Le 28 juin 2017
de 14h30 à 15h00
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3208
Séance - Sounds of Popular Music (I)
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : David Forrest
Mode-preserving, major-third root movement, e.g. C major to A♭ major or C minor to E minor, produces a perceptual paradox that simultaneously destroys any sense of background diatonicism and forces irreconcilable interpretations of consonance and dissonance. Studies by Richard Cohn, Richard Taruskin, and Matthew Bribitzer-Stull identify art- and film-music examples ranging from Orfeo to Star Wars that connect this type of progression with descriptions of uncanny or supernatural phenomena. This paper expands the social implications of the technique by exploring the association in contemporary pop music. Surveying over 50 songs from 1966-2016, the paper identifies six types of uncanny scenarios associated with PL and LP progressions: visions, transcending barriers, nonsense poetry, supernatural phenomena, psychological conditions, and descriptions of dystopia. With each category, this paper inspects examples in detail and provides hermeneutic readings where the association between lyrics and harmony is less obvious. While not every PL/LP transformation evokes an uncanny experience, when the transformations are used conspicuously between adjacent or framing harmonies, the pervasive associations with the uncanny, across sub-genre and generational lines, are hard to ignore.
