School of Music

Making meaning from music

Prof Derek Scott's new volume casts an eye over many styles, many periods and many places

Music is a sophisticated language system yet listeners from conservatoire musicologists to everyday consumers all bring their interpretations to bear on the sounds they hear: musical rhythms may suggest an upbeat and uplifting message or the folds of a melody can speedily transmit a powerful sense of the sombre or the sad.

In Musical Style and Social Meaning (Ashgate, 2010), Derek B. Scott, Professor of Critical Musicology and head of department in the Leeds University School of Music, explores these ideas in a variety of ways in a collection that gathers essays from the last decade and a half but includes new works that bring several of these stories right up to date.

Prof Scott raises a number of questions which he endeavours to address. 'Why do we feel justified in using adjectives such as romantic, erotic, heroic, melancholic, and a hundred others when speaking about music?' he asks. 'How do we locate these meanings within particular musical styles?'

These issues have occupied the author's thoughts and driven his musicological research for many years and, among the targets of enquiry, we encounter an eclectic and wide-ranging approach to the worlds of both art and popular music, the sounds of the West and those from further afield.

Under the microscope are subjects as diverse as UK jazz and Britpop. Bruckner and Gilbert & Sullivan, and major ideological themes from postmodernism to Orientalism, class and race to national identity.

 

Date Published: 01 November 2010
Keywords: Derek Scott, Musical Style and Social Meaning