Journal-format review: The Practice of Popular Music by Trevor de Clercq (2025)

NS: Hi, everyone! I've been working to bang out my review of The Practice of Popular Music now that my semester mostly over. You'll find it below. It's more geared toward a journal-style submission, meaning that it focuses a little more on organization and less on my direct experiences teaching from it. Those will still continue.

Happy summer! — Nick

0.         Overview

[0.1] The Practice of Popular Music: Understanding Harmony, Rhythm, Melody and Form in Commercial Songwriting (2025) by author Trevor de Clercq is an unprecedented departure from contemporary approaches to teaching music theory. Grounded on more than a decade’s worth of experience teaching commercial music industry majors at Middle Tennessee State University, its 475 pages (roughly 8.5 x 11) interleave written theory and aural skills activities across a four-semester sequence that hits all the traditional theory mainstays — fundamentals, meter types, diatonic harmony, chromatic harmony, phrase structures, form and formal function — alongside compositional techniques perhaps more common to popular music — back beat feels, song forms, syncopation, mixed meters, and the double-tonic complex. In-text examples cover an impressively diverse 333-song catalogue that draws from wide range of genres, including but not limited to Top 40 pop, folk, rap, hip-hop, classic rock, blues, funk, metal, and country that spans from 1953–2023. For your reference, Example 1 summarizes the text’s song distribution by half decade.

[0.2] Each chapter concludes with a variety of exercises typically designed around these songs, alongside performance activities such as smooth keyboard voice leading and backbeat simulation. Additionally, The Practice of Popular Music (hereby TPoPM) is similarly replete with supplementary materials housed on de Clercq’s dedicated website http://www.popmusicpractice.com and multimedia drills through Rising Software’s online platforms Musition and Auralia. At $57 USD for the paperback and $49 USD for the eBook, it is an affordable option in comparison to similar texts that take a no-frills approach to music theory instruction.

Example 1. Chronological distribution of songs in The Practice of Popular Music by half decade.

[0.3] This review provides the standard survey of the text’s content, scope, and assessment materials. Of particular note is how TPoPM scaffolds its materials to building Nashville number charts, takes a fresh approach to teaching fundamentals, eschews traditional staff notation, and provides students with a variety of assessment types that align with various levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy (Krathwohl 2002). Along the way, I will occasionally comment on areas where my own class — popular-music majors taking the equivalent of fourth-semester theory — struggled to grasp concepts or were presented with supplementary materials to flesh out the main text to cover absent topics like timbre and texture. Once this context is in place, the second half of the review focuses on why instructors should embrace a flexible attitude toward assessment when teaching from TPoPM in light of recent research in popular-music cognition and corpus studies.

I.               Content and scope

[1.1] Steve Vai, in his guitar method book Vaideology: Basic Music Theory for Guitar Players (2019), observes that popular musicians often have a complicated relationship with the “academics” (his term) of music theory. (p. 5) These musicians’ attitudes toward theory tend to fall into three camps: those who do not hold any regard for theoretical thought but are “powerful music creators nonetheless,” those who are intimidated by music theory, and those who believe music theory constraints their creativity (p. 5). In direct response to the latter group, Vai advocates that the “academic” study of music will not necessarily make one a good musician, but it does provide one with a convenient frame for musical understanding — a shared language and a set of tools to communicate with others about its organization. Vai then goes on to argue that “intellectual understanding” is necessary to enhance one’s fluency with “experiential knowing” that comes from practicing an instrument. (p. 6)

[1.2] The preface of TPoPM seems to be implicitly targeted toward Vai’s skeptical musicians. In de Clercq’s own words, “One central goal of this book is to train you in that language [of music theory], and in so doing, to help you understand how popular music is typically organized.” (p. xii) Toward this goal, nearly every topic in the first 12 chapters scaffolds to creating Nashville number charts in Chapter 13. Along the way, fundamental topics such as key signatures (Ch. 7) and intervals (Ch. 9) are peppered between potentially novel activities like creating a drummer’s chart (Ch. 8).

[1.3] Though it might be tempting to simply teach or review these fundamental topics the way you always have in a traditional theory setting, I strongly encourage instructors to not breeze over the rich content within. de Clercq’s juxtaposition of engaging excerpts, novel pedagogical approaches, and concise figures make brushing up on fundamentals, quite frankly, a fun experience. In Ch. 8, for instance, de Clercq walks students through the process of deducing the key (i.e., pitch collection) for the opening of “Good as Hell” by Lizzo (2016) by mapping the introductory piano riff on a keyboard diagram. (p. 41) In doing so, he provides concrete evidence for what is typically a difficult concept to explain — why we prefer to spell chords in a key using certain pitch names even though C# and Db, for example, sound the same (i.e., are enharmonically equivalent). That is, walking students through this process grounds the topic in practice, thus making the otherwise abstract notion of differentiating key signatures all the more relevant for skeptics.

