptions of hierarchical levels. For example, in his discussion of the I–IV–V–IV progression in The Troggs’ ‘Wild Thing’, Doll states that the final IV is a ‘softener’ – that is, hierarchically subordinate to the pretonic V and not present at deeper harmonic levels. Yet in his surface-level analysis, he labels the V a ‘presubdominant’ to the IV, re-elevating IV as the pretonic chord in the passage. The surface level presents a hierarchy that contradicts deeper levels, a reading that is incompatible with other theories of tonal hierarchy. One might argue that the deeper level shows functions based on knowledge of the rock style, while the surface level shows the hearing of a listener who knows the song and is familiar with its chord-to-chord successions. Doll himself briefly discusses the distinction between these forms of knowledge (pp. 81–2). However, conflating them into a single reading without explanation loses some subtlety in hearing. Moreover, Doll's hierarchy as defined does not easily describe situations where a hierarchically subordinate chord serves not to delay the next chord, but to intensify the expectation of the previous one. These types of event happen frequently in classical harmony, and rock has analogous instances. These issues do not discredit the book's claims about functional effects, but they show that they have room for further refinement.

The central portion of the book presents a theory of schemas in rock harmony, which Doll defines as ‘a mental representation of stock patterns’, which are both harmonic formulae and archetypal Roman-numeral progressions that provide information about the likely tonics of a progression of roots (p. 83). Doll defines schemas in two primary ways: as cyclically ordered sets of Roman numerals (e.g. <V–IV–I>, which could be stated as V–IV–I, IV–I–V or I–V–IV), and as ordered progressions of scale degrees that scaffold a progression. While this portion of the book partially retreads ground covered by other scholars (primarily Tagg Reference Tagg2009 and Everett Reference Everett2009), its scope surpasses previous studies, and the specificity with which it discusses the most common rotations and tonal functions of each schema make it an invaluable resource. Unfortunately, the book has no index of song titles, but it does contain an appendix listing the different schema. The analyses sometimes contain errors – an understandable situation, given the sheer number of songs discussed – but they are infrequent enough that the book's primary claims are amply illustrated. Readers will admire the chronological and stylistic diversity of the examples, which allows classic rock tracks to stand beside examples from country, R'n’ B, hip hop, and other genres.

As Gjerdingen (Reference Gjerdingen2007, p. 10) points out, defining schemas within a musical style is a tricky business: it requires determining the relevant attributes, finding the right balance between generality and specificity and recognising that individual examples may share only some of the features. Doll's schemas assume a single tonal centre and root order, and other than a cursory discussion of ‘harmonic phrases’ (p. 85), they are largely devoid of formal and hypermetric information. Some readers may question whether this system always best represents how harmonic patterns are mentally categorised. For example, his schemas separate progressions that many scholars treat as instances of a single type – such as the I–V–vi–IV/bIII–bVII–i–bVI ‘axis’ progression discussed by several writers. While I cannot speak for other readers, Doll sometimes treats as one category progressions that strike me as distinct phenomena, such as the IV–V–I–vi … pattern frequently used in closing phrases in early 1960s pop and the I–vi–IV–V that serves as an opening progression in the same period. I find other schemas difficult to perceive because they cut across hypermetric and formal boundaries, such as his identified instances of the 4–♯4–5 scale-degree schema that end with a dominant-embellishing I at the beginning of a concluding phrase. Other scholars show that this final chord is a distinct harmonic phenomenon that is motivated by formal and metric considerations (Nobile Reference Nobile2011; Everett Reference Everett2001). While Doll's schemas, arguably, sometimes distort how listeners categorise, they have the advantage of being both consistent and flexible in labelling; moreover, the ideas are crucial to the excellent discussion of centric ambiguity that follows. Doll brings up larger formal issues in his discussion of ‘extended schemas’ (pp. 162–87), but the section could be expanded and put in dialogue with other scholars who have addressed the same topic, particularly Stoia (Reference Stoia2013).

The book's final chapter persuasively argues that a song's use of tonal functions and schemas are crucial to its expressivity. Any rock artist would be lucky to have Doll discuss their work: his writing is full of pithy insights and displays a keen ear and sympathetic attitude towards an artist's expressive aims, whatever their genre. Despite occasional quibbles that readers may raise, Hearing Harmony has mapped out a harmonic landscape that scholars will explore for years to come. Any new discussion of rock harmony will be enriched by adopting and debating this book's ideas.