Tag: Philip Tagg

By 1976 the title theme for the TV series Kojak had been heard by at least 100 million people in at least seventy countries. It is an infinitesimal part of all the mass media music outside the traditional musicological frames of reference. Tagg argues that conventional musicology cannot help us understand how music works on an everyday basis in the popular mass media market of ideas. This book not only reveals, in fascinating detail, how a widely disseminated piece of music can influence the TV-viewer’s evaluation of people and places: it also presents a solid methodological basis for analysing music as if it actually meant something.