Category Archives: Musicology

More Musicological Thoughts

Posted on March 3, 2012 by Paul Carr

I gave a musicology lecture the other days which focused on a number of techniques introduced by musicologist Phil Tagg. They are Sonic Anaphone: Where the music extract resembles what it represents.For example motorbike sounds. For me this is similar … Continue reading →

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The Elements of Music: A Good Start To Basic Analysis

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Paul Carr

When considering the analysis of a piece of music for the first time, it is sometimes useful to start with the ‘elements of music’. As a first step – try placing the following elements in order of priority – in … Continue reading →

Posted in Academic, Education, Musicology | Tagged , , , , , , , | 22 Comments

Barthes;Foucault and Eco: Impact on Musicological Thought?

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Paul Carr

A few things to discuss this week. Firstly, I have been working on attempting to formulate an easy to understand musicological model that takes into account production – the music itself – and its reception. I will be discussing this … Continue reading →

Posted in Academic, Musicology | Tagged , , , , | 19 Comments

National Identity versus Commerce: An Analysis of Opportunities and Limitations within the Welsh Music Scene for Composers and Performing Musicians

Posted on January 14, 2012 by Paul Carr

I have a new Journal article coming out in the next week which discusses some askpects of the Welsh Music scene. It will be published in the Journal ‘Popular Music History’ – a short abstract copied below. This chapter intends … Continue reading →

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Pat Metheny: Why is his music so interesting?

Posted on July 9, 2011 by Paul Carr

  I have just spent an hour or so listening to a ‘best of Pat Metheny‘ collection on Spotify. Having been listening to this man’s music for around 30 years now, it is crazy to think some of the tracks … Continue reading →

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Zappa and Intergrational Meaning: A Quick Example

Posted on June 19, 2011 by Paul Carr

I could not resist but to briefly cover an example of Barthes’ ‘intergrational’ meaning via a Zappa video example – ‘Montana’. For me anyway, here are a few examples of the simultaneous narratives that I can hear in the music. … Continue reading →

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Musicology, Zappa and Barthes: More Ideas of how to Listen and Examine Zappa’s Texts

Posted on June 19, 2011 by Paul Carr

Here is a sort of part 2 of my Barthes post a couple of weeks ago. That post mainly discussed Frank Zappa’s album covers, and the various messages that are potentially within the image. In this discussion I would like … Continue reading →

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Roland Barthes Interpretes Zappa: The Perfect Photo

Posted on June 7, 2011 by Paul Carr

While working on my book on Frank Zappa, I am currently reading a lot of Roland Barthes, and have started to consider how some of his ideas can apply to music. There is a really interesting chapter in his book … Continue reading →

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The Hermeneutic Circle

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Paul Carr

I have become very interested in the nature of the hermeneutic circle recently, in particularly how it enables us to learn about music. There has been a great deal of literature from both philosophy  (For example Georg Gadamer) and musicicology … Continue reading →

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Three Conference Papers in Four Weeks: The Details

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Paul Carr

Well, it is while since my last post. Over the last 4 weeks I have delivered three papers in three different countries. So – I thought I would give an overview of them here. The first was a paper entitled … Continue reading →

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