While research on Victorian music-evolutionism has flourished over the past quarter century, scholars have continued to overlook women’s contributions to early music-evolutionary thought (Brotman 2005; Bolt 2010; Zon 2014; Bannan 2016; Zon 2017; Piilonen 2024). This paper addresses that gap and furthers recent work on historical women in music theory (Raz 2018a, 2018b; Lumsden 2020, 2022; Venturino 2024). I focus on one notable—yet presently neglected—female music theorist-evolutionist, Mrs. F. J. Hughes, whose Harmonies of Tones and Colours Developed by Evolution (1883) garnered considerable contemporaneous attention in Britain and America.
 
Hughes connects theories of music and color with the evolutionary ideas of her cousin, Charles Darwin. She also employs copious theological language, ostensibly intimating a higher purpose. I argue that Hughes’s idiosyncratic brand of “Christian Darwinisticism” influences and ultimately distorts her music-theoretical ideas (Moore 1979). But while she may not convincingly explain harmonic practice, Hughes uses music theory to perform an equally significant type of labor: mediating between the scientific and religious discourses of her time.  
 
In conclusion, I examine the historiographical lessons learned from “taking a look” at Hughes’s music-theoretical mythmaking (Hacking 2002; Martin 2019). Beyond providing insight into Victorian intellectual culture, study of her “failed” music theory reveals persistent strains of positivism in our field and encourages us to expose modern mythmaking in our histories of music theory.

American composer and educator Howard Hanson’s 1960 treatise Harmonic Materials of Modern Music: Resources of the Tempered Scale receives scant mention in comprehensive literature reviews on pitch-class set theory. Contemporary writings by theorists George Perle, David Lewin, and Allen Forte historically enjoy greater circulation, reducing Hanson's treatise to a stepping-stone in set theory development. Hanson was the first to enumerate all sets by reducing them to 224 at the 1951 general meeting of the American Philosophical Society [APS]. An in-progress accession order of the Howard Hanson Collection—compiled by archivist David Peter Coppen at the Sibley Music Library—presents new archival evidence that extends traditional history of theory narratives. Our findings place Hanson’s pioneering proto-set theory work in the Eastman School of Music as early as 1940, suggesting his theories were taught to a generation of composers and theorists through 1964.

Testimonials by composer-theorists William Bergsma and Robert V. Sutton confirm the widespread use of Hanson’s theories in Eastman classrooms. This paper primarily focuses on the undergraduate application of Hanson’s theory, with a previously unknown and unpublished projected theory textbook manuscript intended as an addition to volume ten of the New Scribner Music Library. Our methodology follows Atkinson and Nowacki’s untangling of the multiple layers of the Alia musica. Hanson’s 1960 text acts as the core treatise of his completed theory, allowing comparison between the 1960 proof copy and the 1951 APS presentation. The core treatise provides the backdrop for the undergraduate projected theory textbook assembled between 1960 and 1966.

In Joseph Kerman's 1980 essay, “How We Got into Music Analysis, and How to Get out,” he performs a critical evaluation of the ideological baggage associated with organicism, a philosophy typically associated with German idealism and nineteenth-century aesthetics. Through the organicist lens and its Romanticized vision of nature, compositional structure is seen to reflect ideals like unity, coherence, teleological clarity, and growth from compositional seeds. We have largely accepted Kerman's argument that Forkel's 1802 biography of J.S. Bach constitutes "the origins of the ideology." However, in early eighteenth-century Scotland—a full eighty-one years and 600 miles removed from Forkel's Germany—Alexander Malcolm's work, A Treatise on Musick: Speculative, Practical, and Historical, expresses organicist descriptions of music that are more explicit than Forkel's ostensibly prototypical comments. For instance:

"We have here a Kind of Imitation of the Works of Nature, where different Things are wonderfully joined in one harmonious Unity: [...] some Things appear at first View the farthest removed from Symmetry and Order, which from the Course of Things we learn to be absolutely necessary for the Perfection and Beauty of the Whole (Malcolm, 597–8)."

After presenting Malcolm's influences and the organicist ideals that serve as a condition of possibility for Forkel's somewhat successful attempts to claim musical organicism for Germanic music, I argue that musical organicism is both older and more metropolitan than previously understood. Given that musical organicism is one of our most persistent and entrenched pieces of mythos, we misplace its origins at our peril.

Building on the theoretical writings of Taneyev (1909, 1929), this paper introduces an original method for deriving all possible three-voice infinite canons with equidistant voice entries in first-species counterpoint from any trichord. In contrast to previous approaches—which typically rely on linear melodic or harmonic processes (Collins, 2008; Gossman, 1997; Morris, 1995, 2004; Murphy, 2019), or depend on trial-and-error methods prone to error and incompleteness (Marpurg, 1753–55; Prout, 1891; Gedalge, 1901)—this study adopts a more fundamental approach by taking a single chord as the point of departure. It demonstrates that all three-voice infinite canons can be understood as the symmetrical unfolding of a trichord and offers a new lens for examining the mutual constraints between harmony and canon. Analytically, its stylistic neutrality allows for the identification of canonic potential across a wide range of musical styles; compositionally, it serves as a flexible and generative tool for crafting canonic textures in diverse idioms.

