Style and style analysis

Style analysis – based upon empirical observation

Stylistic traits, musical textual analysis: patterns, instrumental combinations, etc.

The emphasis in analysing the pieces should not be upon every detail of the performance, but
upon those features which position it within a particular genre (i.e. what Tagg labels “style
indicators”)

Be aware: not everything constituting the style is amenable to notation in the traditional sense

Working definitions:
Style: an abstract concept concerning the way something is done. Style applies to all aspects
of behaviour. Style can be thought of as basically what musicians do and the manner in which
they do it: sonic, visual, gestural, etc.

Genre: broader category linking other cultural aspects with the music: what the music means,
how it is used, the type of performance space, ideas, attitudes and rituals deriving from it or
associated with it. In total, the concept of genre in popular music extends to ideas often
related to life style, scene, subculture. Genre therefore is a cultural category given some level
or reality through a discourse. For example, people may argue about whether such and such
an act is a punk band because they have ideas about what punk is supposed to be and
whether or not these expectations are met by the band. Genre always involves a consensus
among the participants, both the musicians themselves and their audiences.

While, as has been demonstrated in Fabbri’s text, genre cannot be accounted for solely on the
basis of the stylistic features of the sound forms of the music (what he calls the formal and
technical rules), style analysis is fundamental to musicians since they have to be able to
understand and replicate various styles. (When Fabbri writes “rules”, think “conventions”.)

Style analysis

basic components, parameters, or dimensions (after Jan LaRue, Guidelines for Style Analysis)

• Sound – timbre, range, texture, density, dynamics, production

• Harmony – types: linear and modal, bifocal, expanded, atonal, etc.
• Melody – mode, tessitura; motion: steps, skips, leaps, chromatic; patterns: rising,
falling, level, wave-form, sawtooth, undulating
• Rhythm – surface rhythm, metre (regular, irregular, additive, syncopated, etc.),
tempo, activity, interactions (textural rhythm, harmonic rhythm, contour rhythm)
• Change/growth – stasis versus movement, larger scale shapes, extension,
intensification
• Text (verbal) influence – the influence of associated verbal texts, such as lyrics

Example using surf music

‘Walk, Don’t Run’

• Sound – rim shot flourish on drums, electric guitar texture, reverb
 • Harmony – Aeolian mode, chords above the bass differ, as A major at beginning, not
expected a minor
• Melody – a Aeolian (natural minor) with C major episode – leap up a fourth (E to A)
dropping an octave, and then rising stepwise in a pattern repeated three times until
the final climax note (approached by a skip) to C (diminished 5th above E root,
dissonance that resolves to B, the fifth) – a generally rising figure to a climax note
• episode in C major marked by rising Mixolydian passage

‘Pipeline’
• opens with surf style indicator – tremolo downward glissando on electric guitar
• moody, tremolo and reverb saturated, quiet dynamic, active surface rhythm but static
harmony: E – G bass line
(e minor chord)
• melody rises with a skip from 5 to hover around tonic note with neighbour tones (9
and 7)
• then repeated on 4th degree (a minor)
• v – vi (twice)
v- iv
i (not really minor, but parallel fifths – very modal and
reminiscent of folk music)

‘Miserlou’
• similar tempo but much more nervous feel, partly because of very rapid surface
rhythm and greater drive from other instruments
• modal-sounding – E G# A B D# C melody – Eastern flavour, something like harmonic
minor
• melodic curve: one long rising and falling arc