Introduction

The seven parts of this book are allocated to different themes, but this is not to suggest that they should be regarded as discrete entities or separate areas of research in popular musicology; rather, they occupy parts of the same field, and this is evident in the overlapping of concerns and issues that is to be found in the topics of individual chapters. They consist of recent research, and the general approach is that of rethinking popular musicology, its purpose, its aims and its methods. Contributors were asked to write something original, while at the same time trying to provide an instructive example of a particular way of working and thinking. The Companion is aimed primarily at research students and scholars who need to familiarize themselves with the work of cutting-edge researchers, rather than to study textbooks that cover tried and tested methodologies from the past (the type of book that is more useful for undergraduate students). The essays here are intended to help graduate students with research methodology and the application of relevant theoretical models appropriate to popular musicology in the twenty-first century. To select one example, David Cooper’s essay (Chapter 1) seeks to demonstrate how an analysis of sources throws light on both musical and technical processes in composition for film. He evaluates Trevor Jones’s score to In the Name of the Father, in which Jones incorporates songs by Bono, and finds in it an interesting model for the composite soundtracks found so often in early twentyfirst-century Hollywood cinema.