Alfred Schnittke’s String Quartet No. 3 (1983) is one of the composer’s few works to use musical quotations, which are labeled in the published score. On this basis the quartet has been called a polystylistic work, using Schnittke’s own term for the incorporation of past musical styles. Yet the role that the quotations play has been overstated. This paper re-examines the use of quotation in the quartet, demonstrating that although Schnittke uses techniques first identified in his analysis of Luciano Berio’s quotation-laden Sinfonia (1968–69), his use of quoted material is ultimately much less thorough than has been previously assumed. Whereas more recent accounts of Berio’s Sinfonia concern the quotations’ semantic properties, philosophical implications, and pitch content, Schnittke, in an essay written in the 1970s but only recently published, notices hidden motivic connections among selected quotations, connections brought out through the quotations’ juxtaposition in the movement. Schnittke’s String Quartet No. 3 likewise juxtaposes its quotations so as to suggest hidden connections among them. Schnittke’s quotations from Orlando di Lasso, Beethoven, and Shostakovich, however, resemble their sources only superficially. Why does Schnittke deem it important to understand these excerpts as quotations? Schnittke constructs monograms on the names of the quoted composers and incorporates them into twelve-tone rows. The quotations, which are merely sprinkled throughout the quartet, serve as a pretext for the monograms that generate a large proportion of the quartet’s pitch material. This paper thus challenges the idea of the quartet as a polystylistic composition.

Starting in the late 1960s, Shostakovich began to incorporate sporadic twelve-tone rows in his music, in works such as the Twelfth and Thirteenth String Quartets, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Symphonies, and the Violin Sonata. These rows often stand out from prominently their surroundings, usually occur melodically, and are normally not subjected to the standard serial operations (although examples of inversion and retrograde do exist). Though several scholars have discussed this phenomenon, much work remains to be done both in terms of grasping the nature of Shostakovich’s rows themselves as well as how they fit into his music.

This paper aims to further our understanding of Shostakovich’s twelve-tone melodies in three ways. First, I argue that these melodies are better understood as part of a broader phenomenon that I refer to as aggregate melodies; put simply, an aggregate melody is one that touches on all twelve pitch classes, with or without any repetitions. Second, I detail several traits that characterize many of Shostakovich’s twelve-tone (and aggregate) melodies; to take one example, in many of these melodies, Shostakovich pursues a strategy of completing the aggregate by unfolding multiple zones of chromatic activity. Finally, through in-depth analysis of selected movements, I offer detailed examples of how Shostakovich’s twelve-tone (and aggregate) melodies relate to their larger surroundings.

Relatively little scholarly attention has been given to one of Stravinsky’s most enduring musical accomplishments: the creation of chords so distinctive that they take on the name of the movement or piece in which they occur. Such significance applied to a single sonority is a rarity in Western art music; the roster of commonly recognizable “named chords” is not long, and Stravinsky is the rare composer to which we may attribute more than a single named chord. In this presentation, I draw upon studies of perceptual learning, categorization, and psychoacoustics to analyze Stravinsky’s most recognizable chords, including the “Augurs chord” (Rite of Spring), the “Psalms chord” (Symphony of Psalms), and the “chorale chord” (Symphonies of Wind Instruments).

Whereas novelty has been shown to greatly facilitate learning and memory, typical musical listening rewards familiarity at the expense of novelty. Accordingly, I examine how Stravinsky’s most memorable chords may be heard as broadly familiar but specifically novel within their respective musical contexts. I frame the musical techniques of intensity, repetition, and isolation as devices intended to attract the listener’s attention and promote recognition, and I examine a chord’s potential for novelty based on how its holistic features—pitch, registration, and chroma profile in particular—compare with those of common cultural exemplars of chords. I offer support for the anecdotal observation that Stravinsky “regarded every chord as an individual sonority,” and I offer a analytic approach toward the study of other memorable chords.

Recent years have seen an outpouring of scholarship on rhythm and meter, a wealth of research has been dedicated to Brahms’s metric manipulation in his song literature, including Richard Cohn, Samuel Ng, Yonatan Malin, Deborah Rohr and Harald Krebs.  Despite this vast scholarship, one aspect of Brahms’s metric practice has yet to be explored in great detail: the change of notated meter, which is as significant as other types of metric dissonances in his music.  This presentation explores the text-expressive effect of Brahms’s change of meter and outlines three types of meter change in his solo lieder: (1) the alternation of triple and duple/quadruple meter.  This technique is typical in Slovakian and Bohemian dances, Brahms employed this metrical setting to preserve the composite rhythm in folk-flavored text. (2) Different meters for sections with different personas.  This changes the sense of pulse in different sections significantly, resulting in a change of affect.  (3) The brief appearance of a new meter, or meters.  This type is often short-lived.  It creates new strong and weak beats on specific words while altering the declamation of the poem.

Expanding on Rohr’s work and David Epstein’s studies of musical time and motion, this project will show the delicate relationship between notated meters, rate of declamation, sense of motion and emotion.  This presentation will shed lights on Brahms’s awareness of the psychology behind the poem and his eagerness to return to a natural rhetorical impulse, even if this means violating the notation based upon invariable ratios.

“Metric dissonance” is a term borrowed from the realm of pitch relationships in music; a passage may be described as metrically consonant if its internal rhythmic patterns are stable with respect to the prevailing meter or metrically dissonant if they conflict with it. Yeston (1974) introduced the term “rhythmic dissonance” to describe complex relationships between rhythmic strata and Krebs (1987 and 1999) formalized them: grouping dissonances (e.g. hemiolas) can be described by the label Gx/y, representing the ratio of the durations of the conflicting metrical units; and displacement dissonances (e.g. canons) can be labeled Dx+a, where x describes the duration of the meter and a describes the distance in pulses between apparent and prevailing downbeats (1999, 31-9). Cohn (1992) and Ng (2005) have introduced other formalizations for metric dissonance.

