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Rock:The Primary Text: Developing a Musicology of Rock (3rd Edition)

This thoroughly revised third edition of Allan F. Moore's ground-breaking book, now co-authored with Remy Martin, incorporates new material on rock music theory, style change and the hermeneutic method developed in Moore’s Song Means (2012). An even larger array of musicians is discussed, bringing the book right into the 21st century. Rock's 'primary text' – its sounds – is the focus of attention here. The authors argue for the development of a musicology particular to rock within the context of the background to the genres, the beat and rhythm and blues styles of the early 1960s, 'progressive' rock, punk rock, metal and subsequent styles. They also explore the fundamental issue of rock as a medium for self-expression, and the relationship of this to changing musical styles. Rock: The Primary Text remains innovative in its exploration of an aesthetics of rock.

• Simon Høffding, Rebecca Josefine Five Bergstrøm, Laura Bishop, Pedro Pablo Lucas Bravo, Kayla Burnim & Carlos Eduardo Cancino-Chacón [Show all 28 contributors for this article] (2025). Introducing the MusicLab Copenhagen Dataset. Music & Science. 8. doi: 10.1177/20592043241303288. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  MusicLab Copenhagen was a unique research concert featuring the world-renowned Danish String Quartet in a naturalistic setting. The audience was split between one group physically located in the hall, another group listening to a radio broadcast, and a third group watching a live stream. Qualitative and quantitative data were captured from both musicians and audiences, resulting in a comprehensive dataset that can be used to address many research questions. This document introduces the dataset, explains its structure, and reflects on the related data collection, storing, publishing, and archiving processes.

• Remy Richard Martin & Nanette Nielsen (2024). Enacting Musical Aesthetics: The Embodied Experience of Live Music. Music & Science. 7. doi: 10.1177/20592043231225732. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The vitality and affective potential of the live concert experience is a result of rich, cross-sensory interactions and varied participatory practices. The complexity of such entanglements has recently led philosophers to argue for an enactive, affordance-based approach that interrogates a variety of perceptual and sensory possibilities inherent in aesthetic experiences. Further, Shaun Gallagher's recent addition of the 4As (Affect, Agency, Affordance, Autonomy) to the 4Es (Embodied, Embedded, Enacted, Extended) for clarifying mind–world relations seem to have potent explanatory power for these kinds of encounters. Building on such current philosophical approaches while examining specific (and actual) live musical engagement, this article offers an interpretation of selected audience data from the MusicLab Copenhagen with the Danish String Quartet research concert to discuss particular responses from the audience physically present at the venue. Responding to neuroaesthetic approaches, we clarify the audience members’ individual and collective aesthetic experience through an enactive, affordance-based approach. We suggest that what is at play in the live concert environment is a mode of attentive dynamic listening. Rather than seeking to characterize the audience as passively responding to music, a 4Es/4As approach to aesthetic experience seeks to clarify embodied-enactive audience engagement for which anticipation is a dynamic factor that enables further musical action and resonance, also for the musicians on stage.

• Dana Swarbrick, Remy Richard Martin, Simon Høffding, Nanette Nielsen & Jonna Katariina Vuoskoski (2024). Audience Musical Absorption: Exploring Attention and Affect in the Live Concert Setting. Music & Science. 7. doi: 10.1177/20592043241263461. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Musical absorption is a multi-dimensional phenomenon that has been understood in various ways, but is related to strong, immersive, and transformative musical encounters. For this exploratory article, we used a phenomenologically and psychologically informed questionnaire to measure audience members’ reports of musical absorption and affective experiences at the MusicLab Copenhagen research concert with the Danish String Quartet (DSQ). We aimed to examine the relation between musical absorption and (1) attention, mind-wandering, and senses of transformation; (2) affective phenomena of feeling moved or touched and awe; (3) social context, as determined by technological mediation of a livestream; (4) musical context (Beethoven, Schnittke, and folk music); and (5) motion. There were 91 participants in the live audience and 43 participants in the livestreaming audience, who completed questionnaires after each piece in the concert and who had their motion measured through an application that recorded accelerometer data from their smartphones. Drawing on methods from experimental psychology, we found that (1) being “absorbed in the music” was not related to mind-wandering, but it was related to a sense of positive transformation; (2) musical absorption was related to experiences of feeling moved, awe, connectedness, and enjoyment, and to being an “admirer” of the DSQ, as well as to being familiar with the music; (3) being at the live concert facilitated more musical absorption than watching the livestream; (4) the final concert section, containing a collection of folk tunes, promoted the most musical absorption; and (5) within the restrained movement dynamics of the live audience, motion trended as an indicator of an embodied experience of musical absorption. We use these results to engage in a phenomenologically informed and empirically enriched discussion of musical absorption and related affective and attentional dynamics.