This paper investigates Janelle Monáe’s transforming music persona. In her first three albums (2007–2010), Monáe portrays a time-traveling, messianic android. Upon the release of Dirty Computer (2018), Monáe sheds the android narrative to prioritize one of self-expression. My work aims to decipher the role of Monáe’s shifting persona throughout her discography: what does the android contribute to her musical expression, and what, then, do we gain in its place once the android is gone? I begin by summarizing literature on the android in popular culture (Jordan, 2016), its significance in feminist studies (Haraway 2004), and how Monáe uses it to deliver overt implications of racialized and gendered injustices (Yates-Richard, 2021). I then present analyses of two of Monae’s music videos: “Tightrope (Feat. Big Boi)” (2010) and “Make Me Feel” (2018). I employ the methodology of Lafrance and Burns (2017) to present a cross-domain analysis of the lyrics, music, and images. Within this cross-domain framework, I apply BaileyShea’s (2014) work on shifting modes of address to convey how Monáe’s lyrics become increasingly intimate. Drawing upon the work of Maultsby (2015), I connect Monáe’s performance style to both James Brown and Prince, and I demonstrate how Monáe implements the funk style to amplify her own critique of societal norms. In the visual domain, I dissect the staging, framework, and visual gestures. My work culminates to show how Monáe frees herself from the android persona to express a more intimate portrayal of the human experience as she begins to reflect inwards.

In this presentation, I frame George Crumb’s music as an invitation to conceive of subjectivity differently. In particular, I find that Crumb’s Music for a Summer Evening stages an agential network which frustrates typical ways of discussing musical agency, in turn problematizing humanist ideologies of subjectivity. While most scholarship on musical agency adopts a humanist model—agents act willfully and can be identified—I find that Crumb’s musical self-fashioning resonates with posthumanist thinking, in which actions emerge from tangled agential networks. Building on the work of Steven Bruns (1993), I trace intertextuality in Crumb’s music in general, as well as in Music for a Summer Evening in particular. In Music for a Summer Evening, quotations of other composers, self-quotations, and conventionalized exoticism blur together. “Who is speaking?” becomes a fraught question.

To mediate between humanist and posthumanist models of musical agency, I adapt David Morgan’s (2018) work on enchantment to music. This work allows us to derive both models from networks—here, enchantment is a process where a network is subsumed into a single actor. In this conception, humanist agents emerge from enchantment; posthumanist work keeps the network in focus. Enchantment helps us shuttle between stances on musical agency, such that their claims are legible to one another. I close by considering how following what I take to be Crumb’s invitation—adopting a posthumanist ideology of subjectivity—might affect our music-analytical work.

Kidnapping, mob violence, death—that these occur in the video game Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (2004) might come as a surprise to some. Given that media aimed at children approach such difficult subjects and do so in a manner that avoids alienating their young audience, it is worth asking: how does their accompanying music mirror this phenomenon? I explore this question through a case study of how Super Mario Bros. music navigates negatively valenced emotions, like fear.

I argue that family-friendly media offset the intensity of emotionally-trying scenarios by including franchise-specific elements intended to evoke positively valenced emotions. Following Cohen (2010), Ekman (2014), and Plank (2021), I suggest that Juslin and Sakka's (2019) BRECVEMAC framework of musically-induced emotions might shed light on the cognitive mechanisms underlying how music accompanying visual media can arouse emotions.

To this end, I propose a categorical scale to classify elements present in emotionally-trying scenarios depicted in family-friendly media. I then use examples of music from haunted Mario levels to examine how elements that might evoke positively valenced emotions may counteract elements that can arouse fear. I further posit that this mitigated approach to negatively valenced emotions describes how media targeted at children broadly depict emotionally-trying scenarios. Thus, I conclude by suggesting how the methodology I employ might apply to family-friendly media at large. In doing so, I explore how these media guide children through difficult or complex subjects, thereby helping them develop life and social skills such as reflection and empathy.

Video games that heavily feature environment creation grant players unique agency as they become partial game developers. Some games that are not primarily designed for making music allow players to create music levels, which offer unique means of interacting with musical space (Hopkins 2015). In this paper, I demonstrate how music levels in Super Mario Maker 2 (SMM2) allow the player, through the main character Mario, to embody musical space. Beginning with a general overview of how different creation games incorporate music, I then analyze representative levels in SMM2 and showcase how they provide a ludomusical landscape in which Mario embodies pitch space, tempo, and form.

Level-creating mechanics in SMM2 allow players to place “note blocks” that produce sound when an entity (e.g., an item or enemy) falls on the block. The pitch of these note blocks is based on their in-game height, so by moving around and interacting with these blocks, Mario is embodying pitch space. Tempo is determined by the scrolling speed, which Mario can control through his own movement, thus embodying tempo. Finally, level creators use game mechanics—e.g., teleportation and on/off switch mechanics—to carry out musical “roadmaps” (e.g., D.C. al fine), allowing Mario to embody form by traveling from place to place. In considering pitch space, tempo, and form as three means of embodiment in SMM2, I demonstrate how ludic interaction effectively allows players to engage with musical space, not only experiencing it, but affecting it, both as level creators and as level players.