[1.4] Once students become acquainted with the Nashville number system, subsequent chapters kick the focus on practice into high gear. Coincidentally, this is also where de Clercq’s claim — that staff notation is not necessary to tackle musical organization in popular styles — begins to coalesce. Chapter 16, “Melodic-Harmonic Organization,” introduces melodic skeletons as a tool for notating the structure of a melody, outlining the process for creating a skeleton for the chorus melody in “Someone Like You” by Adele (2011). To represent the melody, de Clercq sets aside staves and clefs for a simpler system: pitches are represented with note names (or sometimes scale degrees) in place of note heads and the note-name heads are positioned vertically in a relative fashion such that it is quite easy to tell that F# is the floor of Adele’s melody. For later melodies that span wider registers, such as Figure 64.7’s “The End” by The Beatles (1969), the relative relationship of pitch height becomes even clearer, meaning students are unlikely to confuse the note G that is a minor seventh above A with the G that is a major second below instead.

[1.5] Though I am on very much on board with simplifying notation as needed, I admit I find de Clercq’s explanation of what exactly constitutes a melodic skeleton to be a little murky. Again, I chalk this up to the informal and concise tone of the prose (which in most cases I find productive). The “skeleton” as described is not the entire melody listed in Figure 16.1 but is instead the circled notes which de Clercq qualifies as “most structurally important.” (p. 108) These circled notes, when played or sung in sequence, create a smooth stepwise descent from A to F# — a preferred feature shared with smooth voice leading at the piano. I found that my students struggled to grasp how to differentiate structural pitches (especially in light of the anticipated G# in m. 1 of Figure 16.1, which is structural to m. 2) and, perhaps more importantly, why a melodic reduction would be important to create in the first place. To help them along, we sang. First, I had them hum or sing along with the melody in its totality, starting just a few seconds before the chorus at 1:31. Next, we sang only the circled structural pitches. Then finally, we mapped out the pitches for each chord on the board and instructed students to find a stepwise path between them. To wrap things up, I then showed them examples of beginner piano method books as an analogy to the melodic skeleton — reduced melodies that are easy to play due to the oversized noteheads with pitch names on them that kind of (but maybe not entirely) sound like the original song.

[1.6] Now is a good opportunity to discuss the pacing of TPoPM. As you might have guessed, we did not get through Chapter 16 in one lesson. In fact, it took us three class periods: one to work through melodic reductions, another devoted to the melodic-harmonic divorce, and the final one to discuss pentatonic versus diatonic pitch collections. Here I would like to underscore two things: 1) not every chapter can be covered in a single lesson, and 2) due to the concise and informal tone of the text, you may want to spend extra time helping students understand the topic at hand in preparation for future chapters. For example, I found it important to guide students through the two ways of generating the major pentatonic scale, either by removing scale degrees 4 and 7 as de Clercq suggests, or by stacking fifths until you get a five-pitch collection. The former, at least for my students, is more intuitive to vocalists and other monophonic instrumentalists, while the latter is so for guitarists and bassists because their instruments are typically tuned by fourths.

[1.7] Once past Section III, Chapters 17–24, the text becomes more akin to a modular experience where instructors can pick and choose topics to suit the needs of their class. That is, though the earlier chapters occasionally build off each other by adding more depth to a subsequent analysis, later chapters are more independent from others so there is essentially little risk to hopping between them. I most recently taught from TPoPM in a popular music theory course for popular-music majors that satisfies their fourth-semester theory requirement. For their midterm, students were required to compose an original song, annotate it via a melodic skeleton, drummer’s chart, and Nashville number chart, then perform it with their peers. After using the first few weeks to assess their understanding of various topics, I determined that they needed to brush up on their chromatic harmony and formal templates. I then spent approximately four weeks before the midterm covering Chapters 29, 33, 34, 38, 41, 44, and 47 accordingly. However, other instructors may find that their students are sufficiently advanced enough to move well beyond this threshold by the fourth semester. [1]

[1.8] Additionally, the content sequence of TPoPM is flexible enough such that chapters can be easily supplemented with accessible popular-music scholarship. Doing so is essentially required to cover important topics timbre and texture that are not directly featured. Along these lines, I chose to assign Barna’s “The Dance Chorus in Recent Top-40 Music” (2020) in tandem with Chapter 45, “Other Song Forms,” and Temperley’s “Syncopation in Rock: A Perceptual Perspective” (1999) when covering Chapter 10, “Syncopation.” Later, students read excerpts from Chapter 3 in Nothing But Noise: Timbre and Meaning at the Musical Edge (Wallmark 2018, pp. 91–117) and complete a timbral analysis of “Black Panther” by Kendrick Lamar (2018). Such activities are necessary, in my opinion, to round out the otherwise strong base that TPoPM provides.

[1.9] In sum, TPoPM runs the gamut of core topics relevant to popular music study. Its scope and content likewise easily fill a four-semester sequence and beyond, perhaps supplemented by instructor-provided materials for timbre, texture, and other lessons currently not present in the text. Regrettably, I very much doubt most instructors will be using the text for an entire four-semester sequence. To my knowledge, only very few programs have a theory core curriculum dedicated to popular music, thus de Clercq’s vision for a popular music driven core theory curriculum (2020) will likely go unrealized — especially if building fluency with staff notation continues to be a deciding factor. But if one finds themselves in a position of creative control over their curriculum or is about to teach an advanced undergraduate/graduate class on popular music, the textbook makes for a careful and wholistic survey of the style that provides a platform for engaging with related popular-music scholarship.

