Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2008
In recent years, interest within popular music research in describing, analysing and discussing the music itself, the sounding object, has considerably increased. To the English speaking world, the most well known example perhaps is the work of Allan Moore (1993). At my department in Gothenburg, however, by the middle of the 1980s already several dissertations were being written taking the structure of popular music as their starting point to analyse the functions and meaning of popular music in society (Åhlen 1987, Björnberg 1987, Lilliestam 1988). The only problem with these dissertations, as well as with my book on the tin-pan alley tradition in Sweden (1989), is that they are all written in Swedish (although the dissertations have summaries in English or German).