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Music writing has always been something of an occult practice, trying by some weird alchemy to use concepts to describe stuff that defies the basic categories of intellect. So long as we stick to classical music, we can pretend that nothing too odd is happening, since the classical tradition has been steeped in notation for centuries. But when a musicologist attempts to analyze, say, an ambient track by Brian Eno, things aren't so simple. Suddenly notation won't do, and there comes the need to make use of every tool in the poet's shed. This episode focuses on a recently published article by Phil on this question. In due course, the discussion turns to the power of good writing: its capacity not just to convey an author's subjective impressions, but to disclose new facets of the ineffable, baroque objective world.

SHOW NOTES

Phil Ford, "Style as Analysis" in The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches, edited by Ciro Scotto, Kenneth M. Smith and John Brackett
\nChristopher Ricks, Dylan's Vision of Sin
\nFerrucio Busoni, Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music
\nSusan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality
\nHans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey
\nPhil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
\nJerry Hopkins, No One Here Gets Out Alive
\nBrian Eno, Another Green World
\nMitchell Morris, The Persistence of Sentiment: Display and Feeling in Popular Music of the 1970s
\nWilliam Youngren, \u201cBalliett\u2019s Bailiwick,\u201d Partisan Review 32, no. 1 (Winter 1965)
\nWhitney Balliett, Collected Works
\nE.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
\nHenri Bergson, Matter and Memory