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Closed, Closing, and Close to Closure: The Nineteenth-Century “Closing Theme” Problem as Exemplified in Mendelssohn’s Sonata Practice Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2024-08-10 Benedict Taylor
There is little theoretical consensus on what constitutes a closing theme in a sonata-form exposition. William Caplin’s formal-functional theory essentially rejects the notion, while conversely it is upheld in James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy’s sonata theory. For them, a “C-theme” is defined contextually, as occurring after a decisive cadence. Yet there appear to be exceptions to this rule, more prevalent
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Narrative and Tonal Structure in Herrmann’s Score for Vertigo Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2024-07-12 Oğuz Şehİraltı
This article examines the relationship between tonal and narrative structures in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo. I argue that this relationship is reciprocal and that Bernard Herrmann’s score for the film affects the perception of the plot despite the generally accepted conventions of understanding film music as subordinate to overall cinematic structure. Using methodologies ranging from Schenkerian
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Theorizing Musical Improvisation for Social Analysis Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2024-07-12 Ryan Martin
The connections between musical improvisation and society are a topic of frequent scholarly interest. These investigations take a range of analytical approaches, often adapted to the specifics of the improvised musicking being examined. This paper synthesizes existing concepts and theories to produce a framework for improvisation that is applicable to the social analysis of a wide range of improvisatory
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Hermeneutic Limits; or, When Not to Theorize: Notes for Interpreting Our Phoenix by Trans Indigenous Mexican-American Composer Mari Esabel Valverde Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2024-07-12 Gavin S K Lee
Trans composers, like other people marginalized by race, gender, or sexuality, are often caught in the trap of identity constructs, which both envoice minorities and also pigeonhole their possible range of musical expression. In this essay on US-based transgender Indigenous Mexican choral composer Mari Esabel Valverde, I let my consideration of “trans music theory” be guided by her view that writers
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Contrapuntal Parody and Transsymphonic Narrative in Mahler’s Rondo-Burleske Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2024-07-02 Sam Reenan
This article deconstructs the intersections of form, counterpoint, and narrative that contribute to parody in the third movement Rondo-Burleske of Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. Motivic counterpoint problematizes the movement’s main rondo theme, placing initial cracks in the movement’s rondo façade. Through thematic and formal counterpoint, the rondo genre itself destabilizes as signifiers of sonata-form
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Lyricist as Analyst: Rhyme Scheme as Music-Setting in the Great American Songbook Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-12-24 John Y Lawrence
Although most songwriting teams in the Great American Songbook wrote music first and lyrics second, most studies of music-text interaction in this repertoire still evince a lyrics-first mindset, in which the music is viewed as text-setting. In this article, I propose the opposite approach: considering lyrics as a form of music-setting, in which the lyricist’s superimposition of a verbal form (the rhyme
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Adventures in Tonal Gravity: George Russell’s Analysis of Maurice Ravel’s “Forlane” Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 Marc E Hannaford
George Russell conceptualized his Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization as a theory of tonality. He includes an analysis of the opening of Maurice Ravel’s “Forlane” from Le Tombeau de Couperin in the fourth and final edition of his text to demonstrate what his theory—“The Concept”—offers for the analysis of Western art music. This article takes Russell’s claim seriously, discusses The Concept
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Antifocal Anaphoras in Hip-Hop Vocals Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-10-10 Mitchell Ohriner
This article examines the pitch content of the delivery of anaphoric lyrics in hip-hop. Anaphoric lyrics consist of lines with a reiterated beginning and a novel ending. Because new information is presented at the ends of lines, the “linguistic focus” of the line is at the end. Therefore, from the standpoint of intonational phonetics, pitch height would tend to rise to highlight the new information
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Models for Mozart’s Transitions: A Transatlantic Exchange Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-08-22 Nathan John Martin, Ulrich Kaiser
