The past five years have produced at least three book-length theoretical studies of music from the rock era. Each gives sustained attention to a single facet of the style: form (Nobile 2020), harmony (Doll 2017), and timbre and identity markers in vocal performance (Malawey 2020). ( 1) David Temperley's The Musical Language of Rock is unlike these others in two respects. First, rather than focusing on a single feature of rock, it aims to give a comprehensive picture of its stylistic conventions. Second, it frequently uses corpus studies to back up its claims, although traditional analysis and reference to other scholarship also appear. Unlike some of the previous books, Temperley's largely relegates sociological and historical aspects to the backgroundindeed, he explicitly acknowledges and justifies this approach in his first chapter (10-12)-in order to focus on technical aspects such as harmony, meter, timbre, and melodic patterns. This method provides a wealth of observations that are both rigorously achieved and insightful, although it occasionally leads Temperley to overlook important contextual information that could have been relevant to his analyses.[2] Temperley has been publishing articles on rock music for over twenty years-often in collaboration with other scholars such as Trevor de Clercq, Zhiyao Duan, Evan Lustig, Daphne Tan, Ivan Tan, and Iris Yenand his book draws from this research repeatedly. But it does not merely recycle previous findings: many ideas are new (such as those pertaining to meter and drum patterns on pages 69-72 and 123-29) or newly applied to rock (such as the analysis of melodic grouping on pages 88-93). In addition, the book contains analytical vignettes that illustrate both normative and exceptional cases of various stylistic features of songs, along with the emotional effects of those features. This information will reward even readers who are already familiar with Temperley's earlier work. The book is designed to be widely accessible: it uses language that would be comprehensible to upper-division undergraduate music majors (which sometimes involves scaling back explanations of its statistical methods). Discussion questions at the end of each chapter and a companion website with audio examples further aid its usefulness for the classroom.[3] The book is divided into roughly two sections. The first, comprising chapters 2 through 6, investigates different stylistic parameters of the pop/rock style: "Scales and Key," "Harmony," "Rhythm and Meter," "Melody," and "Timbre and Instrumentation." The second, comprising chapters 7 through 11, is primarily concerned with broader questions of structure and interpretation. Many of the book's claims in the first section are supported by corpus analysis of the "RS200," a dataset containing melodic and harmonic xxi), selecting his boundary years based on significant stylistic changes that occurred in each.Return to text 2. de Clercq and Temperley (2011, 51) discuss in more detail how the Rolling Stone list was created and provide justificat...
