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

AbstractA 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

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”

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.

AbstractThis 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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Foundations of Musical Grammar. By ZbikowskiLawrence M.. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, xiv + 255 pages.

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

AbstractA striking feature of Stravinsky’s neoclassical works is his simultaneous use of two or more topics. Robert S. Hatten (2014) has defined this process as troping, which involves four axes or “dimensions along which an imported topic and its potential tropological interaction may be marked with respect to its new environment,” defined as degrees of compatibility, dominance, creativity, and productivity

AbstractThis article presents an overview of a new pre-cadential schema in the galant style: the Volta. The Volta is a two-part schema featuring a prominent chromatic reversal: stage one charges up the dominant with a ♯4^–5^ melodic string, while stage two releases to the tonic using a ♮4^–3^ string. The schema sheds light on many aspects of galant music-making: its variants illustrate how central

eytan agmon, Professor of Music Theory at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, specializes in the theory and analysis of tonal music, a rubric that includes Schenkerian analysis, rhythm, harmony, chromaticism, music and text, and cognitive and mathematical aspects of the tonal system. His 2013 Springer book, The Languages of Western Tonality, sums up three decades of research initiated by his 1986 CUNY doctoral

AbstractJessie Ann Owens marshaled evidence of a stage in Renaissance compositional process that did not use writing; Julie Cumming believes it was composers’ training as choirboys, which included improvisation, that enabled them to do this; and I propose that what they were doing was contrapunto pensado, Lusitano’s “thought-out” counterpoint, a category lying between on-the-spot improvisation and

AbstractToward the end of his 2012 book, Audacious Euphony, Richard Cohn asks, “how does music that is heard to be organized by diatonic tonality [as in the age of Mozart] become music that is heard to be organized in some other way [as in the age of Webern]”? In the present article, a theory different from Cohn’s is offered as answer. The theory’s three sub-theories, harmonic hierarchy, within-key

Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music: New Tools in Music Theory and Analysis. By LochheadJudy. New York: Routledge, 2016, xiv + 179 pages.

Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era. By RitcheyMarianna. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019, 224 pages.

AbstractThe reception of Johannes Lippius’s path-breaking conception of the triad chiefly relies upon his treatise Synopsis musicae novae. Yet Lippius first published most of his ideas in texts called “disputations,” whose genre-specific peculiarities have been overlooked. By situating Lippius’s writings within the early-modern university system, this essay reveals an important instance of how demands

AbstractA characteristic technique of Karol Szymanowski’s middle-period style (1914–18) is “keyboard bitonality”: the juxtaposition of the black-key pentatonic and white-key diatonic scales. To explore Szymanowski’s treatment of keyboard bitonality, I introduce the scalar alignment network, a biscalar landscape of all possible pairings of black- and white-key pitch classes that highlights the effects

AbstractThis article explores common approaches taken by drummers when playing music with a quintuple or septuple groove. Based on original analysis from a corpus of 350 songs released during the half-century between 1967 and 2017, I show that these grooves fall into three categories: undifferentiated, in which the drum/s and/or cymbal/s that mark each attack do not change in the course of the groove;

AbstractThis article explores the manner in which Prokofiev’s interpolation of unrelated material in the middle of a traditional theme-space ironizes a seemingly normative sonata process in the first movement of his Second Piano Sonata (1912). By serving as the motivic, tonal, and rhetorical source of much that follows, this interpolation launches a quietly subversive counternarrative that threatens

AbstractMost analysts consider a song either to be in a single key or to exhibit competition or ambiguity among multiple possible keys. This article proposes an alternative in which two keys combine to create a coherent, stable tonality. I adapt Robert Bailey’s concept of the “double-tonic complex” to demonstrate that in many rock songs, relative major and minor keys coexist with neither superior to

This article explores Schubert’s distinctive handling of the period theme-type, focusing on a particular kind of period that appears often in his Lieder: the idyllic period. Schubert’s idyllic periods are characterized by their symmetry, diatonicism, transparent voice-leading structure, simple piano texture, and association with poems about nostalgia and hopefulness. I analyze three representative

This article argues that Beethoven’s Arietta Variations inscribe the activity of listening in their own melodic and harmonic processes. The argument proceeds from two observations: (1) that tonality anticipates the listening subject in the form of a “desire” to progress from dominant to tonic; (2) that the temporal representation produced by analysis is always minimally dislocated from the time of