This research note comprises two interlinked texts. The first is a short essay that, developing ideas from Ulrich Kaiser’s (2009) article on Mozart’s transitions, isolates and theorizes a particular transition pattern (the “Prinner transition”) and then illustrates with a series of analyses. The second is a response from Kaiser clarifying the difference between Gjerdingen’s Prinner and his own 4^−1^
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Zarlino’s Comporre di fantasia and Canon Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-08-17 Peter Schubert
In the Istitutioni harmoniche, Zarlino describes a compositional process in which a countermelody that is introduced against a principal soggetto can itself become a soggetto for the next phrase, and the process can be repeated in subsequent phrases. This study shows how comporre di fantasia functions in passages from Martini, Févin, Isaac, and Josquin. The technique can also inform our understanding
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Bins, Spans, and Tolerance: Three Theories of Microtiming Behavior Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-07-31 Anne Danielsen, Mats Johansson, Chris Stover
This study compares three recent theories of expressive microtiming in music. While each theory was originally designed to engage a particular musical genre—Anne Danielsen’s beat bins for funk, Neo-Soul, and other contemporary Black musical expressions, Chris Stover’s beat span for “timeline musics” from Africa and the African diaspora, and Mats Johansson’s rhythmic tolerance for Scandinavian fiddle
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Graphing Deep Hypermeter in the Scherzo Movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-07-20 Richard Cohn
This paper reinterprets my 1992 analysis of the scherzo of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony using more recently introduced modes of representation: ski-hill graphs, ski-path networks, and metric cubes. It provides a tutorial on the three metric modes of representation, while using those modes to reveal different aspects of the scherzo’s metric form. It presents evidence in support of the proposition
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Leitmotivic Strategies in Nobuo Uematsu’s Final Fantasy Soundtracks Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Richard Anatone
This article discusses Nobuo Uematsu’s leitmotivic soundtracks to the 16-bit Final Fantasy role-playing games. I identify five distinct techniques within these soundtracks whereby a game’s main theme is musically connected to a single character theme: eponymous omission, motivic networking, thematic hybridization, associative troping, and the double main theme. I argue that these different techniques
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Take Care Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-04-26 Stephen Lett
In this rejoinder, I elaborate on the uncomfortable and foundational call of “Making a Home of the Society for Music Theory, Inc.”: the necessity of abolition as at once the destruction of our colonial/capitalist worlding and the building of a life-affirming world otherwise. Bringing to the fore a couple of backgrounds to my writing—early career transience and building community with unhoused residents
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Extreme Meter Changes and Tempo Giusto in Some Songs by Brahms Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-02-23 Wing Lau
This article examines how changing time signatures correspond with metric dissonance and the flux in metric consonance in Brahms’s songs, with a particular focus on expressive dimensions and Brahms’s relationship with historical metric modes. “Unbewegte laue Luft” is an extreme case of metric dissonance, juxtaposing meters of antithetical metric relations to underscore equally antithetical poetic meanings
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The Predominant Six-Four in the Late Music of Richard Strauss Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-02-08 Kyle Hutchinson
This article examines a unique family of six-four sonorities in the works of Richard Strauss. These six-fours typically sound with 6^, 4^, or 2^ (or modal variants thereof) in the bass but occur immediately prior to a cadential dominant, and thus impart a sense of predominant function despite their unstable inversion. In examining how the sixth and fourth behave, I suggest that rather than hearing
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Combinatorics, Composition, Copia: Mersenne’s Permutations as Rhetoric of Abundance Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-02-07 André Redwood
This article seeks to explain the meaning and function of Mersenne’s exhaustive lists of note permutations. As is true for all of Mersenne’s labors, the permutations are at their deepest level explicable in terms of his religious commitments—in this case, his faith in the ineffable plenitude of God’s creation. Yet, Mersenne also intended the permutations and the combinatorial procedures that generate
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How SMT Could Become More Welcoming Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-02-03 Noriko Manabe