This paper offers a disablist (Straus 2021) reinterpretation of the opening measures of W. A. Mozart’s String Quartet No. 19 in C Major, K. 465 (“The Dissonance”) by integrating transformational theory with disability studies (DS), specifically disability aesthetics (Siebers 2010). Traditional analyses have treated the quartet’s tonally strange introduction as a problem to be erased (Baker 1993), mirroring societal efforts to normalize disability. I argue that transformational theory, particularly through the concept of “fuzzy transpositions” (Straus 2005), resists teleological narratives and aligns with DS principles that celebrate difference. By examining the viola’s initial motive and its transformations across the quartet, I show how these divergences foreground individuality, challenging the desire for tonal resolution. I also survey the nineteenth-century recompositions of the “Dissonance” by François-Joseph Fétis and A. C. Leduc, who sought to normalize Mozart’s irregularities (Vertrees 1974). A disablist transformational analysis embraces these asymmetries, offering new insights into Mozart’s music and inviting a reevaluation of music theory’s ethical and aesthetic priorities.

Marc Applebaum’s 2015 piece for string quartet, Darmstadt Kindergarten, disrupts visual expectations of concert performance through its use of non-instrumental, choreographed hand gestures. I employ Joseph Straus’s notion of “deaf hearing” to argue that Darmstadt Kindergarten welcomes its listeners to, per the composer, “‘hear’ the instrumental material when later voiced by choreographed action,” even when entirely silent. (Straus 2011, 167–170; Applebaum 2015).  

In Darmstadt Kindergarten, after each repetition of a theme, one of the performers rises, sets their instrument down, and performs the next repetition through carefully-synchronized hand gestures rather than instrumental sounds, such that the final repetition of the theme is entirely choreographic and ostensibly silent. In my analysis, I consider the piece’s instrumental and choreographic versions separately before outlining their relationship, highlighting how choreographic action elucidates contrapuntal and textural aspects of previously and currently heard instrumental gestures. I divide the score into ten “gestural groups,” which allows comparison between instrumental and choreographic material. Finally, I consider how the piece’s large-scale structure complicates the listener/viewer’s comprehension of the piece and requires them to engage in “silent hearing.”

I then consider how the piece’s optional introduction engages with scholarship on mimetic comprehension, bodily hearing, and motor theories of perception (Cox 2016; Mead 1999; Godøy 2019). I also discuss the relationship and difference between Applebaum’s choreographic gestures and practices of musical signing in Deaf music. Finally, I encourage further scholarship on music and performance which encourages audiences to partake in disablist or otherwise non-normative modes of hearing.

In the mid-1970s, DJ Kool Herc’s extended break beat marked what many hail as hip-hop’s birth; about twenty-five years later, Adam Krims’s 2000 study established an analytical foundation for this beat-based music untethered from traditional Western theory. Another quarter-century later, hip-hop and pop-music scholarship now boasts precise spectral studies of timbre and rich accounts of flow, meter, and sample layering. One crucial domain remains under-examined: the mix. Situated between composition (how sound information is selected and orchestrated) and perception (how listeners interpret what’s heard), mixing shapes recorded tracks through stereo imaging, side-chaining, effects chains, and equalization, transforming what was originally balancing into an intensely creative practice. This study demonstrates that mix analysis unveils sonic relationships inaccessible to conventional methods. Two case studies ground the argument. Ice Cube’s “The N*gga Ya Love to Hate” reveals how The Bomb Squad’s sample arrangement and aggressive EQ negotiate East and West Coast identities, turning mixing itself into a site of stylistic negotiation. Kendrick Lamar’s “United in Grief” portrays the mix as a narrative engine, crafting contrasts that mirror lyrical meaning. Together, these cases position production mixing as a rich, expressive process that integrates with existing frameworks and deepens our understanding of recorded musical meaning.

Can a performer influence “unfinished business” in the composer’s work? This paper examines how One-Time Occurrence (OTO) thematic material within a classical concerto movement (sonata form Type 5) may have its ‘one-timeness’ disrupted by the soloist’s reintroduction of the theme in an improvised or pre-composed cadenza. I explore the frequency of such OTOs in cadenzas and their treatment, focusing on centrality, location, tonal context, and stability. This study centers on thematic OTOs that are particularly striking and memorable: the two dramatic transition themes from the first movements of Mozart’s piano concertos K. 467 and K. 482. These themes share similarities in context and design, each occurring on the minor dominant. Since no Mozart cadenzas for these concertos survive, this study examines 81 cadenzas—either notated or recorded—by influential composers, conductors, and pianists, from the late 18th to the 21st century. The corpus spans diverse stylistic approaches, from Mozartian fidelity to Romantic aesthetics, and highlights contributions of female pianists, whose improvisational and compositional work has been largely overlooked in scholarly discourse. The dramatic transition theme often reappears in cadenzas in various ways, sometimes as a climax, implying the creator’s impulse to resolve the OTO’s isolation. In many of these instances, it returns in the tonic key, providing a reprise absent from the original movement, where it remained on the minor dominant. The findings highlight the cadenza’s potential to reshape both the movement’s design and tonal balance.

This paper expands the Anticipatory Transition (ATR) framework (Matos-Tovar 2023) by introducing a new methodological approach in 19th-century sonatas. The ATR adopts both dialogic and processual ideas to form, and analyzes musical elements such as melody and rhythm within the Transition module and identifies them as a main theme in later modules. Hepokoski and Darcy (2006), Hepokoski (2021), and Caplin (1998, 2010) raise discussions about the difficulty of Romantic Formenlehre. Moortele (2013), Horton (2017), and Richards (2013) address issues of structural identification for the Romantic period.