II.             Assessments

[2.1] End-of-chapter practice exercises in the main text of TPoPM generally fall into four categories: fundamentals drills, rhythmic notation and tempo/meter/feel analysis, performance activities, and developing Nashville number charts and their associated materials. Additionally, there are numerous supplemental materials provided by Rising Software not covered presently. The fundamentals drills are the most straightforward of them all, typically requiring students to produce pitch information from two or more bits of context. To keep things fresh, and following the advice of Rogers (2004, pp. 41–44), questions are framed in different ways. In Chapter 19, Exercise 19.1 has students find an altered scale degree (e.g., ♭7̂) when given the tonic scale degree (e.g., 1̂ = B). The next set of exercises, 19.2, flips this task by asking for the altered scale degree of a raised/lowered note again given the tonic scale degree. Predictably, 19.3 then requests scale degree 1 given an altered scale degree and pitch (e.g., A = ♭3̂).

[2.2] Though TPoPM explicitly does not adopt Western staff notation in its totality, it does use its associated traditional rhythmic notation throughout, and especially in chapters devoted to rhythm, meter, and drum feels. Rhythmic notation is arguably one of the most complex features of staff notation, as it requires relating all the components of rhythmic values (noteheads, stems, flags, ties) to the indicated meter. Luckily, the ubiquity of 4/4 in popular music reduces the pedagogical load quite considerably.

[2.3] Chapter 6, “Beat Divisions,” is students’ first real foray into the realm of rhythmic notation. Like before, de Clercq carefully walks us through the implications of different notation choices, this time focusing on the kick drum rhythm in “Save your Tears” by the Weeknd (2020) which features onsets on 1, the “and” of 2, and 3. Recognizing that this pattern can be notated in three different ways, he uses the opportunity to warn students of using a quarter-note rest in place of two back-to-back eighth notes because doing so obscures the location of beat 2. This discussion subsequently shapes the end-of-chapter exercises, where students are required to write in the beat location under note onsets (6.1, 6.2), transcribe the rhythms of a vocal melody and align them with the lyrics (6.3), perform the rhythms from 6.1 and 6.3 while conducting with a metronome (6.4), and perform a straightforward backbeat pattern using high and low sounds between the hands (6.5). As with the fundamentals drills, the different activity types help to keep students engaged. They also provide opportunities for further in-class discussion, such as comparing and contrasting the various ways students notated the melody rhythms in Exercise 6.2.

[2.4] Creating Nashville number charts require students to synthesize multiple aspects of heard musical organization into a single coherent notation format. It is therefore the most time-intensive and conceptually complex assessment activity. As indicated earlier, TPoPM thoughtfully scaffolds lower-level activities in preparation — namely, creating drummer’s charts (Chapter 8) and marking changes in harmonic rhythm (Chapter 12). Performance activities, such as playing chord progressions from chord symbols using smooth voice leading at the keyboard (Chapter 11), also help students understand the harmonic logic and pacing behind their notation choices.

[2.5] Once the fundamentals of creating a chart are in place, TPoPM continues to stack on additional elements requiring variations in notation practices, including pushed chords (Chapter 12.2), inversions (Chapter 25), secondary formal sections (Chapter 32), and partial bars (Chapter 39). However, I should also note that TPoPM only occasionally requires a student to create an entire chart. Instead, assessments are often simplified to complement chart creation, like in Chapter 32 “Ending Sections” where students are asked to create a form timeline that displays the progression of sections in a linear fashion with their associated timestamps. When the text does require a full chart, I find it best to choose only one or two exercises so that misconceptions can be discussed in class.

[2.6] As a final comment on assessment types, I do not necessarily agree with de Clercq’s decision to omit tablature and guitar-driven performance assessments from TPoPM. Though it is true that contemporary popular music is overwhelmingly created via DAWs (digital audio workstations) and MIDI keyboards, if the goal of the text is to capture the practice of popular music, then students should have a basic understanding of where pitches are located on a standard-tuned guitar and how to voice major and minor chords in barre format. From personal experience, knowing what notes a guitarist was playing (even when they did not) has occasionally saved me from flailing as a gigging bassist. It has also helped me immensely when arranging songs for others. Rather than belabor this point, Example 2 provides samples of what a set of guitar-focused exercises might look like in parallel with Chapters 25, “Triad Inversion,” 29, “Seventh Chords,” and 41, “Mixture in Major Keys.”

Example 2. Exercises featuring guitar notation skills to supplement those in The Practice of Popular Music.