Continuing Stephen Lett’s (2023) argument that pedagogy was undervalued by SMT at its inception, this essay considers the signs and implications of continued marginalization of teaching. While position statements can influence the atmosphere of a society, they are peripheral to its operations, which determine who is included or excluded. SMT could help expand the pipeline for women and minoritized
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O Give Me a Home Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-02-03 Patrick McCreless
This essay examines Stephen Lett’s (2023) critique of North American music theory in general, and of the Society for Music Theory in particular, from the point of view of the binary inclusion/exclusion. Drawing on my own experience, I acknowledge that in many respects his critique of the Society for Music Theory (SMT), from its very inception, as creating an exclusionary, “stratified” space, is on
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Orienting to Pedagogical Service Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-02-03 Catrina S Kim
This essay considers the Society for Music Theory’s valuations of research, service, and pedagogy in light of Sara Ahmed’s (2006) reflections on orientation and labor. Ahmed’s description of the philosopher’s writing table turns attention to the domestic labor that creates the conditions for the very work of philosophizing; by bringing this analysis to bear on Stephen Lett’s “Making a Home of The Society
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Who Does the Society for Music Theory Gather? Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-02-03 Leigh VanHandel
An important question in Stephen Lett’s provocative article is K’eguro Macharia’s, “Who is gathered by your invitation?” (2021). Lett outlines how the founders of the Society for Music Theory staked out territory for the discipline to establish theorists as separate from composers, musicologists, and pedagogues, and how they assessed who was to be invited by determining what theory as a discipline
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Undisciplined Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-02-03 Judith Lochhead
My response to Stephen Lett initially takes a “glass half full” perspective on the current state of the Society for Music Theory, showing that in the early years of the Society there were substantive activities through what would become the Committee on the Status of Women (CSW) to diversify membership and work against biases. I provide a historical accounting of these activities from 1985 to 1995
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Making a Home of The Society for Music Theory, Inc. Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-12-16 Stephen Lett
This article studies the values animating the profession of music theory in the North American academy. Focusing on the creation and development of the field’s institutional home, the Society for Music Theory, Inc., I argue that professional music theory’s homemaking project was first built—and continues to operate—on exclusionary and assimilationist world-building practices. To conclude, I ask how
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The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory. Edited by Alexander Rehding and Steven Rings Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-01-29 Chung A.
The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory. Edited by RehdingAlexanderRingsSteven. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2019, xviii + 829 pages.
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Becoming and Beyond: Applying Goethe’s Progressive and Retrogressive Metamorphosis to Fanny Hensel’s Piano Sonatas Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-11-22 Tyler Osborne
Abstract Over the last decade, Janet Schmalfeldt’s concept of “becoming” has provided groundwork to evaluate how ambiguous formal moments gradually come into focus through the practice of retrospective reinterpretation. I supplement Schmalfeldt’s Hegelian perspective with concepts drawn from Goethe’s botanical studies to propose a type of becoming that is not limited to retrospective reinterpretation
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Erratum Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-10-27
Correction in Ian Sewell, “When All You Have is a Hammer: Surface/Depth as Good Comparison,” Music Theory Spectrum, 43 (2): 197–220.
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Contributors Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-09-14
CHRISTOPHER BRODY is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Louisville. He holds a Ph.D. from Yale University as well as a DMA from the University of Minnesota, and has previously served on the faculties of Indiana University and the Eastman School of Music. In 2019, he was the winner of the Society for Music Theory’s Emerging Scholar Award for his article “Parametric Interaction
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Composing the World: Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos. By Andrew Hicks Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-08-03 Fulkerson J.
Composing the World: Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos. By HicksAndrew. Critical Conjunctures in Music and Sound Series, edited by MorenoJairo and SteingoGavin. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, xix + 321 pages.