Thus far, such formalizations have served as taxonomies, creating descriptive labels in order to categorize different kinds of metric dissonance. Since music is a temporal art form, metric dissonance, like pitch dissonance, can be exploited as a compositional motivator that creates instabilities that resolve toward stability as the work unfolds: a model is needed that can track changes in stability over time. Because meters are collections of integers, they can also be formalized as discrete mathematical sequences and applying discrete calculus to these sequences can model both the change in dissonance over time and, consequently, a listener's experience of metrically-dissonant music.

During the 1770’s the minuet became the most popular dance in European aristocratic circles and all members of the upper class were expected to dance it with ease. Their embodied knowledge of the steps arguably shaped their experiences as listeners, on and beyond the dance floor. This paper explores historical perception of hypermeter and phrase structure in symphonic minuets by Haydn and Mozart, applying Mirka’s parallel multiple-analysis model and incorporating choreographic implications drawn from eighteenth-century dance treatises.

I highlight several procedures that lead to apparent incongruities between theoretical requirements and compositional practice. For example, whereas historical sources often demanded minuet phrases to be eight or sixteen measures long, less than half of the pieces under study meet this condition: frequently minuets display a tripartite reprise in which each four-bar unit is clearly isolated and articulates a distinct formal function. These tensions are rendered meaningful applying Zbikowski’s hypothesis that non-functional dance music imitates bodily gestures associated with dance. From this perspective, the three-fold twelve-bar reprise functions as a sonic analogue of the ternary geometry of the Z figure, a fundamental floor pattern in the choreography of the minuet. Such compositional strategies lived a period of apogee and then fell from use: as social dance declined, composers abandoned the representational practice of mimicking the danced minuet and leaned towards more abstract constructs. Before that turn, cognitive interaction of sound and physical movement provided the interpretive space where expressive significance of the classical minuet was articulated with full force.

The music of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho is perhaps most often associated with the screeching violin cue from the celebrated shower scene. Although this short cue is not easily forgotten, Bernard Herrmann’s score as a whole brings to life a tale of crime, mistaken conclusions, and the inner life of a madman.

This paper examines how Herrmann uses formal structure, namely rotational form, in Psycho’s prelude to foreshadow the film’s cyclic narrative. Using methodology from Hepokoski and Darcy’s Elements of Sonata Theory (2006), the prelude’s rotations and phrase endings are mapped onto the film’s most significant plot events and correspond precisely to the three crimes at the Bates Motel and Norman’s subsequent capture. Small alterations to each of the prelude’s rotational endings mirror the details of these crimes: Marion’s murder parallels the initial referential rotation, whereas later crimes and Norman’s capture are reflected in subsequent rotations through altered cadences, curtailed motives, and missing sonorities.

Alongside referential sonorities and thematic transformations, recurrent nested rotational cycles emphasize the film’s narrative structure, as the prelude’s overt foreshadowing further underscores the story’s mythic design. Since each crime is openly displayed on screen, tension is created not by obfuscation, but by myth-like cycles of missed opportunities for Marion’s arrest and the discovery of Norman’s crimes. Rotational form thus broadens Psycho’s prevailing pitch- and motive-based musical narratives and extends analytical options in ways both congruent with and more flexible than traditional Formenlehre categories, allowing new possibilities for formal and narrative analyses of film music.

Trance and house music are sub-genres within the popular music genre of electronic dance music (EDM). In trance and house music, the form of breakdown, buildup and anthem is the main generator of large-scale tension and release moments. Scholars like Mark Butler (2006) have noted the form of trance and house music, but have not considered the abundance of devices that drive the form. This paper will define and theorize the formal techniques used by trance and house composers to create climactic moments of tension and release within this breakdown/buildup/anthem form.

My analysis examines the nature of tension and release within the structures by first establishing and defining new terminology for formal devices used within the breakdown, buildup, and anthem sections of the music and leading to a study of how different artists expand the conventions to both stretch the limits of the breakdown/buildup/anthem form and create complex and drawn-out areas of tension and relaxation. Specifically, for trance and house music, the devices that manage this push and pull are: snare drum rolls, bass hits, layering, prolongation of hypermeter, rest measures, synth sweeps, spinning melodic riffs, and bass drum leads.

A function of film music commonly voiced in scholarly literature is that music can express the thoughts and feelings of film characters.  Although composers, scholars, and filmmakers frequently mention this aspect of a film score in writings and interviews, no one has yet to formally explicate the process by which music actually expresses the emotional thoughts and feelings of film characters.  As a result, analysts too often tend to use simple adjectival descriptors of emotions, such as “a doleful theme” or “a sinister chord,” rather than examine the ways in which a passage of music contributes to an audience’s understanding of characters and their motivation.

In my paper, I present a theoretical framework for the musical communication of character-experienced emotion in film.  Drawing on conceptions of emotion articulated in Appraisal Theory, I propose that composers simulate the emotional experiences of film characters through the synchronous alignment of one or more musical elements of growth or decay, such as a crescendo, diminuendo, or accelerando.  I will also maintain that composers align such musical elements in specific ways in order to convey different emotional experiences and behavior.  As such, I will outline six emotion functions of film music, expressed here in sets of two, reflecting the three dimensions of an emotional experience—cognition, physiological change, and attentional bias: cognitive processing and sensing, welling and abating of physiological responses,and desire and expectation.  These functions offer a point of entry into more meaningful discussions regarding music’s role in the expression of emotion in film narrative.

