By Andrew Ford and Anni Heino
Francis La Trobe University Press, PB, 288pp
ISBN 9781760640118
Buy online from Booktopia

What does English singer-songwriter Kate Bush have in common with 16th-century composer Thomas Tallis? Or Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore with Bob Dylan? These are among the connections that musicologist Anni Heino and broadcaster Andrew Ford draw in The Song Remains the Same, named for a Led Zeppelin lyric and spanning cultural touchstones from Mahler to My Little Pony.

In an introduction that gently and lovingly teases apart the features of the musical form known as the ‘song’ – words, music, structure, performance and more – Ford and Heino outline the scope of this book, which brings together analyses of some 75 songs across 800 years: “We only had two rules: no operatic arias (because we didn’t want to cut them adrift from their dramatic contexts) and only one song per composer.”

From Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah to Schumann’s Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, each of the works selected becomes an exemplar of a particular idea – from the differences in how we think about the ‘essence’ of a work by...