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Rethinking Sonata Failure: Mendelssohn’s Overture Zum Märchen von der schönen Melusine Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-07-17 Julian Horton
This article counterpoints James Hepokoski’s notion of sonata failure (Hepokoski 2002; Hepokoski and Darcy 2006) and the concept of “becoming” advocated by Janet Schmalfeldt (2011) as analytical tools in the developing field of Romantic Formenlehre. Taking Mendelssohn’s overture Zum Märchen von der schönen Melusine as a case study, it develops a taxonomy of process for Romantic form, which is applied
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Norms of Textual Scansion and Rhyme in Beatles AABA forms Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-09-08 David Heetderks
In AABA songs (sometimes called verse–bridge songs) written and performed by the Beatles, the song texts’ scansion and rhyme show significant contrasts between different sections, and these contrasts often have important formal and narrative functions. Combining rock Formenlehre with phonetic analysis, this article shows that A modules tend to have irregular scansion and frequent rhyme, while B modules
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Bang your Head: Construing Beat through Familiar Drum Patterns in Metal Music Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-09-08 Stephen S Hudson
This article presents a theoretical framework for understanding headbanging to metal music as an embodied practice of perception and offers several analyses to demonstrate how specific patterns serve as a common core of rhythmic patterning in the genre. Listeners express metal’s flexible rhythmic style through headbanging, creating experiences of heaviness and community. This motion brings felt beats
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The Times are A-Changin’: Metric Flexibility and Text Expression in 1960s and 1970s Singer-Songwriter Music Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-09-08 Nancy Murphy
In 1960s and 1970s singer-songwriter music, some artists used a malleable approach to meter in performance that resulted in songs with extremes of self-expressive timing flexibility that cannot be accounted for by using a single conception of meter. As a solution, this article draws together theories of metric hierarchy, metrical reinterpretation, and metric process to develop the theory of flexible
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Structure and Variable Formal Function in Schubert’s Three-Key Expositions Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-09-08 Aaron Grant
Few expositional procedures have permitted so diverse a repertoire of form-functional explanations as the three-key exposition. Ever since Felix Salzer coined the term, theorists have attempted to model these structures, particularly in relation to Schubert’s sonata-form expositions. Although authors have proposed a number of different options, no consensus has emerged, leading many theorists to equivocate
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A Grid in Flux: Sound and Timing in Electronic Dance Music Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-09-08 Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen, Bjørnar Sandvik, Jon Marius Aareskjold-Drecker, Anne Danielsen
Researchers have argued that temporal microdeviations from the metric grid, such as those produced by musicians in performance, are crucial to making a musical rhythm groovy and danceable. It is curious, then, that the music currently dominating the dance floor, “electronic dance music” or EDM, is typically characterized by grid-based rhythms. But is such a “mechanistic,” grid-based aesthetic necessarily
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Living Toys in Thomas Adès’s Living Toys: Transforming the Post-Tonal Topic Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-08-14 James Donaldson
Through an analysis of Thomas Adès’s (b. 1971) early chamber orchestra work Living Toys (1993), this article explores how pitch material associated with certain topics and topic-like objects can function as nodes of a transformational network. I build a network from two perspectives: first, three topics are related through Expansion (EXP) and Compression (CMP) transformations, and second, two further
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To “Fill Up, Completely, the Whole Capacity of the Mind”: Listening with Attention in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-08-14 Carmel Raz
This essay explores a hitherto unsuspected intellectual relationship among three important thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. The great philosopher and economist Adam Smith is known to have had a conception of instrumental music exceptional for his time in its foreshadowing of ideas generally associated with Eduard Hanslick. As I show here, Smith’s views were decisively influenced by the psychological
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Webs of Meaning in John Corigliano’s Tarantellas Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-06-12 Cara Stroud
The final movement of John Corigliano’s Gazebo Dances (1972)—a light-hearted suite for two pianos—and the second movement of his Symphony No. 1 (1988)—dedicated to friends lost to AIDS—use the same tarantella refrain as their main thematic material, revealing opposing associations possible with tarantellas. Corigliano’s earlier work exemplifies the witty virtuosity of what I describe as a “humorous”
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When All You Have is a Hammer: Surface/Depth as Good Comparison Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-05-26 Ian Sewell
This article interrogates and reimagines the approach to reductive music analysis characterized by spatial metaphors (like “underlying” harmony). Such language portrays analysis as the process of discovering a structure “beneath” a piece’s “surface.” I argue that this picture downplays the multi-faceted, varied processes that go into creating musical reductions. Examining details of several different
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Erratum Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-05-24
Correction in Peter Schubert, “Contrapunto Fugato: A First Step Toward Composing in the Mind,” Music Theory Spectrum 42 (2): 260–279. This article was originally published with an incorrect citation. The first Canguilhem 2017 citation should have appeared as Cumming 2017. This has been corrected online and is reproduced below. The publisher regrets this error.
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Contributors Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-03-16
chelsea burns, Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Texas at Austin, studies Latin American modernisms as well as bluegrass and country music. Her research focuses on analysis in context and the ethics of analysis as it relates to marginalized repertories. Recent articles have appeared in Music Theory Online and Journal of Popular Music Studies.