Schenker’s “linkage technique” connects musical elements between passages, serving as a foundation for the ATR (1980). The ATR incorporates the concept of processual form and the idea of “retrospective reinterpretation” (Schmalfeldt 2011; Carro 2020). Consequently, the ATR identifies musical characteristics within the expositions Transition. This methodology offers two original avenues in analysis; the first being a copy-and-paste, then a spun-out, and I propose an alter-and-paste ATR.

Focusing on compositions by Charles V. Alkan, Felix Mendelssohn, and Clara Wieck-Schumann, musical content within the transition module of some of their sonata-allegro movements unfolds into new melodies in subsequent modules. The alter-and-paste ATR is situated alongside the two initial avenues of methodology. Furthermore, the broadening scope of this work expands from within a single movement unto multiple movements as demonstrated in the C. Schumann Piano Sonata. These analytical findings establish an intertextual connection that promotes a sense of unity across a sonata.

This paper examines form-functional ambiguity in the scherzo of Robert Schumann’s piano sonata op. 14 (1836). Responding to two recent works on the scherzi of Mendelssohn and Brahms (Taylor 2021; McClelland 2010), I show another unique nineteenth-century approach to this form. According to Caplin’s theory of formal functions (Caplin 1998), the thematic functions of a scherzo, including main theme, transition, and subordinate theme functions, are each expressed by specific tonal regions and cadence types. Passages in the home key imply main theme function, modulations from the home key to new keys suggest transitions, and PACs in the subordinate key express subordinate theme function (Caplin 2013, 609). Schumann’s scherzi, although conventional in many other ways, conflict with the thematic function model suggested by Caplin, more than the other two composers’ works mentioned above.

In the op. 14 scherzo, Schumann’s use of unconventional key regions and nested forms contributes to this ambiguity. The exposition, which would normally express main theme function, begins and ends in the subordinate key. The contrasting middle, organized as an independent ternary form, begins and ends in the home key instead. According to Caplin’s theory, this contrasting middle expresses a stronger beginning function than the main theme. Since the key regions of each section often conflict with their formal functions, I suggest alternative parameters that express thematic functions instead. My analysis considers thematic return as well as the use of loosening devices, rather than key regions, as markers of thematic function.  

While scat singing— the jazz vocal practice of improvising with “nonsense” syllables (Kernfeld, 2002) —produces the desired timbral variety of the heterogeneous sound ideal (Wilson, 1999), the structural consequences of the phonetic or timbral patterns invites further investigation. We begin that investigation by exploring a novel corpus of musically and phonetically transcribed solos, specifically examining the distribution of syllable types in relation to musical variables like phrase structure, metrical accent, and melodic contour.

Guided by Bauer’s (2007) method of phonemic analysis for scat solos and building on Slawson’s (1968) observation that vowel quality and timbre share common acoustic correlates, this study treats vowel, consonant, and syllable choice as timbral decisions. Our corpus will contain five solos apiece from ten distinguished scat singers: allowing observation of large-scale conventions and individual tendencies. Transcriptions include phones, phrasal and metrical position, size and direction of semitone change, and chord factor. All transcriptions are cross-checked by a musician and a linguist.

Through our corpus analysis, we demonstrate that jazz vocalists systematically deploy phones to signal and reinforce musical structure. This finding challenges the characterization of scat syllables as “nonsense” and suggests vocalists draw on implicit knowledge of phonetic-structural relationships like those found in spoken language. Our analysis links music and language studies, further examining the relationship between linguistic and musical cognition (see Temperley, 2022). This research opens avenues for future work examining how listeners process these phonetic cues during music perception and whether similar patterns emerge in other forms of non-lexical singing across musical traditions.

Puerto Rican musician Bad Bunny’s distinct musical style includes a marked gasp that can be heard across his studio recorded albums. While popular music post-production involves the removal of breath, Bad Bunny includes these phonated gasps as structurally significant additives in the studio versions of several songs. In this paper I provide a corpus study that defines and examines the function of phonated gasps across seven of Bad Bunny’s studio albums. Building on Wallmark (2022), I define six functional categories and provide detailed analyses of select musical examples to demonstrate each. Because these gasps do not occur in live performance, I argue that they are structurally significant, intentional accentuations added in post-production that contribute to the listening experience. Drawing from Krims (2000) and Weinstein (2016), I argue that the gasps function as identity markers that indicate authenticity and sincerity. The gasps can function as formal section markers (the start or end of a section), be structural to the phrase (hypermetrically connected), signify a shift in vocal register, emphasize the text, signify an upcoming change in accompaniment texture, or function as percussive rhythmic filler. Across the seven albums, over half of the gasps are used to emphasize text (namely explicit sexual acts, emotions, or national pride). My analyses highlight the intentional use of phonated inhalations as a way of marking authenticity and significant moments in Bad Bunny’s non-live performances.

This experimental pilot study examines whether listeners can accurately distinguish between human-composed and AI-generated music. It explores whether factors such as musical training (Expert and Non-Expert), genre (Classical, Salsa, and EDM), familiarity, and confidence impacts performance on such listening tests, building upon previous studies on biases and attitudes towards AI music (Hong et al., 2022; Shank et al., 2023). Participants in this study (n = 16, 8 with musical training) were presented with a side-by-side layout of similar audio excerpts and were asked to select which one they thought was human-composed. Nonparametric analyses were conducted. Overall, participants were not able to accurately distinguish between human-composed and AI-generated music, regardless of genre. There were also no significant differences in accuracy when it came to musical expertise, regardless of genre. Surprisingly, neither familiarity nor confidence were significant predictors of performance on the test. Music that is composed by Generative Artificial Intelligence and the creation of these technologies continue to emerge at a rapid rate. Knowing what GenAI can do—in this case, its ability to compose convincing music to trick listeners—carries mixed implications for music pedagogy (Li & Wang, 2024) and responsible AI use (Sadek et al., 2024).