III.           Popular music perception

[3.1] Assessments typically evolve from a strict binary of correct and incorrect answers into a continuum of appropriate responses across a curricular sequence. Generalizing, of course, a traditional theory curriculum builds student fluency with pitch and rhythm fundamentals in Theory 1, dips its toe into to secondary key areas in Theory 2, and leverages this knowledge to investigate large-scale tonal-formal relationships in Theory 3. In scaffolded fashion, students move from low-level tasks on Bloom’s Taxonomy like spelling chords (remember), to composing or writing a short paper (apply and analyze), then encountering higher-level tasks such as determining which cadence best qualifies as the EEC in a sonata (evaluate) (Krathwohl 2002, p. 215).

[3.2] In my experience, teaching from TPoPM requires the flexibility common to third-semester theory and onward across nearly all its chapters. For any given lesson, instructors should be prepared to acknowledge, discuss, and ultimately accept variability in student responses when it comes to core content areas such as tonic inference, tempo and backbeat feels, and formal function. Such variability is a critical feature of popular music, one that cannot be ignored, due in part to the rich relational nature of practice, perception, and genre-specific paradigms. In the following sections, I outline some perceptual and practice-driven reasons for why an instructor can expect variable student responses. My goal is not to advocate for one interpretation over the other, but rather to point to literature that supports variability as an innate feature of popular music — a variability that is not always present in other music theory teaching scenarios.

Tonic inference and meter

[3.3] The Nashville number system, as de Clercq presents it, treats 6- and 1 as the best options for candidate tonics. Indeed, a majority of the songs in the early chapters of TPoPM are primarily diatonic in that the inventory of pitches within chord progressions neatly distribute into an Ionian or Aeolian collection.[2] Chapter 17 sets up this issue, discussing how the Am and C chords in Dua Lipa’s “Physical” (2020) can both feel like tonics. There are good reasons for this duali[pa]ty: the A- chord falls on the hypermetric downbeat, but the fifth-related progression F C G also strongly implies a C tonic. de Clercq leverages the double-tonic complex in “Physical” to advocate for the innate flexibility of the Nashville number system in its capacity to toggle between relative keys, which is especially useful when analyzing contemporary popular songs that feature various permutations of the 6- 4 5 1 axis progression (Richards 2017).

            [3.4] Though only briefly touched on, and for good reason because TPoPM is a textbook and not a journal article, the double-tonic complex (Nobile 2020) undermines the utility of Roman numerals in contemporary popular-music analysis. Consider how students might be rightly confused by the double-tonic complex: Theory 1 and onward establishes the Roman numeral I/i as a collection-based and perceptual evaluation of tonic with no explicit distinction between the two. However, when analyzing popular music, these aspects of tonic are sometimes disjunct. Scale-degree 1 in “Physical” maps onto the pitch C but is not always the most perceptually stable pitch in the collection.

[3.5] The practice of demarcating C as 1 in the context of the Nashville number system is a perceptually agnostic act. Doing so simply says “C is the pitch that best-supports our common conception of the major scale as an explicit orientation of whole and half steps.” C as 1 establishes the Ionian scale as the backdrop for the chart. But why is an Ionian (i.e., collection-based) framing helpful? Recall that the Nashville number system is a practice-driven notation format for session musicians to efficiently realize song structures. In tandem, major scales are by far the most common pedagogical starting point for Western musicians, so much so that even non-musicians can produce a major scale with little prompting.[3] Equating 1 as the first note of the Ionian scale is therefore optimally efficient for realizing chords within a key but also relating non-diatonic sonorities to the well-trodden Ionian backdrop.

[3.6] Where students and instructors might stumble is reconciling the Nashville number system’s emphasis on practice and practicing musicians with music theory’s traditional focus on listeners and pitch perception. To elaborate, mainstream music theory demonstrates an almost inescapable Ionian bias — a bias that makes no distinction between collection and stability — that only sometimes aligns with performance practices in popular music. Anecdotally, my first intuitions about this disconnect arose in my days as a gigging musician playing  for open mic nights and the like. There, I noticed that community musicians tended to treat downbeat chords as tonic regardless of collection. As an example, one night we were about to play “What I Like About You” by The Romantics when a guest guitarist joined us at the last minute. The song features the double-plagal progression E–A–D–A throughout (Biamonte 2010). As the guitarist walked on stage, the MC directed the new guitarist to take a solo “in E” after the second chorus. Meanwhile, though numerous theoretical articles have been devoted to unpacking the various ways to interpret ambiguous tonics, an Ionian-centered Roman numeral analysis of “What I Like About You” would most likely place A as the tonic and result in the progression V-I-IV-I.[4]

[3.7] A perceptual-corpus study by Vuvan and Hughes (2021) offers direct empirical evidence of a theory/practice disconnect in popular music pitch perception. There, the authors compared the results of their own probe-tone study, where listener-participants evaluated the perceptual stability of timbre-distinguished rock- and classical-music key profiles, to existing pitch profiles generated via other probe-tone and corpus studies. Their goal, in part, was to follow up on de Temperley and de Clercq’s (2013) assumption that Western classical music and rock music shared a common tonal backdrop, such that any perceived differences between the two styles are perhaps overstated. Curiously, however, Vuvan and Hughes found that listeners drew strong distinctions between the rock and classical pitch profiles and also tended to agree strongly between each other about these distinctions. Additionally, in a post-hoc exploratory study, the authors found that the Temperley and de Clercq’s classical-music pitch distribution profile was not significantly different than their rock profile from the same study. In other words, general musician listeners understood there to be a notable difference between pitch structures in classical and rock music, whereas the evaluations provided by professional music theorists did not.