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Voice Leading: The Science Behind a Musical Art. By David Huron. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016, vii + 263 pages Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-04-26 Farbood M.
One might argue that David Huron’s last book, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation, which won the Society for Music Theory’s Wallace Berry Award in 2007, is a tough act to follow.11Sweet Anticipation has become an instant classic with a significant multi-disciplinary impact, as indicated by its 2742 citations on Google Scholar (as of February 2021). This leads naturally to high
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Musical Illusions and Phantom Words: How Music and Speech Unlock Mysteries of the Brain. By Diana Deutsch Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-03-07 Shanahan D.
Musical Illusions and Phantom Words: How Music and Speech Unlock Mysteries of the Brain. By DeutschDiana. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019, xviii + 243 pages.
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The Enigma of Entropy in Extended Tonality Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-02-17 Smith K.
AbstractThis article considers music that stages the decline of the tonal system through “entropy”—the process conceived in the domain of thermodynamics by which energy is wasted through randomized dispersal or decrease in organization. Tonal organization faced challenges at the turn of the twentieth century, much of the music possessing a sense of tonal drive but with an increased array of outlets
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Steve Reich’s Signature Rhythm and an Introduction to Rhythmic Qualities Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-02-06 Yust J.
AbstractThe rhythm of Steve Reich’s Clapping Music (1972) features in so many of his pieces that it can be understood as a rhythmic signature. A theory of rhythmic qualities allows us to identify the signature rhythm’s significant features and relate it to other cyclic rhythms like the Central/West African “standard pattern,” from which it probably originates. Rhythmic qualities derive from the discrete
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“Musique cannibale”: The Evolving Sound of Indigeneity in Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Tres poêmas indigenas Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-01-12 Burns C.
AbstractHeitor Villa-Lobos’s Tres poêmas indigenas (1926, published 1929) provide an unusual image of Brazilian indigeneity: in three short songs, he creates a narrative of progress, one that ends with redefining himself and modernist colleague Mário de Andrade as Amerindian. The first two songs set melodies collected in 1557 and 1912, the third a new poem by Andrade (1926). The set begins with a narrow
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Metric Manipulations in Post-Tonal Music Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-01-09 Sullivan J.
AbstractThis article explores the continued use of eighteenth-century metric manipulations by composers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These manipulations, called imbroglio, close imitation, and imitative imbroglio, are motive-driven and involve the perceptual interaction of meter, motivic parallelism, and perceptual streaming. Their defining features and local perceptual effects, which
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Music Theory’s White Racial Frame Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-03-11 Philip Ewell
For over twenty years, music theory has tried to diversify with respect to race, yet the field today remains remarkably white, not only in the people who practice music theory but also in the race of the composers and theorists whose work music theory privileges. In this article, I offer a few explanations for why this is so. I posit a music-theoretical “white racial frame” that is structural and institutionalized
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Second-Reprise Opening Schemas in Bach’s Binary Movements Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-03-11 Christopher Brody
A harmonic pattern, termed the V–I schema, is shown to structure most of the second-reprise openings in Bach’s binary movements. This pattern combines cross-repertoire harmonic consistency with context-dependent prolongational variability, a juxtaposition that causes intractable contradictions to emerge within Schenkerian theory. The schematic aspect to early eighteenth-century tonality suggested by
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From Exoticism to Interculturalism: Counterframing the East–West Binary Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-03-06 Yayoi U Everett
This essay addresses the need to expand the musical repertory for analysis beyond the western canon, as well as to develop intercultural strategies for analysis that reflect the multicultural subject positions of composers, performers, and theorists. In my area of specialization, discourses on exoticism, transculturation, Orientalism, and globalization have provided frameworks for examining music composed
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Segmentation, Phrasing, and Meter in Hip-Hop Music Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-02-08 Ben Duinker
This article proposes a theory of flow (the rapped vocals of hip-hop music) segmentation, phrasing, and meter that considers the way linguistic, syntactic, articulative, and corporeal aspects of rapping engage with vocal rhythm and its grouping structures. While flow is organized into phrases, hip-hop beats (the sampled or instrumental accompaniment) typically express a periodic, looped, highly repetitive
