DAVID TEMPERLEY'S The Musical Language of Rock is a welcome and useful resource for the study of rock music. Designed for “people with a serious interest in rock music” (xi) who are literate in staff notation and conversant with basic harmony, it could serve as a textbook or supplementary reading for a course at the advanced undergraduate or graduate levels in the theory and analysis of rock music, if not popular music more generally. Temperley cites Allan Moore's Rock: The Primary Text, Ken Stephenson's What to Listen for in Rock, and Walter Everett's The Foundations of Rock as important precursors of his book (8). Among these, Stephenson's is the most similar because it was designed as an undergraduate textbook, with exercises for each chapter presented at the end of the book, while Moore's (now in a third edition, Moore and Martin 2019) is a scholarly monograph, and...
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