In 1960s pop/rock, the end of a prechorus often uses text, breakaway from harmonic loops, hypermeter, or a change of melody to heighten expectation for tonic harmony and create structural closure. Songs harness this heightened expectation to underscore the importance of the chorus and illustrate the singer’s lyrics. These closing markers provide a wide range of expressive and formal options by creating various cadential effects, including a closed cadence overlapping with the chorus, an open cadence before the chorus, or—in passages often depicting marked emotional states—conflicting formal cues.

In AABA songs (sometimes called verse–bridge songs) written and performed by the Beatles, the song texts’ scansion and rhyme show significant contrasts between different sections, and these contrasts often have important formal and narrative functions. Combining rock Formenlehre with phonetic analysis, this article shows that A modules tend to have irregular scansion and frequent rhyme, while B modules tend to show regular scansion and less frequent rhyme. In the unusual cases where A modules have infrequent rhyme, the B modules tend to offer contrast by showing greater rhyme frequency. These contrasts represent an independent, recurring formal device in the Beatles’ catalogue that does not entirely comport with other well-defined formal processes, such as the loose-verse/tight-chorus schema. The scansion and rhyme have various narrative and formal functions: They often suggest a contrast between an active and passive state in the song’s protagonist, and disruptions to regular patterns or conflict with grammatical boundaries can play a critical role in shaping phrases. B modules that thwart the norm can connote an especially high emotional arousal or suggest a process of intensification and conclusion, linking the form to an expanded statement–response–departure–conclusion form. The analyses demonstrate the central role that prosody often plays in popular song and show the importance of considering its relation to other musical patterns.

This article uses Harold Bloom's concept of revision, defined as a reading that is simultaneously a re‐interpretation, to examine how the alternative band Sonic Youth transformed the hardcore style. Sonic Youth embraced hardcore in the early 1980s as a means of expanding beyond their no‐wave origins, but because of a cultural gulf between them and other hardcore bands, their successful appropriation of hardcore necessarily involved fragmentation and ironic reversal of its stylistic elements, combined with formally unorthodox means of re‐integrating those elements. Examining lyrics, scalar subsets, gestural motions on the guitar, timbre, references to formal archetypes and cues for pitch centricity, this article shows revision in two Sonic Youth songs from the late 1980s. ‘Silver Rocket’ (1988) fragments riffs characteristic of hardcore and substitutes a large‐scale constructive principle for musical narrative in its verse and chorus. ‘White Kross’ (1987) transforms hardcore's characteristic stance against authority, creating instead a sense of internal conflict both lyrically and musically. I present the analyses in order to provide a foundation for examining other post‐punk songs and explaining Sonic Youth's cultural significance in the alternative‐rock scene.

[1] A number of pieces written in the first half of the twentieth century sound tonal while also containing decidedly modern elements. The label "neo-tonal" or "centric" is often applied to such works, which include music by Britten, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Stravinsky during his neoclassical period, and others. Zimmerman (2002) and Silberman (2006) point out that readings of neo-tonal music often combine techniques of both tonal and post-tonal analysis, an approach that opens the question of precisely which elements of the tonal idiom are applicable to the work under discussion. (1) Such readings also raise a related question of whether a single mode of analysis can apply to an entire composition, or whether we must jettison the assumption of stylistic unity and find the best possible method for each individual section. (2) Aaron Copland's Quiet City (1940) raises similar questions for analysts. The work has a consonant musical surface yet often strips away many markers of common-practice tonality. This paper offers a hearing of Quiet City that is oriented toward two of its most salient features: ABSTRACT: Tonal ambiguity in Aaron Copland's Quiet City, a feature frequently noted by critics, results from a radical reorganization of the constituent elements of tonality. Many sections of the work eschew triads and, in lieu of tonal progressions and key centers, the work shifts between referential collections and emphasizes pitches through salience. This paper creates a perfect fifth/semitone Tonnetz to model two of Quiet City's most notable features: motives built from pentatonic subsets and semitonal shifts. The Tonnetz reveals isomorphisms between melodic motives and characteristic shifts between pitch-class collections, and it shows that climactic sections feature dramatic reversals of motion. Pattern completion-a voice-leading technique in which a missing note from a collection established as normative sounds conspicuously-articulates points of arrival and confirms central pitches. This analysis shows that Quiet City transforms the relations among the constituent elements of tonality in order to further explore the potential of the tonal system, an avowed aesthetic goal of Copland's.

Sonic Youth originated in No Wave, a movement from the late 1970s and early 1980s that reduced rock to minimal gestures and explored extremes of noise. In the mid-1980s, Sonic Youth’s style changed as they began to incorporate guitar parts that were reminiscent of 1970s hard rock. But their experimental tendencies persisted through this change, because they overlaid the parts in ways that created incongruity and tweaked hard-rock stylistic features in order to create dissonance or tonal conflict. Sonic Youth’s strategies for twisting hard-rock norms into clashing harmonies often follow one of two recurring types. The first, tonic divergence, occurs when separate lines have phase-mismatched tonic harmonies. The second, intervallic dissonance, occurs when instrumental lines are arranged in order to highlight harshly dissonant intervals or chromatic clusters. In many songs, their dissonant counterpoint works in tandem with their characteristic noisy guitar timbres by occurring in alternation, forcing listeners to continually re-evaluate how they perceive a song as a standard rock track. The analyses show how the band continued to experiment within popular style and created types of dissonance that influenced 1980s–1990s guitar-based indie rock.