Luciano Berio's Sequenza for Flute frustrates conventional analytical approaches because of its unconventional notation and seemingly unconventional use of motive to articulate form. However, my analysis shows that if we re-define the conventional notion of motive, then we discover that Berio, in fact, uses motive more traditionally--to articulate or complement a piece's form.  I show that Berio adopts a unique collection of features to define his motives. This collection requires a new analytical focus, one more closely related to Berio's own compositional concepts. His writings on music frequently refer to a "density" in music, but for Berio "density" was intimately connected to what he described as "tension." As my analysis reveals, Sequenza defines motives through the interaction of four main features that Berio himself describes: pitch, dynamic, duration, and morphology. He defines the tension created within each of these features in his own terms that can seem counterintuitive to the classically trained musician. In my analysis I use his outline of maximum, neutral, and minimum tension to quantify each variable. Taking these values, I create a graphic analysis that traces the maximum and minimum of each type of tension and their mutual interaction.  This approach reveals patterns in their "peaks and valleys" (i.e., points of maximum or minimum density);  and these patterns, which rely on his unconventional concept of motive,  clearly reveal that Berio in fact uses motive to articulate form in a fashion that is more traditional than most analysts
have suspected.

Horlacher (1992) introduces the cycle, an analytical module that identifies a higher-level pattern from two or more concurrent repeating rhythmic patterns. Her work and similar analytical approaches to repetition (such as Colannino et al. 2009) focus exclusively on complete cycles, whose rhythmic patterns are unchanging. György Ligeti, with his well-documented interest in mechanical processes (2007), often suggests similar cycles in his late-period works, but only sometimes carries them to completion, instead exploring the formal and aesthetic possibilities of cycle disruption.

In this paper, I modify the cycle to show three different kinds of incomplete cycles, which I call unfinished, out-of-order, and supplemented. I demonstrate the analytical application of these types in two of Ligeti’s piano études, showing how cycle disruption can be used to create incomplete cycles and frustrate the sense of regularity. Fém and Fanfares each combine different types of incomplete cycles, and I contend that understanding these procedures is crucial to understanding the formal outline in each piece. This paper will explore the procedures used, as well as their ramifications, to convey the strong sense of organization underlying the sometimes unpredictable and incomplete cycles on the musical surface.

Much scholarly discourse on Steve Reich’s music has been about rhythm and meter, and for good reason.  His innovative techniques of phasing—two voices starting in unison, followed by one of the voices gradually increasing tempo so as to “slip” ahead of the other—and dividing 12/8 meter in various ways so that potentially ambiguous meters arise have earned him a unique niche in contemporary music.  Another important technique prevalent in Reich’s works—augmentation—is lesser known.  While this aspect of composition is obviously not new, Reich has adopted a more liberal approach in its use.  Instead of adhering to direct proportions, the composer freely lengthens note values as he feels appropriate—in fact, he says the process is entirely developed by ear. 

I address processes of augmentation in Double Sextet, written in 2007 for the chamber ensemble eighth blackbird.  My objective is to explore how Reich might determine the length of each note value and how he might develop the process by ear, attempting to systematize an allegedly intuitive process.  To aid in my discussion, I apply concepts from diatonic set theory as developed by John Clough and rhythmic theory as developed by Richard Cohn and Justin London.  Additionally, I consider phrasing and grouping structures in each of the piece’s two distinct strata—what eighth blackbird colloquially refers to as the melodic “front line” and the harmonic/rhythmic “back line”—as they relate to augmentation.

In her groundbreaking book, Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers (2004), Lisa Kernan persuasively discusses the movie trailer for Hitchcock's Rope (1948) in terms of visibility and invisibility. In the trailer, the audience sees first hand that Brandon and Phillip are murderers, thus avoiding the veil of mystery associated with suspense films since we know from the outset -- indeed, the very prequel to the film itself -- who the killers are. Hitchcock's marketing strategy is bold in that he implicates the filmic viewer/voyeur in the murder as third-party participants, agents who will hopefully return to the cinema to see if Brandon and Phillip get caught or get away with murder. In her analysis, Kernan discusses how the movie trailer -- one that uses content and material not shown in the film -- foreshadows many of Rope's narrative concerns. My presentation supplements Kernan's contribution to movie trailer scholarship by providing an in-depth study of the intermedial use of music in Rope's movie trailer. In sum, I focus on David Buttolph's orchestral arrangement of Poulenc's Mouvements Perpétuels and take into consideration how and why the music is altered from Poulenc's original. As we will see and hear, as characters start to unravel on screen, the accompanying music itself becomes more and more dramatic, successfully creating tension and suspense in the hopes of seducing audience members to return to the cinema -- that is, to the scene of the crime -- to see the entire film.

Analysis of film music, unlike most music for the concert stage, is often hindered by the fact that film music is rarely published in print. Transcriptions of film music from a film’s soundtrack recording can be complicated by the presence of other sounds (dialogue and sound effects). Occasionally, the opportunity to analyze an unpublished work in the composer’s hand presents itself to the film musicologist. Such is the case with the current analysis of “L’Estasi dell’Oro.”