[3.8] To further investigate how tonic perception might differ in popular music practices, I recently conducted a related probe-chord study that underscores the importance of metric orientation when assessing candidate tonics (Shea, White, Hughes, & Vuvan 2025). We presented listeners with four rotations of the chord progression Am-G-C-F in different key collections, such that each subsequent stimuli started with a different downbeat chord: e.g., [Am-G-C-F] in C, [F#-B-E-G#m] in B, and so on. For the first part of the study, listeners heard the rotated progression, then evaluated the perceptual stability of a randomly selected chord from the progression on a scale from 1 to 7. In contrast, the second part of the study focused on an explicitly analytical task akin to what one might encounter in a theory classroom. Listeners heard the rotated chord progression, this time accompanied by staff notation, and were asked to indicate which chord they heard as “most central or stable.”

[3.9] We expected that students would adopt two competing strategies for evaluating a candidate tonic chord: a metric orientation strategy, where downbeat chords are given preference, and the Ionian-default strategy, where listeners would orient themselves toward hearing the chord built of scale-degree 1 in an Ionian context as most stable. We also expected that our popular-music student participants would prefer the metric orientation strategy in all contexts compared to students who primarily engage with classical music. We explicitly recruited students from contrasting program types (conservatory, school of music, and popular music programs) to help distinguish listening habits between classical-focused and popular-music focused musician populations.

[3.10] Our results ultimately suggest that listeners prefer to hear tonics on downbeats, but the Ionian default strategy persists across conditions (i.e., at a broader background level). In part 1 of the study, downbeat chords were rated highest in each group. So, for example, when presented with the progression F-Am-G-C then the probe chord F, more than 75% of the 155 participants heard F as the most stable. The C chord, meanwhile, was the lowest-rated chord in this specific rotation. However, across all conditions combined, the C chord rated highest regardless of its position within the loop, suggesting the Ionian-default strategy also swayed listener responses, perhaps in a parametrically independent fashion. Part 2 of the study produced similar results in the contrasting analysis-like task, further reinforcing the interplay between the metric orientation and Ionian default strategies.

[3.11] So, what do we make of this data in the context of the classroom, specifically when it comes to teaching popular music harmony? Earlier I implied that music theorists might be working from a different set of musical expectations compared to our students, just as much as we have come to expect differences in hearing amongst ourselves.[5] In Chapter 7 of TPoPM, de Clercq acknowledges that there is an important difference between key — the collection of notes a song uses — and the tonic – the scale degree that feels most stable in the context of the key. To illustrate this difference in the context of the chapter, I have an incredibly difficult time hearing the tonic of “Good as Hell” by Lizzo as Eb as de Clercq claims in section 7.3. The Ab downbeat chord in the verse and its relative relationship to the concluding Fm7 disrupts any notion of the Eb/G between them as a potential tonic, even as it is “confirmed” by a 3–2–1 pattern in the following chorus. So, while yes, Eb = 1 in the sense of the key as de Clercq defines it, its viability as a tonic is only weakly so in terms of my own sense of its perceptual stability.

[3.12] But are these perceptual differences perhaps overblown? Indeed, in our experiment, musician type (self-selected as popular or classical musician) had no notable influence on tonic preference. Example 3 outlines the three questions we asked in our experiment to get a sense of participants’ listening and performing habits. Each required musicians to pick from one of two categories: 1) pop/rock, or 2) classical. As shown, about half the musicians categorized themselves as classical musicians, while slightly fewer self-selected as popular musicians. Again, this distribution reflects how we intentionally recruited from different program types. Responses to the other two questions, on the other hand, focused on day-to-day musical engagement and are much more homogenous.

[3.13] My direct experiences instructing both classical and popular musicians leads me to believe that institutional classifications do not always neatly map onto students’ general listening habits; that is, classical musicians rarely listen to Western art music exclusively, or even most of the time, as evidenced by our data. As such, we cannot expect student intuitions to align with those of a classical-oriented stylistic tradition when investigating popular music, even if it was necessary in previous semesters. In other words, a theoretical system that positions 1 as both most perceptually stable and the first note of an Ionian collection is inherently deficient for popular music. de Clercq’s decision to focus TPoPM on the Nashville number system is therefore sound for respecting performance and listening in this style.

Example 3. Musician survey responses from Shea et al 2025.

