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In American folk and popular music, dissonance frequently functions in ways that cannot be explained by conventional tonal theory. Two types of dissonance—the dropping and hanging thirds—function outside of classical norms, and within the framework of a mode built around the tonic triad that either transposes or remains in place with changes of harmony. The interaction between the mode and harmony influences the large-scale structure of a strophe or other section and the perception of its tension and resolution.

Recent scholarship has shed light on the troubling use of rap lyrics in criminal trials. Prosecutors have interpreted defendants' rap lyrics as accurate descriptions of past behavior or in some cases as real threats of violence. There are at least two problems with this practice: One concerns the interpretation of art in a legalistic context and the second involves the targeting of rap over other genres and the role of racism therein. The goal of the present work is translational, to demonstrate the relevance of music scholarship on this topic to criminologists and legal experts. We highlight the usage of lyric formulas, stock lyrical topics understood by musicians and their audiences, many of which make sense only in the context of a given genre. The popularity of particular lyric formulas at particular times appears connected to contemporaneous social conditions. In African American music, these formulas have a long history, from blues, through rock and roll, to contemporary rap music. The work illustrates this through textual analyses of lyrics identifying common formulas and connecting them to relevant social factors, in order to demonstrate that fictionalized accounts of violence form the stock-in-trade of rap and should not be interpreted literally.

's mastery of triple counterpoint is evident in all of his works based on the compositional technique. These pieces include the Sinfonia (Three-Part Invention) in D major, BWV 789; the Prelude in A major from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, BWV 864; the Fugue in F # major from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II, BWV 882; and the Sinfonia in F minor, BWV 795. Of these, the Sinfonia in F minor stands out, by virtue of Bach's bold departures from conventional practices of dissonance treatment and harmonic syntax with respect to six-four chords, licence that he takes to accommodate thematic material in the bass.This essay explores several interrelated musical components central to the extraordinary nature of the piece: the polyphonic structure of the subject and the transferred resolution of its most prominent dissonance; the above-mentioned departures from conventional treatment of six-four chords; the altered linear and harmonic meanings of the three lines -subject (S), countersubject (CS1) and second countersubject (CS2) -in the context of modulation via auxiliary cadence; Bach's use of particular permutations to mark with perfect authentic cadences both keys and sections of form; and his use of certain permutations to create a prolongational structure on a deep middleground level.A formal chart of the piece (Table 1) indicates bars, permutations (or vertical arrangements of the subject and countersubjects), thematic statements and episodes, keys, cadence types and several other factors discussed in the course of the essay. I follow Daniel Harrison (1988) in treating the 'conjugation' as an important formal indicator and source of compositional technique in the context of triple counterpoint (Table 2): there are six possible arrangements of the three lines in triple counterpoint; the two conjugations are the two collections of three arrangements each in which each line appears once in each voice.1 The essay also briefly explores the views of the eighteenth-century theorists Johann Philipp Kirnberger and Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg regarding six-four chords in invertible counterpoint; Bach's employment of melodic and cadential formulas common in eighteenth-century fugue and partimento; and the descriptions of those cadential formulas by several seventeenth-and eighteenthcentury theorists.Throughout much of the essay I employ conventional Schenkerian analytical techniques, including some methods particularly applicable to the study of imitative counterpoint, such as the examination of the polyphonic and harmonic content intrinsic to many fugal subjects and the reduction of the melodic Music Analysis, 34/iii (2015) 305

Sweet Thing: The History and Musical Structure of a Shared American Vernacular Form is a historical and analytical study of one of the most productive and enduring shared musical resources in North American vernacular music. Many of us learn the form as children, when we sing “If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands,” and we hear it frequently in popular music, but usually without realizing that this poetic and rhythmic pattern has been penetrating the minds of musicians and listeners for centuries. The antecedents of the form date back to sixteenth-century Scotland and England, and appear in seventeenth-century English popular music; eighteenth-century English and American broadside balladry; nineteenth-century American folk hymnody, popular song, gospel hymnody, and ragtime; and American folk repertoire collected in the early twentieth century. It continued to generate many songs in early twentieth-century popular genres, including blues, country, and gospel music, through which it entered into many postwar popular genres like rhythm and blues, rock and roll, soul, country pop, the folk revival, and rock music. This book offers the most comprehensive examination to date of the centuries-long history of the scheme, and defines its musical parameters in twentieth-century popular music.