William Poland Lecture: Drew Nobile, University of Oregon

The Music Theory area will hold this year's William Poland Lecture on Thursday, February 20. Drew Nobile, University of Oregon's School of Music and Dance, will present "Form and the Song Persona."

When you hear a popular song, you don’t just hear notes, rhythms, and chords; you hear someone communicating something. That someone is the song persona, a mishmash of the lyrical narrator, the artist’s performance persona, and the social identity implied by the sound of the recorded singing voice. Popular music scholars have long noted that our perceptions of the song persona are crucial to our engagement with popular songs across genres. At the same time, existing scholarship tends to treat the song persona as largely separable from the song it is singing; that is, the song persona and its attendant matters of identity, expression, and embodiment are considered non-structural aspects of music, unrelated to and unaffected by elements such as melody, harmony, rhythm, and form. This presentation, by contrast, aims to show how so-called “structural” aspects of popular songs are intertwined with the song persona’s identity and expression — ultimately aiming to break down the notion that there is a “structural/non-structural” binary at all.

The speaker focuses his analyses on the relationship between the song persona and musical form, specifically the interplay between a song’s verses and choruses. He looks at how the verse/chorus opposition is reflected in the lyrics the persona sings, the persona’s vocal timbre, and the persona’s placement in musical space. Through analyses from Bruce Springsteen to TLC to Charli XCX, the speaker shows how song personas use verse–chorus form to frame their communication, demonstrating the deep interconnection between a song’s socio-cultural context and its formal design.

Drew Nobile is associate professor and chair of music theory at the University of Oregon’s School of Music and Dance. His research on the theory and analysis of popular music can be found in Music Theory Spectrum, Music Theory Online, the Journal of Music Theory, Popular Music, and other venues. Nobile’s first book, Form as Harmony in Rock Music (Oxford, 2020), received the 2021 Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory and was published in Italian translation in 2023. His recent research focuses on voice and persona in popular music of the last 30 years. 

This lecture is free and open to the public. No ticket required.