Just Another Pop Song? The Music (Trace Analysis Pt 1)

This is the first of four chapters that undertake the trace (or neutral-level) analysis of the musical texts of the 32 most sung contemporary congregational songs (CCS). This chapter approaches the analysis from a corpus perspective, comparing and contrasting CCS with the scholarly analysis of secular popular music. It examines melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, textural, and instrumental components of the genre as a whole. Song lengths, tempos, time signatures, and structural elements are also explored. The features of the corpus are defined and considered in light of what they mean for the genre. CCS hold in tension elements of secular popular music and those of vernacular music in a way that makes them uniquely definable among other genres.