Popular Music and Semiotic Analysis – a Method for School Educators

Classical and Jazz based analytical tools are not broad enough to explore popular music in a holistic manner, which requires consideration of culture and subtext through para-musical elements (e.g. video, image etc), as well as harmony, melody, rhythm, form etc. Semiotic analysis is useful in the study of popular music as it looks at both the sociological and musicological features of any given musical text. I teach semiotic analysis to students enrolled in the Bachelor of Musical Arts degree at MAINZ as a means to understand song and songwriting, and this workshop will be a practical way to look at popular music analysis taking into account denotative and connotative components.

Mark Baynes is a jazz pianist with a contemporary leaning. Mark’s doctoral research has provided an analytical lexicon that can be used to understand music in terms of what is defined as consonance and dissonance found in western music as a whole. Although informed by academia, Mark is primarily a performer, composer and accompanist residing in Auckland, New Zealand. Mark is a presenter of 95bFM’s The Jazz Show, and writes the X-Factory column for NZMusician Magazine. 

Mark currently works as a Programme Manager and Senior Lecturer of the Bachelor of Musical Arts Degree at the Music and Audio Institute of New Zealand / Southern Institute of Technology.