„Rock and Roll has always been a music of collective composition. Although many bands have one or two de facto songwriters, the authoring of the rock-and-roll semiotic is almost always a group activity. Unlike what happens in the Western compositional tradition, rock bands rarely work from scores. Although a songwriter may create the basic architecture for a song, that composer rarely writes parts for each instrument. Weiterlesen →

„In blues-based rock and roll, the form comes not from the composer but from the tradition. The performer-as-composer inflects the form with individual differences or contravenes the conventions outright. In either case, the listener starts with an understanding of the form that is roughly equal to that of the performer. The listener’s responsibility, in the first case, is to remain sensitive to the performer’s inflections, weighing them against the demands and allowances of the form, as well as against the inflections of other performers. In the second case, the listener must understand the status of the formal expectations being disrupted, while also comparing the contraventions against a slate of other potential disruptions, and thus to piece together the differential meaning of the gesture. The assumption is not one of invention and inspiration but an engagement with a tradition and of negotiation with the possibilities, forms, and meanings of that tradition.“
(Seth Kim-Cohen in: In the blink of an ear (2009/13, S. 147)