Question	Count	Average
I would describe myself primarily as a _________ musician. If you don't identify as either, pick the musical style you have the most experience with.
	Rock/pop	81	.523
	Classical	65	.419
What is the musical genre you mainly listen to?
	Rock/pop	138	.890
	Classical	8	.051
I primarily engage with ___________ music in my day to-day life (listening, performing, composing, etc.).
	Rock/pop	127	.891
	Classical	19	.123

Demographically encoded listening

[3.14] Various musicological commentators alongside consumer data suggest that listening habits are, in many cases, demographically encoded. For instance, the 2023 Nielsen music report indicates that “Black listeners spend more time with radio than any other group—20 minutes longer than the average of the total population” (2023) and are the primary audience demographic for Urban Adult Contemporary and R&B stations. Similarly, on the performer side, a listener preferring a heavy rotation of Top 40 hits can expect to hear a song by a female artist approximately a third of the time (Smith et al 2025).

[3.15] My students’ responses to the textbook exercises were informed by a different set of demographics — their performance backgrounds and occupations. Chapter 20 “Drum Feels in 4/4” was one such instance, where I was slightly surprised by the variability in student responses to Exercise 20.1. I had arbitrarily assigned exercises d–h, requiring students to provide the BPM and drum feel for sections of the songs listed in Example 4. Students were mostly consistent amongst themselves for “Beautiful Day” by U2, “Burn” by Rancid, “Fly” by Nicki Minaj ft. Beyonce, and “Mama’s Broken Heart” by Miranda Lambert. On the other hand, “Loyalty” by Kendrick Lamar ft. Rhianna was more divisive, where ~2/3 of the class heard the backbeat in half time, while the other ~1/3 heard it as standard.

[3.16] Chapter 20 juxtaposes different backbeat feels against the parameters of tempo and kick/snare patterning. Tempo is presented as a flexible threshold in parallel with de Clercq (2016). It is a variable feature but listener responses typical fall between the threshold of 80–140 BPM. Any higher or lower values result in greater variability, with some listeners preferring to subdivide or double the tempo so that it falls within the said threshold. Backbeat patterns are meanwhile presented in three categories: standard, half, and double time. Standard drum feels have two bass/snare alternating articulations within a measure, half-time feels have one, and double-time feels have four alternations or simultaneous articulations. These feels, de Clercq idealizes, should be treated as independent of tempo, even though he implies this is often easier said than done. Other cited influences on perceived tempo are harmonic rhythm and danceability.

Example 4. Student assessments of drum feel in The Practice of Popular Music, Exercise 20.1, songs d–h.

[3.17] Preferred tempo is very much tied to embodied experiences like dancing and can often been observed in voluntary and involuntary bodily movements (Vroegh 2021; Zelechowska, Sanchez, and Jensenius 2024). Head movements, for instance, are an empirically verified reliable indicator of listener entrainment, especially in live-performance contexts (Swarbrick et al 2019). Nevertheless, the same research does little to affirm the perceptual influence of perceived drum feels on preferred tempo because feels are not analogous to tempo perception in all contexts. Case in point, my students heard “Burn” by Rancid in a half-time feel but reported an average BPM of 138 — the BPM associated with a “standard” drum feel. As such, I again agree with de Clercq in his decision to distinguish tempo from drum feel, especially in light of this evidence.

[3.18] Returning to perceived drum feel in “Loyalty,” one of my students is a full-time DJ who performs under the stage name MUCCI.[6] He spends his evenings and weekends playing in various venues across the city and is deeply familiar with contemporary popular music, especially regarding Top 40 pop and hip-hop hits. With his permission, here’s his unedited take on the drum feel in “Loyalty”:

Out of all of those tracks we had to analyze, Loyalty is the one I'm familiar with the most. Before I started making EDM, I used to produce hip-hop beats. It's so common for a trap kick rhythm and the snare/clap to always be on beat 3. To me, for hip hop tracks, that's the "normal" drum feel. When talking about this, the content we covered in class applies heavily to most Pop (not popular) music and EDM & House music. I think a normal vs double time vs half time drum feel is subjective- the "normal" is different from genre to genre! (eg. House music, a "normal" feel would be snare/claps on 2 & 4, but with hip hop and trap music, a "normal" feel would be snare/claps on beat 3.) 

Imagine this- You're listening to that song Loyalty by Kendrick, but the clap is on 2 and 4. It COMPLETELY changes the whole energy and vibe of the track. Kendrick is known for his fast style of rapping, so to me, that "normal" drum feel would make the whole energy of the track sound double time. I do agree that it can be subjective for something like this and I can see why many other students said that this song has a half-time feel, but I overall agree with my original answer, and I hope this helps! 

MUCCI’s analysis points to genre as the determining factor for drum feels. In essence, his assessment is that while de Clercq’s generalizations might best apply to Top 40 pop, EDM, and house music, drum feels do not necessarily the function the same way in hip hop and trap music. What is “normal” or “standard” for the former is not so for the latter.[7]

            [3.19] I am less interested in arriving at a “correct” answer for the drum feel in “Loyalty.” Such discussions, though fun, are rarely productive outside of pedagogical contexts and in the absence of music-perceptual methods of operationalization. More to the point, I trust this student’s judgment because of his experience and my lack thereof. For me personally, hip-hop tracks make up only a small portion of my regular rotation. I am also not a hip-hop scholar. (Very few music theorists are.) TPoPM therefore presents a novel situation where students may very well be more familiar with the repertoire than the instructor. Our job, then, is to draw on our own general but deep understanding of musical organization, and its associated analytical techniques, to push our students to engage at a similarly deep level with the style at hand while simultaneously respecting its idioms.

