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dc.contributor.authorMaxwell, Kate
dc.date.accessioned2017-01-31T11:54:57Z
dc.date.available2017-01-31T11:54:57Z
dc.date.issued2016
dc.description.abstractThe pop/alternative musician Beck created a stir in the music world when he released his 2012 “album” Song Reader as a book compilation of individual pieces of sheet music. This included a guide to reading music notation, together with an introduction describing the work’s intentions and inviting readers to perform their own versions of the songs. Two years later, a recording of the songs interpreted by various well-known artists was issued. The video to one of these, Jack White’s interpretation of “I’m Down,” focuses entirely on the presentation of the track in the book-album Song Reader: the musical notation, lyrics, and artwork. Using multimodal discourse analysis together with Derrida’s notion of grammatology, this article will analyse both the book-album and the “I’m Down” video. If the Derridean violence of writing brings speech under its over-arching wings, then notation can be seen as dominating musical discourse: the habit of not notating popular music is in fact a (usually subconscious) semiotic decision to differentiate from the (classical/art) music tradition. Song Reader’s release as a book, only to be later reappropriated as a “normal” album, means that it can be understood as an example of “unbound” popular music reincorporated into the mainstream—yet the “I’m Down” video can be read (literally) as a rebellion against this. Or can it? Without their “alternative mainstream” status, neither Beck nor White would have been able to exploit the popular music business in this way. To what extent can the institutional discourse of popular music be infiltrated from the inside? What is the status of “unbound” music-as-literature?en_US
dc.descriptionThis article is under the terms of the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives License</a>.<br> This article is also available via DOI:<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1038035ar">10.7202/1038035ar</a>en_US
dc.identifier.citationMaxwell K. Beck's Song Reader: An Unbound Music Book. Mémoires du livre. 2016;8(1)en_US
dc.identifier.cristinIDFRIDAID 1413294
dc.identifier.doi10.7202/1038035ar
dc.identifier.issn1920-602X
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10037/10253
dc.language.isoengen_US
dc.publisherUniversité de Sherbrooke, Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines, Groupe de recherches et détudes sur le livre au Québecen_US
dc.relation.journalMémoires du livre
dc.rights.accessRightsopenAccessen_US
dc.subjectVDP::Humaniora: 000::Musikkvitenskap: 110en_US
dc.subjectVDP::Humanities: 000::Musicology: 110en_US
dc.subjectDiskursanalyse / Discourse analysisen_US
dc.subjectMultimodalitet / Multimodalityen_US
dc.subjectMusikkanalyse / Music Analysisen_US
dc.titleBeck's Song Reader: An Unbound Music Booken_US
dc.typeJournal articleen_US
dc.typeTidsskriftartikkelen_US
dc.typePeer revieweden_US


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