Musicologist Sergio Miceli briefly mentions Ennio Morricone’s micro-cell technique in his article in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Miceli describes it as “a pseudo-serial approach often incorporating modal and tonal allusions, which, with its extreme reduction of compositional materials, has much in common with his film-music techniques” (Miceli 146). The composer has acknowledged that he did in fact use this technique in his music for Sergio Leone’s 1966 film Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, but he has politely declined to explain this technique in any detail. Although its role in his compositional process may remain somewhat of a mystery, it is the intention of the current research to describe the resulting characteristics of this technique as evident in the cue “L’Estasi dell’Oro.”

This presentation will begin with a brief explanation of the composer’s use of a six-note scale, from which he derives the three-note “micro-cell” used in “L’Estasi dell’Oro,” along with several relevant recognizable musical gestures (rhythmic, harmonic, and timbral) that occur throughout this film score. It will continue with an analysis of his micro-cell technique and, if time permits, conclude with the screening of a film clip that includes this musical cue.

For thirty years, Keith Jarrett’s so-called “Standards Trio” has been one of the preeminent jazz trios in the world.  The attraction of Jarrett’s group seems to dwell more in its consummate mastery of old styles than in originality.  But closer analysis shows that the trio forges distinctive pathways in the straight-ahead style.  Performers, educators, students, and theorists have much to learn from Jarrett’s craft, which has been largely unexplored in the scholarly literature.  

I focus this exploration on the recording of “Autumn Leaves,” which appears on the fourth disc of the trio’s 1995 six-CD set, “Keith Jarrett at the Blue Note.”  The 26-minute tour de force serves ably as a survey of the characteristic facets of Jarrett’s approach to playing standards.  My analysis focuses on: (1) Jarrett’s motivic rigor in both inner and outer voices (recalling Schuller 1958); (2) characteristic harmonic devices that permeate Jarrett’s playing, especially his “side-step” reharmonization patterns and his recontextualization of polytonal and quartal sonorities as triadic harmonies with nested suspensions; (3) the long-range voice-leading and tonal connections that Jarrett makes across the work, centering on his almost Schenkerian sensitivity to goal-orientation (after Arthurs, 2012); and (4) his narrative conception of form, expanding the tonal and rhetorical possibilities of the straight-ahead standard.  I conclude with speculations on Jarrett’s influences, including his grounding in free jazz, his upbringing and side career in classical piano, and (after Blume 2003) his fascination with the music of India.

Charles Griffes’s Piano Sonata, described as “uncompromisingly dissonant and muscular” (Anderson, 1993) employs the synthetic scale, D–Eb–F–F#–G#–A–Bb–C#, which contains three augmented seconds (Eb–F#, F–G#, Bb–C#), two [012] subsets (C#– D–Eb, G#–A–Bb), a HEX_1,2 collection, and six of the eight notes in an OCT_0,2 collection. Dissonance, however, is not absolute but relative to its surroundings; without stability, dissonance cannot exist.

This paper investigates Griffes’s meticulous use of the synthetic scale throughout the sonata as a generator of both stability and dissonance. By discarding octave equivalence, the synthetic scale can be mapped onto Steven Rings’s S-Space to generate a tonic (2011). As a result, some of the remaining scale degrees become tonally charged and thus desire resolution. The majority of the sonata is in D-tonic S-Space, which is strongly suggested by the single-flat key signature.

Many recent theories aimed at tackling issues of harmony in mid- to post-Romantic music, such as neo-Riemannian theory, rely on enharmonic equivalence; yet, these repertoires still strongly suggest elements of tonality. By rejecting enharmonic equivalence, even in profusely dissonant music like the Piano Sonata, and adapting Rings’s S-Space to show scale-degree function, the potential to show both small- and large-scale tonal centers can offer a narrative to discuss highly complex music.

A musical topic is a conventional musical sign with an unusually clear signification.  Scholars have pointed out that in film music this clarity in signification is often gained by reifying pernicious stereotypes, and such scholars usually recommend music indigenous to the group being represented to avoid stereotypes.  Running contrary to this understanding is a body of scholarship defending stereotypical topics on the basis of dramatic utility.  If such approaches can seem woefully naïve about ideological deployment of stereotype, they do have the advantage of highlighting formal properties and functions of topical signification; in particular, nearly all such studies readily acknowledge such signification as arbitrary and conventional.  By focusing on the formal properties of signification rather than on the arbitrary musical content, these studies show that the formal system, not the content, determines signification; one consequence of this analysis is that stereotypical signification becomes a formal property of the sign type and so would apply whether the content is fabricated or genuine.  

In this paper, I will discuss musical topics in Birth of a Nation and Stagecoach from a postcolonial perspective, following Homi Bhabha’s suggestion that “the point of [postcolonial] intervention should shift from the identification of images as positive or negative, to an understanding of the processes of subjectification made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse.” This recommendation suggests analyzing both how these films require and enable particular stereotypical topics and how these topics serve to articulate the ideology of the larger social structure in all its contradictoriness.

Released on Christmas Day in 1948, David O. Selznick’s film Portrait of Jennie tells the story of an artist, Eben Adams, a young girl, Jennie, and their complex “out of time” relationship.

Beyond the romantic storyline Portrait of Jennie explores differing models of art: on the one hand reproduction, art as commodity; on the other hand, the eternal, transcendent entity of “high” art—art that belongs in a museum and to future generations.

