What is a "Lament," Really?: A Commentary on Nicholas Shea's "Descending Bass Schemata and Negative Emotion in Western Song"

Abstract

This commentary focuses on Shea (2019) and its relationship to much of the literature on popular and rock music. The commentary offers some methodological considerations on the construction of corpora for this type of analysis. The commentary questions the operational definition of 'lament,' and laud's Shea's work in attempting to create a more thorough, objective definition. Ultimately, the commentary concludes that, while Shea's approach is worthwhile, a much larger corpus must be generated in order to draw meaningful conclusions from it.