Scott Walker's Avant-Garde Idiom and the Framing of Perceptual Space: A Close Reading of "Phrasing" and a Stylistic Analysis of Tilt, The Drift, and Bish Bosch

Abstract

The late-career songs of Scott Walker (1943-2019) are revered for their innovative formal construction and imaginative combination of genres. They are also infamously dark and discordant. This study proposes that both the inventiveness and the psychological difficulty of Walker’s avant-garde style stem from his strategy of manipulating the “frames” of his songs simultaneously with their contents; this leads to a uniquely spatial experience in which the listener’s typically fixed perceptual orientation within the music, here called “perceptual space,” is undermined and exploited as compositional material. The song “Phrasing” (2012) provides a case study for techniques found across Walker’s de facto trilogy of Tilt (1995), The Drift (2006), and Bish Bosch (2012).