The tensions between conceptions of “high” and “low” art are reinforced in the music used for the film and Selznick’s attempts to score the film. The score needed to bridge the fantastical gap in the film’s storyline, but Selznick also aimed for a score that would create a kind of cultural uplift for the film, one that would bring to the movie the connotations of “high” art. By using Claude Debussy’s music as the basis for the majority of the film’s score Selznick attempted to project the image of high art, but in the end, he could not keep the music from assuming additional meanings. Ironically, a “popular” song left out of the score, which Selznick described as corny and banal, over the years has taken on a new kind of artful quality, achieving the timelessness that Selznick so desperately sought for his movie. While Selznick wanted his score to be a closed text, a closer look at decisions regarding music, will show how the score becomes a hybrid signifier of both “high” and “low” art.

Where in Mozart pass whole swaths of measures in no particular key?  Where follow chromatic third relations one after the other?  Where is rhythm so free that meter is indiscernible and its very notation perfunctory?  In the secco recitatives, of course.  Figuring as an expedient nexus between orchestrated masterworks, the organization of the Classical era secco recitative has received little critical attention.  While surely not the equal of the arias and ensembles in emotional and contrapuntal depth, Mozart’s secco recitatives can be of clever if methodical construction.  Through statistical analyses of the three Da Ponte operas—The Marriage of Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787),and Così fan Tutte (1790)—emerges a fairly stable approach to the genre.

In this presentation I will describe Mozart’s default pattern in secco composition, within a framework of eighteenth-century conceptions of sonority and harmonic progression.  I will then detail Mozart’s expressive deformations in correspondence with textual markers in the drama.  Finally, an original dice game for generating secco recitatives in the style of Mozart will be demonstrated.

The assemblage of diverse practices constituting the field of music theory largely centers around conceptualizations of the musical utterance in terms of an abstract inventory of pitches residing in a tonal hierarchy, along with how elements from this inventory are distributed linearly within an event hierarchy. Patrick McCreless has demonstrated the affinity between this binary conception of tonal and event hierarchies and Ferdinand de Saussure’s binary conception of paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations. In this paper, I explore relations outside of these binaries, relations Saussure himself prefigures in ruling out the possibility of pronouncing multiple linguistic elements simultaneously. As polyphonic music simultaneously presents multiple interrelating voices, I contend that music-theoretical paradigms with such close affinities to Saussure’s binary lack adequate explanatory power for certain compositional decisions.

The exercises in free composition from the Attwood Notebooks provide a compelling case study. As I demonstrate, analyses of Mozart’s corrections in syntagmatic and paradigmatic terms do not account for seemingly simple changes, thus illustrating the importance of compositional thought outside of this binary. To provide a specific example, I attempt to excavate Mozart’s lesson in his correction of Attwood’s last eight measures of a minuet for string quartet. I propose that Mozart's primary lesson lies outside the realm of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic, concluding rather that Mozart demonstrates the compositional possibilities available in conceptualizing voices as discrete entities entering into dynamic spatial relationships. To conclude, I bring my analysis into dialogue with Roman Jakobson’s theoretical framework for the communicative act, proposing that Mozart’s correction establishes a synthetic “context” within the “message” itself.

Scholarship on Pierre Boulez’s music has focused largely on his more mature works, especially those after Structures I (1952). Most research on Boulez’s serial techniques focuses on his post-Schoenbergian practices of integral serialism and multiplication. In this paper, I explore the earliest piece in his oeuvre, Douze Notations (1945). While this piece employs neither of these techniques, there are numerous stylistic features that figure prominently in Boulez’s later works. Both Peter O’Hagan (1997) and Jonathan Goldman (2011) have pointed to some of these relationships, but only in a fairly general way. Other writing (Ofenbauer, 1995) on the piece has focused on the relationship with the orchestral version of movements 1–4 and 7 of 1984. This paper involves a more thorough serial analysis of the piece than has been published, and focuses on elements of style that are important features of Boulez’s later works. These include a rotational treatment of the row, use of subgroupings of a main row, gestural writing, rhythmic and metrical ambiguity, performer choice, control of registral disposition of notes, a prominent use of the note E-flat, clear links in organization at different structural levels, and an interest in extended timbral resources. These can be found in works that span a broad range of Boulez's output, including Structures Ia, Messagesquisse (1976), Derive I (1984), the Troisieme Sonate (1955–1957), Domaines (1961-1968), Dialogue de l’Ombre Double (1982-1985), and Rituel (1974).

In “The Use of Computers in Musicological Research,” Milton Babbitt (1916–2011) underscores that determining the number of twelve-tone rows possessing a certain property (e.g., all-interval property) can “yield insights into the structure of such a set [row], and into the system itself” (Babbitt 2003/1965, 203). And indeed, enumerations have appeared in the literature for various kinds of rows that achieve precisely these insights (Morris and Starr 1974, Morris 1976, Stanfield 1984, Mead 1989, Alegant and Lofthouse 2002). The present paper argues that such data is also relevant to analyses of Schoenberg’s and Webern’s twelve-tone music.

The paper is divided into two parts. The first presents a methodology for enumerating rows with one or more properties of interest and emphasizes that enumerations measure the normativity and distinctiveness of a property. The paper’s second part considers how this insight can contextualize analytical findings about Schoenberg’s and Webern’s music. In focus here are the “nexus point” of Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto, op. 36/I and the “structural unfolding” of the row class in Webern’s Variations for Orchestra, op. 30. In the case of op. 36/I, the data indicate that the nexus exploits relatively distinctive features of the work’s row. In the case of Webern’s variations, the data suggest that the work’s unfolding charts a path between more and less normative features of the underlying row class.

