In the early music of the Beatles, form, harmony, and voice leading are intricately related. The most common form of this period—AABA where each A section contains an SRDC (Statement–Restatement–Departure–Conclusion) phrase structure as defined by Walter Everett (2001 and 2009)—carries with it harmonic and melodic implications which allow for the creation of a voice-leading model for this form. This paper examines how this model interacts with various songs from the early Beatles catalog. While not every song fits the model perfectly, there is always adialoguebetween the model and the specific voice leading and form of the songs in question.
In this article, I advocate for a syntactical definition of harmonic function in rock music such that function is acquired not by a chord's scale-degree content but by its role in the context of a song's form. In rock songs, the syntactical role of dominant, for example, is often played by chords unrelated to V, such as IV, ii, ♭VII, or even versions of I. A theory of harmonic function rooted in chord category—e.g., ascribing dominant function to any chord related to V—inadequately accounts for rock's harmonic organization. I argue that syntactical elements underlie many existing conceptions of harmonic function, but theories rooted in common-practice repertoire nearly always involve chord category to some degree. Separating syntactical and categorical elements not only leads us to a fuller understanding of rock's harmonic idiom, but also reveals similarities between rock music and common-practice tonal music that many theorists insist do not exist.
Most analysts consider a song either to be in a single key or to exhibit competition or ambiguity among multiple possible keys. This article proposes an alternative in which two keys combine to create a coherent, stable tonality. I adapt Robert Bailey’s concept of the “double-tonic complex” to demonstrate that in many rock songs, relative major and minor keys coexist with neither superior to the other and no conflict between them. These songs are not quite in two keys at once, but rather each component key represents a different incarnation of a single, more abstract tonality encompassing them both. The prolonged generative tonic of such a structure is a four-note sonority built from the union of the two tonic triads; this sonority often—but not always—appears as a surface chord at structurally important moments.
This book has presented both a methodology for analyzing form in rock songs and a theory of formal organization in the rock output of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. The methodology grows out of the general concept of form as process described in the introduction, where rock songs are seen as cohesive entities unfolding through time. From this point of view, we approach a rock song by listening for broad trajectories, identifying points of stability and tension in small-scale phrases and sections as well as large-scale cycles and entire songs. More specifically, we focus first on a song’s harmonic trajectory, interpreting a prolongational progression through a functional circuit (or noting one’s absence), and then aligning that trajectory with the layout of formal functions. From this methodology comes the theory that the rock repertoire in question is based on a small set of conventional formal-harmonic patterns, what I have been calling rock’s ...
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