Reviewed by: Hearing Harmony: Toward a Tonal Theory for the Rock Era by Christopher Doll Paul Christiansen Hearing Harmony: Toward a Tonal Theory for the Rock Era. By Christopher Doll. (Tracking Pop.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. [x, 320 p. ISBN 9780472073528 (hardcover), $90; ISBN 9780472053520 (paperback), $39 95;. ISBN 9780472122882 (e-book), varies.] Appendices, notes, bibliography, index. Anyone who has spent time pondering harmonic motion in rock has to acknowledge that traditional tonal theory is not sufficient alone in describing many of the most special moments in songs. In his book Hearing Harmony: Toward a Tonal Theory for the Rock Era, Christopher Doll proposes an ambitious new theory for rock music—not merely for musicians but also for lay people interested in the repertory. What is truly remarkable about this book is its considerable value as a compendium of chord progressions and riffs in popular music. To choose just one example: the author lists five different instances of a vi–♭VII–I chord progression, something not often encountered. Difficult to read from cover to cover—anyone attempting this should have headphones at the ready to listen to every example in order to follow Doll's arguments—it can be a useful concordance for rock sequences, schemas, and effects. Doll provides exemplars from a dizzying range of genres: hip-hop, doo-wop, disco, Frisco, grunge, heavy metal, 1970s TV show themes, and musicals. Another excellent aspect of the book is the sense it gives the reader of traveling on a safari with an experienced guide who points out all the exotic musical wildlife hidden in the savanna. Doll's analytical conclusions usually seem absolutely on the mark. Thorough analysis, buttressed by Doll's listening instincts, is the strongest aspect of Hearing Harmony. More problematic is the underlying theory when presented as a new framework for analyzing music of this large repertory. Doll is correct in asserting that rock cannot be analyzed only in [End Page 313] terms of traditional tonal theory, but he seems overly dismissive of the traditional approach despite its utility in so many rock contexts. Doll's theory is based on a strongly subjective, intuitive approach. Fair enough. Particularly for rock, this make sense. Yet perhaps the most perplexing aspect of the book is the author's choice to keep some aspects of tonal theory (the tonic as a centralizing chord) while rejecting others (most other chord functions). He engages the theoretical discourse by selectively employing traditional terminology—here using a common term in a new fashion, there discarding a term, elsewhere inventing new terms. The author says that determining whether a new chord has occurred is "part of a messy intuitive process" (p. 67). In fact, the theory presented seems idiosyncratic to Doll himself. He goes on to suggest that readers should construe his claims about the commonness of chord schemas as nothing more than "an intuitive appraisal by a single researcher" (p. 84). A table on page 53 codifies some new terms he creates, which are meant to clarify function in rock; some examples are hyper pre-dominant, hypo presubdominant, and medial pre-mediant. Further, he posits functions that he denotes with Greek letters. Alpha equals tonic; beta, pretonic (not necessarily dominant); gamma, pre-pretonic; delta, pre-prepretonic; and epsilon, prepreprepretonic. Apart from the infelicitous treatment of Greek prefixes hyper and hypo as words unto themselves, the taxonomy presented here is confusing and minimally descriptive. And why stop at epsilon? Presumably there would be theoretical functions for chi, psi, and omega as well. Yet analysts would still be scratching their heads as they fathom how the chords relate to each other, as these Greek letters do not actually denote function; they merely demark distance from the tonic. One might assume that Doll does not mean these terms to be taken completely seriously. After all, he writes that his particular division between dominants and subdominants "entails a fair amount of theoretical choice, one might even say whimsy" (p. 32). In traditional tonal harmony, subdominant and dominant chords have specific discrete functions within a key, so why jettison those useful concepts in favor of "pretonic" or "hypo pre-subdominant"? Over-complication is not the only...