REVIEW | Music as Multimodal Discourse: Semiotics, Power and Protest

From its beginnings in the 1970s, popular music studies have underlined the parallel activities and channels involved in the production and consumption of a song.Melody, drumming, vocal staging, voice quality, performance, clothing, and many other aspects simultaneously produce their effect.Such simultaneity is implicit in discussions such as Hennion and Vignolle (1978), and explicit in such contributions as Tagg (1987).The present book appears to be addressed to people working in discourse analysis and is a plea for music to be taken seriously by the discipline, whose scholars, we are told, are more accustomed to analysing news bulletins and political speeches: "[w]e believe that music and sound are not trivial concerns for scholars of communication and media" (8).The ten chapters, of which chapter one is a theoretical introduction, present nine case studies of analysis in musical communication.