It is well known that Boulez and Cage maintained a lively correspondence in the early 1950s, but that they later split over the role of chance procedures in music. From here, contemporary historiography pits Boulez, integral serialist, against Cage, chance composer. This paper shows that, to the contrary, there are remarkable overlaps between Boulez and Cage in their thinking and application of chance procedures, despite their heated public disagreements. In the first part of this paper, I pursue a close reading of Boulez’s article “Alea [1957]” to show the multifaceted and flexible way in which “aleatory” was used in the 1950s. Boulez was critical of Cage’s Music of Changes (1951) at the same time as he professed his interest in “mobile forms,” a technique that he used in the third movement “Constellation-Miroir” of the Troisième sonate (1955-57). In the second part of this paper, I explore the two pieces analytically. Focusing upon the temporal progression of the pieces, I reveal surprising moments of “micropredictability,” defined as three or more aural events that are periodically spaced in time. In conclusion, I argue that Boulez’s Troisième Sonate and Cage’s Music of Changes remain very close in aesthetic terms though the composers’ conceptual ideas diverged. In this sense, the aleatory debates do not address the listener’s experience very much at all; rather, this discourse opens out to quasi-political questions of what citizenship, democracy, and freedom mean, using compositional technique as a metaphor that foreshadows the political upheaval of the mid-to-late 1960s.

The Swiss-Viennese musicologist Ernst Kurth (1886–1946) is best known for his “energetic” writings on the music of Bach, Wagner, and Bruckner. These analyses captured readers’ imaginations in the early twentieth century, and they remain provocative today. Kurth’s prose style, however, one that is highly metaphorical and psychological in character, is an oft-mentioned barrier to comprehending and extending his ideas. Indeed a fuller appreciation of his music-analytical insights requires a better understanding of the theoretical and philosophical foundations undergirding them. This paper demonstrates that such foundations lie in Kurth’s final published monograph, Musikpsychologie (1931).

Rather than a précis of his earlier writings, Musikpsychologie offers an original theory of music-as-experienced—one that Kurth envisions as centrally located within the wider disciplinary network of Musikwissenschaft. In the first part of the paper, I focus on Kurth’s appeal to the emerging area of Gestalt psychology to bolster his musical claims. In the writings of Christian von Ehrenfels and Felix Krueger, in particular, Kurth discovered a new vocabulary with which to convey his ideas about melody, harmony, and form. In the second part of the paper, I turn our attention to the system of harmony appearing within Musikpsychologie. The discussion will center on Kurth’s notion of “musical dissonance.” With an ear towards compositional practices of the late nineteenth century, we will experience some familiar phenomena (enharmonic reinterpretations) as well as a harmonic oddity (the “imaginary 6/4 chord”) from a psychological, and uniquely Kurthian, perspective.

Almost anything stops making sense if you think about it hard enough. For instance, melodic inversion requires inter alia that two versions of the same melodic profile directly oppose one another within the same pitch space; but if they oppose one another, is it not a logical contradiction to regard them as “the same?” Nevertheless, we all know that melodic inversion is readily hearable, even with minimal musical experience. So why question its intuitiveness? The fourteenth variation of the Chopin Berceuse op. 57 in D-flat major (1844) provides a reason: in playing two inversionally related large-scale semitone gestures (C-flat–B-flat vs. F–G-flat) the pianist’s two thumbs converge from white keys to adjacent black keys. The two gestures are bilaterally symmetrical about the A-flat/G-sharp key and about the body’s sagittal plane, so in a sense they are physically congruent. But now we have the opposite problem because the two gestures cannot be identical unless we recognize them within separate, mutually reversed spaces. This variation suggests that the issue of melodic inversion goes deeper than we initially thought — perhaps a kind of “glitch in the Matrix” that typically screens performance phenomena from music-theoretical discourse. In light of what John Campbell (1994) calls an “egocentric reference frame,” this musical event unlocks a liminal transformational space I call sagittal space inhering between the keyboard (where pitch space is arranged horizontally) and the pianist’s body (which is bilaterally symmetrical about the sagittal plane), which carries the potential to support our intuitions about melodic inversion.

Moritz Hauptmann and Simon Sechter, both of whom published significant treatises in 1853, enjoy radically different reputations today: Hauptmann as an abstract theorist who speculated about the dialectical underpinnings of tonality, and Sechter as a paragon of pedagogy who eschewed string lengths and ratios in favor of practical matters. This presentation explores an aspect of Sechter’s treatise that rivals Hauptmann’s in its abstraction from musical practice: his system of tuning, which has far-reaching implications for his theory. Sechter mirrors Hauptmann by generating the diatonic gamut through just intonation (JI)—an opening gambit deeply indebted to the speculative tradition. He cautions readers about JI’s characteristic out-of-tune fifth (between 2 and 6), calling it “dubious” (bedenkliche) and demanding that it be prepared and resolved like a dissonance, even though it is written as a perfect fifth.

Sechter’s commitment to JI is uncharacteristically impractical, since by 1853, equal temperament was nearly universal. Hauptmann makes much of this condition, crafting a metaphysics of listening in which justly-tuned intervals are the hidden “meaning” of equally-tempered sounds, but we can also detect metaphysical traces in Sechter: even as he admits that JI is rarely practiced, he insists on voice-leading constraints that honor its intonational shortcomings. This presentation explores Sechter’s tuning theory, critiques its absence from his reception history, and problematizes his enshrined position on one side of the speculative/practical continuum by exposing the roles played by acoustics, intonation, and his nascent, speculative theory of hearing, in a treatise that so vehemently denies their importance.

