Psychedelic Popular Music

William Echard

Description

Recognized for its distinctive musical features and its connection to periods of social innovation and ferment, the genre of psychedelia has exerted long-term influence in many areas of cultural production, including music, visual art, graphic design, film, and literature. William Echard explores the historical development of psychedelic music and its various stylistic incarnations as a genre unique for its fusion of rock, soul, funk, folk, and electronic music. Through the theory of musical topics—highly conventional musical figures that signify broad cultural concepts—and musical meaning, Echard traces the stylistic evolution of psychedelia from its inception in the early 1960s, with the Beatles' Rubber Soul and Revolver and the Kinks and Pink Floyd, to the German experimental bands and psychedelic funk of the 1970s, with a special emphasis on Parliament/Funkadelic. He concludes with a look at the 1980s and early 1990s, touching on the free festival scene, rave culture, and neo–jam bands. Set against the cultural backdrop of these decades, Echard's study of psychedelia lays the groundwork and offers lessons for analyzing the topic of popular music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Delineating Psychedelia: Topic Theory and Popular Music Cultures
2. Developments Through 1966
3. The Later 1960s
4. The 1970s
5. The 1980s and On
Epilogue: Conclusions and Prospects
Appendix A: The Sample and Discography
Appendix B: The San Francisco Poster Sample
Appendix C: Some Notes on the Transcriptions
List of References
Index

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Grateful Dead
• Music
• Rock
• Jefferson Airplane
• The Beatles
• Pink Floyd
• History
• Cultural Studies
• History of classical music traditions
• Criticism
• Multiple signal classification
• Popular music

