Joni Mitchell is one of the foremost singer-songwriters of the late
twentieth century. Yet despite her reputation, influence, and
cultural importance, a detailed appraisal of her musical
achievement is still lacking. Whitesell presents a through
exploration of Mitchell's musical style, sound, and structure in
order to evaluate her songs from a musicological perspective. His
analyses are conceived within a holistic framework that takes
account of poetic nuance, cultural reference, and stylistic
evolution over a long, adventurous career.
Mitchell's songs represent a complex, meticulously crafted body of
work. The Music of Joni Mitchell offers a comprehensive survey of
her output, with many discussions of individual songs, organized by
topic rather than chronology. Individual chapters each explore a
different aspect of her craft, such as poetic voice, harmony,
melody, and large-scale form. A separate chapter is devoted to the
central theme of personal freedom, as expressed through diverse
symbolic registers of the journey quest, bohemianism, creative
license, and spiritual liberation.
Previous accounts of Mitchell's songwriting have tended to favor
her poetic vision, expansive verse structures, and riveting vocal
delivery. Whitesell fills out this account with special attention
to musical technique, showing how such traits as complex or
conflicting sonorities, dualities of harmonic mode, dialectical
tensions of texture and register, intricately layered instrumental
figuration, and a variable vocal persona are all essential to her
distinctive identity as a songwriter. The Music of Joni Mitchell
develops a set of conceptual tools geared specifically to
Mitchell's songs, in order todemonstrate the extent of her
technical innovation in the pop song genre, to give an account of
the formal sophistication and rhetorical power characterizing her
work as a whole, and to provide grounds for the recognition of her
intellectual stature as a composer within her chosen field.
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