A fundamental issue in undertaking what is commonly described as “opera analysis” of Baroque opera seria is that this genre of works does not rely on dynamic and fluid musical elements to drive the drama forward. Instead, musical topics—and dance music in particular—play an important role in the composition of many arias in opera seria, and the information these topics provide can contribute to semantic interpretation. While a considerable amount of literature has been devoted to the use of dance and other musical topoi in the late eighteenth century, a lacuna still remains to be filled with respect to their use in Baroque music.

In this paper, I examine the types of information that dance topics provide in the Baroque, with special attention to arias in G.F. Handel’s Italian-language operas. I explore the “denotative” reading of expressive information (Shaftel 2009, 33); that is, the actual, concrete experiences audience members may have had with the types of dances Handel employed. Establishing the types of relationships to and attitudes towards dance music that the audience members at the time provides interpretive information and lends credibility to the notion that these dances could indeed carry topical significance in the early eighteenth century. I also unpack possible “connotative” associations—assumptions and literarily constructed notions of stylistic level and affect for a sample of dance topics (Monelle 2006, 5–7). I apply the resulting information to several arias and form interpretations of the characters and dramatic situations based on their accompanying dance topics.

A striking aspect in parts of Tomás Luis de Victoria’s homophonic and polyphonic compositions is his expressive use of circle progressions, or apparent harmonic motion in the bass by descending fifths. These enigmatic pseudo-Rameauian bass lines are remarkable because of Victoria’s historical status as a pre-tonal composer.

Recent scholarship on the progressive aspects of Victoria’s cadential rhetoric has sought a common ground between the prima and seconda prattica at the turn of the seventeenth century (Adams 2011). The present paper adds to this radical reception by discussing the implications of Victoria’s circle progressions vis-à-vis the analysis of early music and the history of music theory. For the former, one must decide what combination of “historicist” and “presentist” methodologies will yield the best insights into the peculiarities of Victoria’s musical language. In this vein, my study seeks to identify early exemplars of an emerging harmonic compositional style within an ostensibly modal environment. The historiographer, conversely, must revisit the general origins of functional tonality and also question the roles of recursive formulas, the emancipation of the bass voice, methods of vertical composition, and sixteenth-century theoretical discussions in particular. The treatment and description of descending fifth progressions in a sixteenth-century treatise by the Spanish theorist Santa Maria may provide evidence for the apparent historical paradox found in select passages of Victoria’s oeuvre: common eighteenth-century harmonic figures within the context of a late-sixteenth-century repertoire.

A common technique in fugal writing is to allow subject entries to overlap with the cadential articulations of phrases. I refer to this technique as “thematic overlap.” Theorists from Bach’s time observed how it contributes to rhythmic fluidity, and more recent theorists have investigated it as well. I am particularly interested in the rhythmic implications of what I call “deep” thematic overlap, in which a subject entry begins well before the cadential harmony that joins two overlapping phrases, so that it is effectively transected by this harmony. This technique is especially conspicuous, and rhythmically essential, in some of Bach’s Weimar fugues that replicate the “motoric” rhythmic—or tonal-rhythmic—drive of the Italian concerto style, a propulsive quality that emerges in these fugues from the design of their subjects, which foreground sequential Fortspinnung as a constructive element. With deep thematic overlap, subjects appear to enter “midstream,” allowing this tonal-rhythmic mobility to endure for long stretches of time.

The Fantasy and Fugue in A Minor, BWV 944, contains many very clear examples of deeply overlapping subject entries. To understand their role in maintaining mobile rhythmic qualities, I suggest that their gestural identities emerge as a significant shaping force. Moreover, I argue that this work applies the principle of deep thematic overlap systematically, with clear differentiation between entries that do and do not apply it. This differentiation, I argue, coordinates masterfully with the fugue’s form, as I demonstrate through the analysis of selected passages.

This paper is about one of the deep-seated assumptions at the core of music-analytical discourse: that mathematical relations and poetic expressions in music are in the relationship of discursive doubles—two aspects of some reality that is intrinsically neither mathematical nor poetic. Through a critical reading of David Lewin’s works, this paper explores to what extent and in what sense musical mathemes and meaning can be integrated rather than loosely coupled. Specifically, it seeks to answer the following questions: Is Lewin an “author,” a founder of a discourse? If so, what is that discourse’s identifying characteristic? Aren’t there perhaps two incompatible Lewins: a Platonist who believes the task of a music-analytical matheme is to interrupt the power of poem/sophistry; and a Platonist who, having explored certain limits, also draws on poetic experience and its spontaneous consequences? The paper attempts to revisit Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations, not as a site of an integral formalism but as a process of a far-reaching transformation, and to argue that Lewin did not draw on group theory to the point of turning it into a kind of dogmatism. Rather, he used both mathematics and musical examples in order to explain mathemes in music that had been in tension with the prevalent analytical methods. While Lewinian mathemes function against the metonymic slide inherent in any process of communication—as originally meant by the neologism—their primary aim is to give an expression to certain perceptions that step out of the preexisting perspectives of music analysis.

In his exposition on the nature of Dasein, or the experience of being, Martin Heidegger uses an example of tool use to illustrate his concept of readiness-to-hand. Stated simply, it is the way in which objects in the world present themselves to us in an ordinary manner, the kind that underlies our everyday understanding of doing something in order to achieve a specific goal. This idea of action unmitigated by reflection and mental operations serves as the starting point for the present paper, where I argue that musical understanding is fundamentally constituted in how listeners move to music. More to the point, the theoretical position which I advance is that actions performed to music––such as dancing, conducting, or even playing “air” instruments––are evidence of a procedural understanding of music’s temporal processes. By drawing on recent work in embodied cognition, as well as my own empirical motion-capture studies of listeners, I show that procedural understanding constitutes the basis of the ways in which we form conceptions about our world. Finally, I posit that, by following the temporal unfolding of music, musically engendered movements are intentional actions that shape listeners’ thought processes, and thus constitute the kind of understanding that can open the way for conceptualizing musical meanings in terms that are grounded in everyday experiences.