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 22 mai 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 5
• EAN13: 9780253026590
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Psychedelic Popular Music
MUSICAL MEANING AND INTERPRETATION
Robert S. Hatten, editor
A Theory of Musical Narrative
BYRON ALM N
Approaches to Meaning in Music
BYRON ALM N AND EDWARD PEARSALL
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NAOMI ANDR
The Italian Traditions and Puccini: Compositional Theory and Practice in Nineteenth-Century Opera
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Debussy Redux: The Impact of His Music on Popular Culture
MATTHEW BROWN
Music and Embodied Cognition: Listening, Moving, Feeling, and Thinking
ARNIE COX
Music and the Politics of Negation
JAMES R. CURRIE
Il Trittico, Turandot, and Puccini s Late Style
ANDREW DAVIS
Neil Young and the Poetics of Energy
WILLIAM ECHARD
Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Opera: Osvaldo Golijov, Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, and Tan Dun
YAYOI UNO EVERETT
Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert
ROBERT S. HATTEN
Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation
ROBERT S. HATTEN
Intertextuality in Western Art Music
MICHAEL L. KLEIN
Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject
MICHAEL L. KLEIN
Music and Narrative since 1900
MICHAEL L. KLEIN AND NICHOLAS REYLAND
Musical Forces: Motion, Metaphor, and Meaning in Music
STEVE LARSON
Is Language a Music? Writings on Musical Form and Signification
DAVID LIDOV
Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony
MELANIE LOWE
Breaking Time s Arrow: Experiment and Expression in the Music of Charles Ives
MATTHEW MCDONALD
Decorum of the Minuet, Delirium of the Waltz: A Study of Dance-Music Relations in Time
ERIC MCKEE
The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military, Pastoral
RAYMOND MONELLE
Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects: The Construction of Musical Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber
JAIRO MORENO
The Rite of Spring at 100
SEVERINE NEFF, MAUREEN CARR, AND GRETCHEN HORLACHER, WITH JOHN REEF
Meaning and Interpretation of Music in Cinema
DAVID NEUMEYER
Deepening Musical Performance through Movement: The Theory and Practice of Embodied Interpretation
ALEXANDRA PIERCE
Expressive Intersections in Brahms: Essays in Analysis and Meaning
HEATHER PLATT AND PETER H. SMITH
Expressive Forms in Brahms s Instrumental Music: Structure and Meaning in His Werther Quartet
PETER H. SMITH
Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven s Late Style
MICHAEL SPITZER
Death in Winterreise: Musico-Poetic Associations in Schubert s Song Cycle
LAURI SUURP
Music and Wonder at the Medici Court: The 1589 Interludes for La pellegrina
NINA TREADWELL
Reflections on Musical Meaning and Its Representations
LEO TREITLER
Debussy s Late Style: The Compositions of the Great War
MARIANNE WHEELDON
WILLIAM ECHARD
Psychedelic Popular Music
A History through Musical Topic Theory
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2017 by William Echard
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Echard, William, author.
Title: Psychedelic popular music : a history through musical topic theory / William Echard.
Other titles: Musical meaning and interpretation.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2017. | Series: Musical meaning and interpretation
Identifiers: LCCN 2016059651 (print) | LCCN 2017000758 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253026453 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253025661 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253026590 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Psychedelic rock music-History and criticism.
Classification: LCC ML3534 .E25 2017 (print) | LCC ML3534 (ebook) | DDC 781.64-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016059651
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Delineating Psychedelia: Topic Theory and Popular Music Cultures
2. Developments through 1966
3. The Later 1960s
4. The 1970s
5. The 1980s and On
Epilogue: Conclusions and Prospects
Appendix A: The Sample and Discography
Appendix B: The San Francisco Poster Sample
Appendix C: Some Notes on the Transcriptions
List of References
Index
Acknowledgments
Much of the early work on this book was supported by a research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am also grateful for financial support received from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Carleton University. As always, special thanks are due to my family, especially to Lillian, Morgan, Si n, and my parents. Your unwavering patience with the long stretches of work and your interest in the results have been absolutely essential to seeing this project through.
Psychedelic Popular Music
Introduction
An hour later, with ten more miles and the visit to the World s Biggest Drug Store safely behind us, we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as being in one s right mind.
-Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception , 1954
There are a lot of things this book does not get into. For any writer on music, that is a familiar situation, because it is notoriously difficult to fit even a small part of the listening experience into words. A few seconds of listening will uncover countless nuances that were not even hinted at, no matter how thorough the author aims to be. This rift is heightened when music is tied to personal experiences and states of mind and feeling that are ineffable, profoundly atypical, and ultimately inexpressible. This book does not try to analyze the aesthetic and emotional landscape of psychedelic music, let alone psychedelic experience. It is about something else: how psychedelia developed as an interlinked family of styles, a set of conventional codes and typical features. It is in turn about how psychedelia drew upon preexisting styles and codes, capitalizing on their existing meanings and forging new ones. Aldous Huxley talks about the world of daily life, how it frames and reabsorbs the transient psychedelic experience. He presents this mainly as a loss or a missed opportunity. However, in that framing world and in those framing discourses, a whole language of styles and signs grows up, which can be a fascinating area of study on its own.
Issues of this sort also arise for a different reason, because music signifies in a variety of different ways simultaneously. Some musical meaning is highly affective, linked to tantalizingly ineffable gestures and emotions. While we are listening to or performing music, these gestures and emotions can feel entirely clear and distinct, yet they evade verbalization. At the same time, some musical meanings are more like words, highly conventional signifiers linked to clearly delineated cultural concepts. This second sort of meaning has been theorized in various ways, but one of the most powerful and current of its models is the theory of musical topics . Topic theory is explained in chapter 1 , but briefly, a topic is a highly conventional musical figure that signifies a broad cultural concept. The topical signifier originally gains its meaning through direct historical and contextual connection with the cultural concept, then over time the sign becomes less historically and socially specific. For example, hunting horns were originally used in pastoral situations and so could become a generalized signifier for the pastoral as a concept. Similarly, certain distinctive guitar licks were originally connected to Chuck Berry as part of his personal style; later, they became generalized as topical signifiers of 1950s rock and roll along with all of the connotations of that era and subculture.
Topic theory was developed in connection with the study of Western art music, but it bears a strong resemblance to theories of musical meaning in popular music studies. One purpose of this book is to explore those areas of overlap. I chose psychedelia as my case study not because of anything to do with psychedelic experience itself but because it is a genre with good credentials for studying topicality. It is fairly recent in origin, so we can look at questions of how topics emerge. Psychedelia drew from a wide range of preexisting topics and at the same time transformed them, and so it can expand our understanding of topical change and dynamism. Finally, the psychedelic genre has existed long enough to have reached a crucial turning point. This book is being written in an era when some kinds of psychedelic music are stylistically quite new and current but are also becoming historically self-reflexive and standardized. Psychedelia is still an actively changing and expanding topical field, but at the same time it affords chances to study how topics solidify. Overall, psychedelia offers a rich set of possibilities for research into topicality, and this book has two purposes. For readers interested in the history of popular music style, the book offers a survey of the main signs, styles, and codes that went into the formation of psychedelia and its proliferation of substyles from the mid-1960s into the 1990s. On a theoretical level, it explores topic theory in a way that aims to enrich both popular music studies and mus