As a composer of songs, Florence B. Price was reliably faithful to the poetry she set. Like other songs in her oeuvre, her twelve settings of poems by Langston Hughes are carefully crafted to capture the atmosphere of the poetry, and phrase rhythm is one of the many tools used to this effect. This paper analyzes Price’s settings of two poems by Hughes through the lens of hypermeter, “Hold Fast to Dreams” and “Fantasy in Purple.” Drawing on the work of previous scholars, I will show that Price consciously used hypermetric shifts to convey emotions such as despair, helplessness, and excitement. While hypermetric irregularity does not always imply negative emotions, the deviations in these two songs intensifies the hopelessness and despair portrayed in these particular poems.

In 2014, Boosey & Hawkes published a new performing edition of Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony. This fresh engraving by Philip Rothman incorporates many corrections and clarifications, all grounded in the composer’s documented intentions, with a notable exception: in the third movement, three passages have been re-notated using different time signatures and shifted bar lines. According to Rothman’s introductory note to the new edition, the intention in the two instances is “to better reflect the musical pulse indicated by Copland’s across-the-bar beaming.” This decision, and its rationale, raise a number of questions. Under what circumstances is it appropriate to modify a composer’s metrical notation? To what extent have conceptions surrounding mixed meter changed since 1946? What changes (if any) does this re-notation cause in the experience of this music by listeners? by performers? And, perhaps most crucially for some, what would the composer think of these changes?

Using Rothman’s re-notation of Copland’s meter in the Third Symphony as a point of entry, this paper explores the composer’s history with notation of mixed meter. Elizabeth Bergman Crist (2000) and Howard Pollack (2002) have already documented how Copland altered his metrical notation for different arrangements of the same music, and the composer himself penned an essay surveying the fraught relationships in the mid-twentieth century among rhythm, meter, and the notation of both. This paper probes the motivations behind and perceptual consequences of Copland’s contrasting metrical notation practices, which I call grouping-driven and periodicity-driven notation.

This paper equips instructors with lesson plans to teach rhythm and meter through electronic dance music (EDM) using critical pedagogy (Aybar and Bingöl 2023). Several recent tracks will be discussed, along with classroom activities and assignments for analysis and composition in core theory. The tracks discussed exemplify concepts such as simple and compound meter, hypermeter, metrical dissonance, the tresillo and double tresillo rhythms (Biamonte 2014), and the rumba clave pattern. I articulate three reasons for teaching rhythm and meter through EDM: first, the concepts saturate even a single EDM track; second, EDM is based on loops that repeat and solidify the concepts; third, teaching EDM decenters the traditional music theory canon through inclusion of more contemporary music. For example, “Right This Second” by deadmau5 could be used to demonstrate compound quadruple meter, then returned to for a lesson on metrical dissonance, encouraging critical thinking and reflection through spiral learning.

Using EDM examples can also lead to discussions comparing how rhythm is used in various repertoires. To demonstrate, I provide a lesson plan showing how “Dont Give it Up (Full Intention Remix)” [sic] can be used to teach clave patterns and theories of groove. Students could be asked to transcribe rhythms or enter them into a DAW, then reflect on how clave patterns are used for different purposes in different genres. The examples in this paper illustrate how EDM provides clear and plentiful opportunities for teaching rhythmic theory, in a way that supports student autonomy and critical thinking skills.  

Act V, scene VIII. Andromède, Cassiope, Céphée, and Persée’s followers find themselves under the attack of Phinée and his troops. Persée enters the scene carrying the recently severed Medusa’s head, using it to petrify his foe and save those under attack. The set changes, a cloud machine representing Vénus’ palace descends, and Persée announces the entrance of Vénus, Love, and Marriage. The passacaille that follows, choreographed by Guillaume-Louis Pécour, has been described either as a depiction of courtship and passion (Mather, 1987); a tender, romantic dance under the rule of Venus (Harris-Warrick, 2016); or a symbol for the harmony between Fortune and Virtue, humans and deities (Pierce and Thorpe, 2010).  

In this paper, I investigate how Pécour uses the relationship between dancers’ bodies and music in his choreography to depict love and tenderness as a stable relationship between bodies. Set as a couple’s dance, the choreography elicits such reading with dancers moving longer in axial symmetry than in mirror symmetry, as well as performing bouts of dance steps during climatic passages in the middle of the passacaglia. In my analysis, I situate the spectator as an active participant in construing affect while observing dancing bodies, arguing that dancers use kinetic affect to elicit affect. I construe kinetic affect as both a dancer’s tool for expressing their innermost feelings through bodily motion and spectators’ experiences of constructing their emotions during the dancing act.

I interpret dancer’s kinetic affect dividing my analysis in two parts. First, I analyze choreography through four parameters: posture—how dancers carry their body; energy—the amount of perceived force in dancers when performing steps; velocity—how fast dancers travel the stage according to the number of step-units in a measure; and movement type—specific gestures from dance vocabulary. Second, I evaluate how, when combined, choreography and music elicit affective states in audiences by mapping possible core affects onto Russel’s circumplex model (Russell 1980). My analysis demonstrates how Pécour combines the four parameters outlined above to construct different affective states in conjunction to the passacaille’s couplets.

