Book Review

What to Listen for in Rock: A Stylistic Analysis. By Ken Stephenson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-300-09239 (cloth). Pp. vii, 253. $35.00

The impact of Ken Stephenson’s What to Listen for in Rock should not be underestimated. His major premise appears early in the introduction: “The assumption that rock is simply a crude extension of common practice music is false. Rock, in fact, exhibits melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic characteristics that are not found in any other style” (x). Stephenson situates himself within an ongoing debate among music scholars such as Walter Everett (“Confessions from Blueberry Hell, or Pitch Can be a Sticky Substance,” in Expression in Pop-Rock Music, ed. Everett [2000]) and Simon Frith (“Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music,” in Music and Society, ed. R. Leppert and S. McClary [1987]) concerning the musical and sociological basis of a rock aesthetic.