V. Final thoughts

[5.1] The Practice of Popular Music is breath of fresh air in an age where many programs are opting out of textbooks altogether. Its contents represent a career-long synthesis of popular music theoretical-empirical analysis couched in 10+ years of teaching popular-music majors. It should thus come as no surprise that it meets the promise of its title — an approach that is genuinely grounded in the practice of popular music. Any instructor choosing to include popular music in their curriculum, even in a piecemeal fashion, or simply aiming to cultivate student sensitivity to style-specific methods of music analysis would do well to adopt the text. Yes, at times the prose does come off as slightly dogmatic, even as the author signals a willingness to humor other interpretations, but anyone familiar with de Clercq’s scholarship will find his perspectives unsurprising. If anything, this minor fault is perhaps a byproduct of the informal narrative format, which I and my students found helpful in nearly all cases. (Instructors are responsible for offering flexibility as they see fit, regardless.) Additionally, in the context of discipline-wide concerns about canonization, the text undermines music theory’s previous focus on the classic rock canon by featuring a swath of post-millennial songs across a wide variety of genres including Top 40 pop, folk, country, alternative rock, and hip hop. Such a focus typically elevates the contributions of non-white and non-male artists — another critical concern to our discipline. (Ewell 2020, Palfy and Gilson 2018, Shea et al 2024)

[5.2] I suspect more than a few instructors will feel apprehensive about their own popular-music analysis skills. Though I consider myself a popular-music scholar, I was admittedly anxious about leading a class full of majors through songs that they potentially have spent more time with, even if only casually. My advice when teaching from The Practice of Popular Music therefore is to lean into the novelty. Take the time to create your own Nashville number charts for all the exercises you assign even though it might not be necessary for all lessons. Play through the voice-leading exercises at the keyboard. Record yourself performing the backbeats. Then, during class, challenge yourself to create charts in real time in front of the students without referring to your own. You might be surprised at how good you’ll get at listening back to the previous hypermeasures. [8] Sure, you might miss a phrase extension or fail to demarcate a four-measure link, but your students will almost surely let you know. By doing so, you will have created an opportunity for a productive discussion about the rich nuances of a style that, in the public’s mind, is often regarded as overly simple in its organization. More importantly, the act of creating a Nashville number chart simulates real-world performance practices, and this is an opportunity few and far between in mainstream music theory pedagogy.

Works Cited

Barna, Alyssa. 2020. “The Dance Chorus in Recent Top-40 Music.” The Society for Music Theory Videocast Journal 6 (4). https://doi.org/10.30535/smtv.6.4.

Biamonte, Nicole. 2010. “Triadic Modal and Pentatonic Patterns in Rock Music.” Music Theory Spectrum 32 (2): 95–110. https://doi.org/10.1525/mts.2010.32.2.95.

Clercq, Trevor de. 2025. The Practice of Popular Music: Understanding Harmony, Rhythm, Melody, and Form in Commercial Songwriting. Routledge. Accessed May 7, 2025. https://www.routledge.com/The-Practice-of-Popular-Music-Understanding-Harmony-Rhythm-Melody-and-Form-in-Commercial-Songwriting/deClercq/p/book/9781032362892.

Clercq, Trevor de. 2020. “A Music Theory Curriculum for the 99%.” Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy 7 (0). https://doi.org/10.18061/es.v7i0.7359.

Ewell, Philip A. 2020. “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame.” Music Theory Online 26 (2). https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.20.26.2/mto.20.26.2.ewell.html.

Gjerdingen, Robert O. 1996. “Courtly Behaviors.” Music Perception 13 (3): 365–82.

Karpinski, Gary Steven. 2000. Aural Skills Acquisition: The Development of Listening, Reading, and Performing Skills in College-Level Musicians. Oxford University Press.

Krathwohl, David R. 2002. “A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy: An Overview.” Theory Into Practice 41 (4): 212–18. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4104_2.

Meyer, Leonard B. 1997. Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo3645275.html.

Palfy, Cora, and Eric Gilson. 2018. “The Hidden Curriculum in the Music Theory Classroom.” The Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, 1–32.

Radio Ink. 2023. “Nielsen: Radio Is Essential To Reach Black Audiences.” Radio Ink (blog). December 13, 2023. https://radioink.com/2023/12/13/nielsen-radio-is-essential-to-reach-black-audiences/.

Richards, Mark. 2017. “Tonal Ambiguity in Popular Music’s Axis Progressions.” Music Theory Online 23 (3). https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.17.23.3/mto.17.23.3.richards.html.

Rogers, Michael. 2004. Teaching Approaches in Music Theory: An Overview of Pedagogical Philosophies. 2nd ed. Southern Illinois University Press.

