Embodied Expression in Popular Music

This book explores the intimate connection between body and instrument in popular music, explaining chords, melodies, riffs, and grooves in terms of embodied movement, which in turn informs the imagination in constructing meaning in songs. Tracing connections from foundational blues, gospel, and rock musicians to current rap artists, author Timothy Koozin demonstrates how a focus on body-instrument interaction can illuminate creative strategies while leveling implied hierarchies of cultural value, revealing how artists represent subjectivities of gender, race, and social class in shaping songs and whole albums.

Timothy Koozin is Professor and area chair of Music Theory at the Moores School of Music, University of Houston. His research interests include music and meaning, theories of embodiment and musical gesture, popular music, and the music of Toru Takemitsu. His essays on musical gesture in popular music appear in numerous published journal articles and edited collections. Koozin is co-author of the music textbooks Music for Sight Singing and Music for Analysis, ninth edition (both volumes with Thomas Benjamin, Michael Horvit and Robert Nelson). He is the former editor of the electronic journal of the Society for Music Theory, Music Theory Online.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part 1. Guitar Voicing and Embodied Gesture in Rock
1. Guitar Voicing I: Barre chords, Gesture, and Agency
2. Guitar Voicing II: Open-String Chords, Fretboard Strategies, and Virtual Spaces
Part 2. Gospel and Groove: Gestural Strategies in Soul and Funk
3. Funk at the Keyboard
4. Pentatonic Space to Outer Space: Funk Bands and the Rise of Afrofuturism
Part 3. Gestural Variation in Songs with Acoustic Instruments
5. Temporality and Gesture in the Songs of Bob Dylan
6. Counterpoint and Embodied Expression in the Music of Joni Mitchell
Part 4. Situating Gesture
7. Keyboard Playing in the Beatles' Abbey Road: Topic, Persona, and Social Discourse
8. Musical Topic and Ironic Gesture in the Songs of Steely Dan
9. Voice in Hip Hop
Glossary
Bibliography
Index