Luise Adolpha Le Beau emerged as one of the first professional female composers in the male-dominated German musical scene. She received many accolades for her compositions, though reviewers of her music often used gendered language (e.g., “ma?nnlich”) to praise her craft. Le Beau’s performances of her Variations on an Original Theme for solo piano garnered particularly sexist critiques. Indeed, the physicality of the final two variations defies 19th-century corporeal scripts for feminine bodies at the keyboard.

Considering reactions to Le Beau's performing body, her responses to those reactions as documented in her memoir, and my bodily experience as an executant of the Variations, I take the physical gestures required to perform the piece as my analytical starting point. First, I create a “choreomusical score” (Leaman 2016) that represents hand movements within registral streams (Duguay 2019) alongside the musical score. The choreomusical score reveals parametric amplification (Cook 1998) of the theme’s sentential structure through its choreomusical rhythm. From here, I draw a gestural map of the theme and ten variations to illustrate the work’s gestural crescendo. Then, to appreciate the expanded physical space required to play the Variations 9 and 10, I define and trace two distinct hand-crossing gestures: Crossing Over and Sweeping Out. Finally, I invoke Noland’s (2009) concept of gestural performatives to argue that the movement sequences in these final variations renegotiate the boundaries of feminine pianistic comportment, and that this may elucidate how Le Beau demanded space for herself as a composer in a male-dominated field.

The hierarchical framework present within dance often depends on the stratification of musical beats since one cannot classify a particular step or motion as being choreographically stronger or weaker than another. This poses an analytical problem if one wishes to compare the various rhythmic streams since the music and the choreography often do not align. Existing analytical processes often depend upon repeating choreographic ostinati to determine the choreographic pulse; however, clear choreographic ostinati often do not appear. Certain analyses also tend to overlook the segmentation of the choreography into two different kinetic streams as the choreographic rhythm of the dancer’s upper body may differ from that of their lower body.

This paper seeks to circumvent these issues by adapting concepts from Christopher Hasty’s Meter as Rhythm (1997) so that they may be applied to dance. Using a choreopictographic notation system derived from both Zorn Notation and Arthur Saint-Léon’s Sténochorégraphie, I adapt Hasty’s projective arrows to depict what I call projective symmetry: instances in which a choreographically symmetrical step is used to perpetuate a rhythmic formula. The ensuing choreographic rhythm may be either metrically dissonant or consonant to the rhythm of the music. I will illustrate this by means of analysing the choreomusical relationships that exist between the prima ballerina, the corps de ballet, and the orchestral score within Yury Grigorovich’s modernist choreography for the Waltz from Sergei Prokofiev’s The Stone Flower.

Abstract to be added soon.

Cardiacs were an English cult rock band known for their bizarre blend of progressive and punk genres. Over the band’s career, their primary songwriter Tim Smith developed an idiosyncratic harmonic language, jokingly described by composer Craig Fortnam as “loads of major chords randomly [arranged] on a page.” As previous scholarship into the “pentatonic systems” (Biamonte 2018, Everett 2004) and “riff schemes” (Easley 2015) of heavier rock styles has shown, such practices often weaken diatonicism, suspend harmonic function, and subvert tonal centricity, making them fundamentally at odds with the functional understanding of rock harmony. 

This presentation explores the idea that Cardiacs’ triadic successions behave as motives within a broadly developmental approach. To describe harmonic motives, I use Murphy’s (2014) labeling system for “tonal triadic progression classes” (TTPCs), which indicates the triad type and the ordered intervallic distance between chord roots (ex. M2M). These motives are tonally flexible, making them particularly adaptable to developmental processes. To support this hypothesis, I demonstrate motivic/developmental procedures such as transposition, interval cycle, and modifications of a chord series. Through an analysis of the song “Cry Wet Smile Dry,” I consider the larger strategy behind these procedures, loosely viewing them through Schoenberg’s developing variation, whereby a basic unit – often the first chord series of a song – provides the impetus for further motive forms. As this unpredictable approach to chord succession poses substantial challenges for pop listeners, the presentation concludes by pondering how listeners might navigate these highly contextual developmental processes with a strategy focused on surprise and reaction.

This paper proposes three analytic pathways through Wicked. As Schwartz describes, Wicked’s primary motif derives from the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” which I divide into two parts: ‘Unlimited,’ which uses a major-mode 1-1-7-5, and the continuation which includes 6 and 2 as subordinate motivic pitches. But intertextual aspects of ‘Unlimited’ are only one dimension of the musical fabric: the motif also undergoes transformation in a manner reminiscent of Schoenberg’s theory of developing variation. During “Defying Gravity,” the verse rearranges these scale degrees; in Act II, the Wizard corrupts the motif through inversion in “Wonderful.” Elphaba then adapts the original motif into a minor-mode context as she spirals into despair in “No Good Deed,” while the motif returns to its original form in “For Good.”

Similarly, the show’s large-scale tonal design (after Motazedian 2023 and Gilliam 1992) develops three tonal pathways that Elphaba traverses: C major reflecting her initial goals, and the semitonally juxtaposed keys of B (the Wizard) and D-flat (defying the Wizard). In Act II, as Elphaba accepts the moniker of ‘wicked,’ she descends into the Wizard’s associated tonality (B minor), before being redeemed by Glinda, who brings Elphaba back to D-flat major before her death.