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Naming the Frames that Shape Us Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-02-07 Elizabeth West Marvin
This introduction provides context for the Society for Music Theory’s 2019 plenary session, “Reframing Music Theory.” These four papers together confront the frames of race, ethnicity, nationality, ability, gender, and sexuality that have bounded music theory and music theorists for generations, constraining what our discipline can be. They explore underlying reasons for the lack of diversity in the
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Music Theory’s Therapeutic Imperative and the Tyranny of the Normal Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-01-25 Joseph Straus
Traditional music theory rationalizes abnormal musical elements (like dissonant or chromatic tones or formal anomalies) with respect to normal ones. It is thus allied with a medical model of disability, understood as a deficit or defect located within an individual body, and requiring remediation or cure. A newer sociocultural model of disability understands it as a culturally stigmatized deviance
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Undersurface Sequences Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-01-13 Ram Reuven
An undersurface sequence is a type of motivic parallelism that unifies parallel patterns into a single sequential unit. This article focuses on various undersurface sequences that leading Schenkerian scholars, including Schenker himself, integrated into their voice-leading graphs without explicitly pointing them out. The phenomenon is discussed according to different levels of distance from the surface
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End-Accented Sentences: Towards a Theory of Phrase-Rhythmic Progression Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-01-06 Ng S.
AbstractFor centuries, theorists have debated whether musical phrases are normatively beginning-accented or end-accented. The last two decades of the twentieth century gave beginning-accented rhythm the upper hand; yet, recent work on end-accented phrases has reinvigorated the debate. I contribute to this discussion in two ways. First, I aim to rehabilitate a central position of end-accented rhythm
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Getting to Count Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-01-03 Ellie M Hisama
The Society for Music Theory (SMT) remains a starkly male-identified society. According to the SMT’s 2019 annual report on demographics of its membership, 33% of SMT members self-identified as women—a figure that has not changed significantly over the last five years—in comparison to 51.2% of American Musicological Society members in 2017 and 52.2% of Society for Ethnomusicology members in 2014, the
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On the Nonindependent Parts of Time-Consciousness: Husserl’s Early Phenomenological Investigations and the Perception of Melody Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2020-12-22 Wiskus J.
AbstractDrawing upon Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, I apply the laws of mereology—the study of parts and wholes—to the analysis of time-consciousness in his On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), arguing that Husserl’s phenomenological solution to problems raised by empirical psychology in the late nineteenth century concerning the relation between subject
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Perceiving the Mosaic: Form in the Mashups of DJ Earworm Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2020-12-18 Yunek J, Wadsworth B, Needle S.
AbstractThe formal analysis of mashups is generally overlooked because their structures are assumed to be derived from one or more of their component tracks. This article explores the generation of original formal structures in one of the most well-known and complex mashup artists, DJ Earworm. We show that the form of his mashups can neither be derived from a singular work nor be analyzed by their
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Music, Analysis, and the Body: Experiments, Explorations, and Embodiments. Edited by Nicholas Reyland and Rebecca Thumpston Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2020-12-12 Trevor C.
Music, Analysis, and the Body: Experiments, Explorations, and Embodiments. Edited by ReylandNicholas and ThumpstonRebecca. Leuven Studies in Musicology: Analysis in Context, Volume 6. Leuven, Belgium: Uitgeverij Peeters, 2018, xvii + 329 pages.
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Foundations of Musical Grammar. By Lawrence M. Zbikowski Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2020-12-12 Reybrouck M.
Foundations of Musical Grammar. By ZbikowskiLawrence M.. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, xiv + 255 pages.
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Erratum Music Theory Spectrum (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2020-12-03
Correction in Composing Captial: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era. By Marianna Ritchey. Reviewed by Bryan Parkhurst. Footnote 7 should read: “Rings (2018).” The citation for Harrison, Daniel. 2000/2001. “A Story, an Apologia, and a Survey.” Intégral 14/15: 29–37 was missing from the Works Cited. These errors occurred in the online version of the review and have been corrected. The publisher regrets