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• Allan F. Moore & Remy Martin (2018). Rock: The Primary Text: Developing a Musicology of Rock (3rd Edition). Routledge. ISBN 9781472462404. 348 p. doi: 10.4324/9780429490170. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This thoroughly revised third edition of Allan F. Moore's ground-breaking book, now co-authored with Remy Martin, incorporates new material on rock music theory, style change and the hermeneutic method developed in Moore’s Song Means (2012). An even larger array of musicians is discussed, bringing the book right into the 21st century. Rock's 'primary text' – its sounds – is the focus of attention here. The authors argue for the development of a musicology particular to rock within the context of the background to the genres, the beat and rhythm and blues styles of the early 1960s, 'progressive' rock, punk rock, metal and subsequent styles. They also explore the fundamental issue of rock as a medium for self-expression, and the relationship of this to changing musical styles. Rock: The Primary Text remains innovative in its exploration of an aesthetics of rock.

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• Nanette Nielsen & Remy Richard Martin (2024). Affective framing, care, and (en)action in musical encounters. Full text in Research Archive
• Nanette Nielsen, Remy Richard Martin & Emil Bernhardt (2023). Entrainment, free will, and musicking: an enactivist perspective. Full text in Research Archive
• Remy Richard Martin (2023). Sensing Contexts: An Audio Walk Through the Nasjonalmuseet. Full text in Research Archive
• Remy Richard Martin (2023). Our Aesthetic Categories. Full text in Research Archive
• Remy Richard Martin (2023). Ultima Listeners. Full text in Research Archive
• Remy Richard Martin, Ian Cross, Finn Upham, Laura Bishop, Solveig Sørbø & Frederik Øland (2023). What can one learn from more naturalistic concert research? Full text in Research Archive
• Remy Richard Martin & Emil Bernhardt (2023). Entrainment, free will, and musicking: an enactivist perspective. Full text in Research Archive
• Remy Richard Martin (2023). Aesthetic Resonances: Senses of Self in Rhythm, Musical Time, and Space. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Resonance is a rich concept that is receiving significant attention in current psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience. In ecologically-oriented literature its usage centres on perceivers’ adaptive detection of environmental information (Clarke, 2005; Raja, 2019). This is instructive of the modulating—and enhancing—nature of attention, awareness, and action. Distinct from perceptual notions of resonance in ecological psychology, physical understandings, and accounts of neural activity, appear in several related fields. These typically concern the oscillatory interactions of two systems including forms of phase locking, synchronisation, and entrainment. Elsewhere the metaphor of acoustic resonance, as manifest in political contexts, is receiving philosophical attention (James, 2019). Resonance is also a central metaphor in the context of aesthetic subjectivities. Vernacular uses of the term in response to aesthetic entanglements (‘I resonate with this song’; ‘that artwork resonates with me’) are called to mind. Adopting the ecological approach, this paper foregrounds resonance as a means of understanding the relationship between the phenomenology of music reception and underlying perceptual and affective interactions. Particularly important, self- luminous aesthetic resonances – experienced as senses of agency, ownership, affirmation, and affiliation – form the focus of a discussion which draws empirical support from quantitative studies of live music spectatorship and rich reports of ‘private’ music listening gathered through media- stimulated, phenomenological interviews.

• Remy Richard Martin & Emil Bernhardt (2023). Entrainment, free will, and musicking: an enactivist perspective. Full text in Research Archive
• Remy Richard Martin (2022). Music and Identity. Full text in Research Archive
• Remy Richard Martin (2022). Senses of Self in Rhythm and Time. Full text in Research Archive
• Remy Richard Martin (2022). Affordance and Autonomy. Full text in Research Archive

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