These analyses suggest a deeper-level musical unity and development that repudiates common criticisms of megamusicals. I conclude, however, that there are other relationships of note in Wicked: like ‘Unlimited,’ other melodies from the show also originate in The Wizard of Oz, and these also serve as a compelling pathway through Wicked’s score.

Joni Mitchell composed her eighth studio album, Hejira, in 1975–76 while on three road trips throughout North America. Fittingly for its nomadic genesis, Mitchell describes Hejira as “restless” (Hilburn 1996). My presentation illuminates three ways in which Hejira portrays restlessness.  

First, the poetry of Hejira ebbs and flows between two modes of address: Mitchell’s recounting of her travels directly to the listener, and her more inward meditation on her melancholic state. Adding to Matt BaileyShea’s (2014) model for interpreting discourse in popular music, I propose a new type of second-person address, deflected reflection, wherein “you” acts as a stand-in for “I/me” to bring the listener into the reflective realm of the singer. Then, I map the nine songs of Hejira on two spectrums—descriptive to reflective, and literal to metaphorical—to show the restless, larger-scale ebbing and flowing of the poetry in aggregate.  

Second, I draw on Nancy Murphy’s (2023) theory of self-expression in singer-songwriter music to show how Mitchell’s poetry forces her vocal melodies to employ malleable melodic phrasing. The misalignment between vocal phrasing and the strict metrical grid established by the guitar contributes to the theme of restlessness, denying listeners consistency which conflicts with the expected regularity of strophic song forms.?  

Third, I adapt Mark Spicer’s (2017) concepts of absent, fragile, and emergent tonic chords to reveal that the vocal melodies of the songs “Coyote” and “Hejira” have avoidant and emergent tonic pitches. The obscurement of ^1 prevents these melodies from achieving resolution. Thus, in Hejira, Mitchell depicts restlessness in three domains: poetic, metrical, and melodic.

This paper provides a theoretical framework for analyzing Joni Mitchell’s early piano-based songs through the lens of slash harmony, a key element of her harmonic vocabulary. Building on the work of previous scholars including Whitesell, Biamonte, and Koozin, this research explores sixteen songs from her 1970-1972 albums. Our analysis addresses six main concepts: 1) a chord structure and labeling system for the selected corpus; 2) the interplay between vertical and horizontal harmony; 3) stylistic features across three distinct phases of the early piano songs; 4) the expressive significance of her pianistic and compositional evolution; 5) the influence of Sullivan’s 1927 portrait of Beethoven’s spiritual development; and 6) the interpretive utility of Russell’s 1959 treatise in understanding Mitchell’s trajectory.  

Through corpus study, three phases are presented that correspond with her albums. Phase 1 is characterized by virtually no use of slash harmony; Phase 2 integrates slash harmony and their resulting chord progressions; and Phase 3 marks the advances in composition and expression through Mitchell’s strategic use of specific slash harmonies. Slash chords, named for sounding a triad over a bass note, can be measured by distance in semitones between the UST (upper structure triad) and the bass note. Out of all the possible slash harmonies available, Mitchell limited her use to five during Phase 2: T0 (trivial), T₃, T₅, T₇ and T₁₀. The songs comprising Phase 3 highlight Mitchell’s innovative use of the Lydian mode through T₂ and T₇ chords, shown in our analyses of “The Blonde in the Bleachers” and “Judgement of the Moon and Stars.”

As argued by de Clercq (2017), many approaches to the study of form in popular music privilege one musical parameter over all others. In this paper, I propose a method of analysis which attempts to account for how the interactions between different parts of the musical texture, rather than any individual parameter, contribute to the perception of form. Drawing on the cognitive theory of Dynamic Attending, I reconceptualize accent as any timepoint which draws the listener’s attention including conventional accents (dynamic, contour, agogic), as well as harmonic rhythm and changes in timbre. In accounting for all of these accents, I create an “accent profile” represented by a scalar array containing the distances between each accented timepoint. The patterning of these timepoints model the presumed attentional rhythm evoked by the music throughout the course of song. In analyzing a selection of recent songs from Japanese pop groups Ryokuoshoku Shakai, Cö Shu Nie, and Creepy Nuts, I show that changes in accent profile serve as a means of analyzing formal boundaries and function.

Analysis with formal functions and theme types from a Caplinian perspective has been robustly extended beyond high Viennese classicism to include art song literature (Krebs, Martin, Pedneault-Deslauriers, Rodgers 2023, 2014). This paper continues in a similar vein, using Matthew Arndt’s formal functions (2018) to explore how musical phrases in the voice and piano intersect with poetic meaning. Specifically, we examine how formal functions, such as establishment, preparation, and dissolution, considered as descriptive processes might provide a conceptual framework to explore poetic subtext within the musical structure.

We, a theorist and a singer, explore this approach in Poldowski’s mélodies. Her use of harmony, subtle manipulation of form, and sensitivity to poetic imagery and mood combine in vocal lines fashioned for textual clarity and immediacy with piano writing that illuminates the sonic possibilities of the instrument while supporting the voice in realizing the musico-poetic content.  

