Review of TimothyKoozin, Embodied Expression in Popular Music: a Theory of Musical Gesture and Agency (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2024). xix + 312 pp. £59.00 (hb.). ISBN 9780197692981.

meaning: what happens in a gesture on a guitar or keyboard or in a voice can suggest virtual actors moving within a virtual world (p.3).Koozin's repertoire is vast, from early R&B and soul artists such as Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder, to rock and roll acts such as the Beatles and Steely Dan, to singer-songwriters such as Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and finally to hip-hop artists such as A Tribe Called Quest and Kendrick Lamar.His methodology proves flexible enough to illuminate this wide spectrum of popular music.This makes the book especially helpful for those looking to gain more experience with popular music analysis or who might appreciate a new jumping-off point for exploring this music from a fresh perspective.Embodied Expression is organised into four parts across nine chapters.The first part examines guitar chords; the second covers gospel and funk music, with a focus on keyboard textures and song forms; the third part focuses on acoustic instruments; and the final part, 'Situating Gesture', considers a range of newer artists from a variety of perspectives.Although these topics are quite diverse, the division into four parts reflects the way Koozin's methodology builds across the book.For this reason, it is best to read it in its entirety before reflecting on specific passages.On re-reading, however, one might find that the analyses often prove more enriching than the methodology as a whole.Koozin's methodology centres on the interrelation of gesture and virtual agency, positing that musical performance -whether on guitar, keyboard, voice or any other instrument -can create virtual actors.Through this process, songs can become landscapes in which musical narratives unfold.Fig. 1 presents Koozin's flow chart of musical gesture and virtual agency.One example of how this might work is with a guitarist who creates a 'box' through their chosen chords, limiting themselves to a specific area of the guitar's fretboard.In this case, the performative action of fretboard movement can be understood as virtually representing the anthropomorphised musical actor being contained.By 'breaking out of the box' and playing elsewhere on the guitar neck, the player can project a virtual agent which represents resistance to containment (p.18).In Lenny Kravitz's 'Fly Away', for example, the physical motion of (mostly) moving up the guitar can be understood as metaphorically 'flying away' on a psychedelic journey -and perhaps even resisting social containment (pp.24-5).Koozin's methodology really begins to develop in the ways it allows gestures to be combined with other topical aspects of the music.Building on Lawrence Zbikowski's work on conceptual blending (2002), Koozin frequently suggests how different domains -in this case, bodily motion and musical soundcan blend to produce expressive personas associated with certain gestures.Fundamental to Koozin's framework is the relationship between open-voiced chords (chords involving unfretted strings) and barre chords (chords in which every string is fretted, typically with one finger fretting several strings).Openvoiced chords can be understood as folk-like, or rooted in tradition, whereas barre chords can be conceptualised as urban or heroic.What makes barre