The idea that key distance can be measured using incremental changes in key signature is an old one, but Julian Hook’s exploration of signature transformations and Dmitri Tymoczko’s study of voice-leadings between scales have recently developed the geometric implications of key signature changes and tonal key distances.  Building on their work, my paper seeks to model tonal distance in diatonic music after the common-practice era. Though voice-leading distance contributes importantly to the sense of tonal distance between scales, in cases where a scale’s tonic changes without an accompanying signature transformation, the changing tonic alone appears to account for the tonal distance we sense.

Study of passages from post-common-practice diatonic works suggests that a “major” tonality and its “relative minor” a diatonic third below are exceptionally closely related. Furthermore, major tonalities related under diatonic transposition by t₃ or t₄ and similarly related minor tonalities also seem to be fairly if somewhat less closely related. I argue that after the common practice composers treated s₁ signature transformations as different in direction but equivalent in distance to t₄ transformations between the same scale types, and I model all of these observations concerning relative tonal distance on a two-dimensional lattice structure composed of “relative”, t₄, s₁, and T₇ transformations.  Finally, analysis of more extended passages demonstrates how an appropriate model of tonal distance can add depth to our engagement with and analysis of this music.

Ongoing debates regarding “so-called” monothematic sonatas concern the utility of the term “monothematic” and the rationale behind recapitulatory rewrites characteristic of such movements. Study of both of these issues benefits from systematic consideration of local and global voice leading, despite the likelihood that Schenker would have dismissed monothematicism as yet another “fallacious” concept. This paper demonstrates how combining Schenkerian analysis with Hepokoski and Darcy’s Sonata Theory aids comparison of themes, informs sonata exposition prototypes, and enriches discussions of recapitulatory strategies associated with Haydn’s monothematic sonatas.

Primary (P) and secondary (S) themes vary in terms of degree of monothematicism; S may be equivalent to P or retain only an incipit, a melody, or a rhythmic motive. The stronger the degree of monothematicism, the greater the ramifications are for middleground voice leading. Strongly monothematic expositions require both themes to be graphed with the same type of linear progression, necessitating alternatives to the most common Schenkerian sonata prototype.

Consideration of voice leading also provides a needed supplement to Haimo’s “Redundancy Principle” in explaining recapitulatory strategies associated with monothematic sonatas, which range from literal reiteration of P and S to alteration of the monothematic portion of S to elimination of the monothematic material altogether. Analyses of Keyboard Trio Hob. XV:14/III, String Quartet Op. 74, No.2/I, and Keyboard Sonata Hob. XVI:39/I powerfully illustrate how Schenkerian analysis contributes to a deeper understanding of the thematic, schematic, and recapitulatory issues inherent in Haydn’s “so-called” monothematic sonatas.

This presentation investigates the scalar techniques of the band Yes, particularly the relationship between surface modality and large-scale form. I will attempt to show that the band combines traditional formal/tonal concepts with a more advanced scalar thinking of the like associated with 20^th-century composers of the “scalar tradition” (Tymoczko 2004). To demonstrate these relationships, I will draw from some recent theoretical work by Tymoczko (2004/2011), Hook (2008), and Bates (2012), including the concepts of voice-leading between scales and signature transformations.

In the analytical portion of my presentation, I will first demonstrate the importance of smooth scalar voice-leading—or signature transformations involving only one added accidental (f₁ or s₁)—to Yes’s formal strategies. In “Roundabout” (1971), a scalar gap between verse and chorus is “filled in” by successive f₁ transformations. “And You And I” (1972) will be shown to exhibit a directed series of s₁ transformations over its A–B–A form, created through the maintenance of a single scale type and through an ascending-fifths pattern of pitch centers. In “The Remembering” (1973), formal symmetry is articulated in part through parallel processes of s₁ transformations in the outer sections. “Heart of the Sunrise” (1971) will demonstrate the “subset technique” (Tymoczko 2011), whereby a modular formal design is aided by the exploitation of common tones between scales that exhibit maximal (or total) pc intersection. Finally, an extended analysis of “Close to the Edge” (1972) will detail the correspondences between formal/scalar concepts and the spiritual transformation of the song’s protagonist.       

Musically gifted students are intrinsically motivated to participate in musical experiences. Whether playing an instrument or singing along with a favorite tune, these students integrate listening and active participation seamlessly in an of “symphonic hearing.” Ironically, conventional approaches to aural skills pedagogy often place students in a passive, disengaged position relative to classroom musical examples, leaving them unable to connect the requisite skills and learning objectives with other types of musical experience.

Building on the work of Nancy Rogers, Peter Schubert, Jay Rahn, and James McKay, this paper provides a coordinated set of listening strategies, solo and group improvisation exercises, and aural analysis assignments that enables advanced undergraduate and graduate students to listen attentively, actively, and productively to diatonic and chromatic harmony, cadences, modulating phrases, and sonata-length movements. In each exercise, students learn to sing and embellish a continuous harmonic “guide tone” in order to track in real time the large-scale harmonic design of a piece. I conclude by discussing the pedagogical advantages of this ear-based analytical method over more score-based approaches. By prioritizing advanced analysis-by-ear, students learn to approach the score with specific, musical, personally meaningful questions—and to discover that what may look straightforward on paper may hold delightful challenges for the ear.