Shea, Nicholas J., Lindsey Reymore, Christopher WM White, Benjamin Duinker, Leigh Van Handel, Matthew Zeller, and Nicole Biamonte. 2024. “Diversity in Music Corpus Studies.” Music Theory Online 30 (1). https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.24.30.1/mto.24.30.1.shea_et_al.html.

Shea, Nicholas J., Christopher Wm. White, Bryn Hughes, and Dominique T. Vuvan. 2025. “Metric Accent Affects Perception of Key Center in Pop-Music Chord Loops.” Music Perception, March, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2025.2321624.

Shea, Nicholas Jordan. 2020. “Ecological Models of Musical Structure in Pop-Rock, 1950–2019.” The Ohio State University. https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_olink/r/1501/10?clear=10&p10_accession_num=osu158755665247824.

Smith, Stacy L, Katherine Pieper, Karla Hernandez, and Sam Wheeler. 2025. “Inclusion in the Recording Studio? Gender & Race/Ethnicity of Artists, Songwriters & Producers across 1,300 Popular Songs from 2012 to 2024.” USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative 4 (January). https://assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/aii-inclusion-recording-studio-2025-01-29-2.pdf.

Swarbrick, Dana, Dan Bosnyak, Steven R. Livingstone, Jotthi Bansal, Susan Marsh-Rollo, Matthew H. Woolhouse, and Laurel J. Trainor. 2019. “How Live Music Moves Us: Head Movement Differences in Audiences to Live Versus Recorded Music.” Frontiers in Psychology 9. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02682.

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Vroegh, Thijs, Sandro L. Wiesmann, Sebastian Henschke, and Elke B. Lange. 2021. “Manual Motor Reaction While Being Absorbed into Popular Music.” Consciousness and Cognition 89 (March):103088. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2021.103088.

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Yust, Jason. 2024. “Tonality and Racism.” Journal of Music Theory 68 (1): 59–88. https://doi.org/10.1215/00222909-10974705.

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Notes

[1] The previous theory course in our sequence for popular-music majors, Arranging for Popular Musicians, is taught outside of our theory area and frequently changes instructors, so for me personally it was best to err on the side of caution and spend ample time establishing a strong foundation of concepts and terminology before delving into advanced topics. In future semesters I will likely progress farther into the text.

[2] Many of the earlier examples focus on top hits from 2010 onward, which tend to feature various permutations of the 6- 4 5 1 axis progression.

[3] Karpinski (2000) provides an activity where the instructor moves along the floor while observers sing along. Providing only the tonic note, the observers are typically able to replicate the major scale as the instructor progresses through each pitch by skipping and hopping around in relation to the initial geographic starting point.

[4] Reframing common popular-music chord progressions in a modal framework is covered extensively in Biamonte (2010). In this case, “What I Like About You” would be I–IV–bVII–IV in Mixolydian.

[5] The day before presenting the results of our study at SMT 2024, a well-established popular music theory scholar approached me bemoaning our methods, stating in paraphrase “What makes you think we care about how a bunch of undergraduates hear harmony?” We must abandon this elitist attitude, as it flies in the face of reality. Responses from trained musicians and the habits of corpus encoders demonstrate that harmonic hearing in popular styles is flexible. In practice, tonality can be heard sectionally and globally (Burgoyne, Wild, and Fujinaga 2011) and even amongst expert musicians there is a notable level of disagreement about basic chord labels (Koops et al 2018). Outside of popular music, many trained musicians also fail to realize large-scale tonal relationships across the formal trajectory of a piece (Pollard-Gott 1983). Likewise, tonality requires cultural context, as argued extensively in Yust (2024). It is one thing to debate theoretical potentialities — the various ways one could hear tonal relationships. But we fail the field when we automatically assume or imply that these ways of hearings are generalizable. Continuing to do so reinforces the notion that the discipline of music theory is out of touch, as evidenced by the scores of self-taught, semi-professional, and even mainstream popular-music artists who do not find value in our perspectives (Shea 2020). The Practice of Popular Music is one model for bringing us closer to bridging this gap.

[6] https://mucci.live/

[7] This is not a novel concept in music theory. Meyer, in Style and Music, (1997) observes that “[…] our understanding, and hence our interpretation, of an event depends not only on its contextual present, but on the implications that the event is thought to have had for subsequent events.” (p. 72) Gjerdingen (1996), too, in some sense anticipated the duplicity of structural features in popular music, noting “Charting the exact musical knowledge of modern listeners would be a daunting task. Musics from popular culture, musics from the near and distant past, and musics from various ethnic regions coexist today in a vast commercial marketplace of sound.” (p. 380). It seems foolish, then, to not allow exceptions to student conceptions in the mutli-cultural context of popular music.

[8] Notating hypermeasures in real time feels extremely similar to the Karpinski (2000) method of dictation, which I also adopt in my aural skills curriculum. In dictation, students sing back the melody on a neutral syllable like “loo” while the instructor makes three passes to notate the meter, rhythmic durations, and solfege syllables before. Likewise, for charts, I typically make at least two passes while listening along with students: one for the hypermeasures and phrase lengths, and another for the harmonic rhythm.