In analyzing the formal functions of the piano and vocal lines discretely and together, we discovered that Poldowski employs both similar (convergent) and dissimilar (divergent) functions between parts. Functionally similar phrases tend to occur where the text might be understood on the surface, while functionally dissimilar phrases offer opportunities to pursue further layers of poetic meaning. Divergent functions, experienced as contrasting energies between the voice and piano, can be used to create subtext–the lack of musical cohesion may suggest something hidden beneath the surface. This paper presents a model to hear and interpret formal functions as poetic subtext demonstrated with our analysis of Poldowski’s mélodie “Colombine.”

Johanna Beyer’s early compositions demonstrate a unique compositional approach: in each piece, Beyer composes a single melodic line, and then varies that line for the duration of the piece. From one statement of the melody to the next, a transformational process can be observed—pitches are transposed, and added or deleted pitches cause the lines to grow or shrink. I propose that Levenshtein distance, or edit distance, can be used to codify the specific transformations used from one variation to another, and to measure the similarity between two variations, creating formal structure.  

Levenshtein distance is a string metric that measures similarity by counting the number of single-character edits necessary to transform one string of characters into another. Possible operations include insertions, deletions, or substitutions. Edit distance has been used in music information retrieval and perceptual studies measuring melodic and rhythmic similarity; however, edit distance has not yet been applied to music theory and analysis, despite its resemblance to transformational theory. In Beyer’s music, each melodic line is a “string,” and similar single-character edits can be made: pitches can be inserted, deleted, transposed, or reordered. I will demonstrate how a similarity metric such as Levenshtein distance aids with interpretive choices and with issues of form by determining which phrases are most closely related to one another. Using Beyer’s music as a case study, I propose that Levenshtein distance is one solution to a limitation of transformational theory, allowing for transformations between two melodies of differing lengths through insertion and deletion functions.

Despite its conventional English translation as “realism,” verismo opera at the turn of the twentieth century in Italy involves more than its socio-political implications (Corazzol 1993 and Giger 2007). While early and mid-century Italian composers structured their operas according to a template convention, verists challenged this tradition in search of dramatic immediacy and emotional intensity. Of the characteristic features of verismo, vehement climax building is one of the most compelling (Lee 2020). In this paper, I probe the underresearched topic of climax building as a signature feature of verismo opera, exemplified through analysis of the end of Act 1 of Puccini’s Turandot from a large-scale perspective. Under the lens of climax building, the end multiple numbers which conclude the act—the final section of Calaf’s ternary form aria and the following ensemble finale—can be illuminated as a series of multiple climaxes creating a dynamic continuum.  

Dramatically, my climax reading aligns with the emerging emphasis on Calaf at the end of Act 1. Although introduced in absentia by other characters at the beginning of the act, Calaf gradually asserts himself and his identity as a nobleman and an ambitious suitor; his rising prominence thus plays out in the climax succession’s teleological process. Consequently, the ensemble finale’s ending, with the Herculean double highpoint, presages the upcoming battle royale in Act 2 between the most cutthroat tyrant Turandot and her most audacious challenger.

Johnson (2017) argues that tonality becomes topic in early modernist concert music. Building upon his claim and the scholarship on twentieth-century musical topics (Frymoyer 2017; Donaldson 2021), I argue that twelve-tone technique becomes topic in postwar American concert music. Twelve-tone melody is deployed amidst a largely tonal landscape for the purpose of topical signification. In this paper, I use two of Bernstein’s staged works—Candide (1956/74) and West Side Story (1957)—as case studies, and I provide an adaptation of Mirka’s semiotic model (2014), which accounts for the topic’s markedness within a new context and emergent social meanings (Figure 1). I posit that Bernstein implements a set of overlapping similarities (Wittgenstein 1953), which coalesce into an iconic association and communicate reference to a Schoenbergian melodic sensibility. Bernstein’s “Quiet” and “Cool” are emblematic of serial procedures implemented by American tonalists, who (1) often treat the twelve-tone series as motivic (not harmonic) source material, (2) rarely transform the series by anything more than transposition, and (3) maintain an overarching tonality despite the serial chromatic procedure. Ultimately, the twelve-tone topic points to a shift in political and cultural sentiment toward nationalist music during the Cold War: Hubbs (2000) observes at the midcentury a “bursting of Coplandian tonality and ascent of university-based complexity music…[due to] a new positioning of serial composition as emblematic of artistic freedom” (169).

Existing scholarship has highlighted the presence of cowboys and cowboy songs in musical portrayals of the American West (Crist 2005; Levy 2012; Murchison 2012), but relatively little attention has been paid to the cowboys’ steeds. Horses play a prominent role in musical portrayals of the American West, appearing in the form of loping rhythms, irregular metrical features, and timbres mimicking hoofbeats or whipcracks. 

Using Monelle’s (2000) definition of the noble horse topic in European music as a model, this paper proposes an alternative horse topic that can be heard in portrayals of the American West in music since 1931. I identify three equine archetypes in this repertoire and give an example of each: the burro, the cattle horse, and the bronco. The burro can be heard in Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite (1931) and functions as transportation; the cattle horse is used for ranching in Virgil Thomson’s The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936); and the bronco, which can be heard in Aaron Copland’s Rodeo (1942), serves as entertainment. I conclude by examining an excerpt from John Adams’s opera Girls of the Golden West (2017), which features characteristics of all three archetypes. 

Each equine archetype features off-kilter rhythmic and metrical elements such as loping rhythms, grouping dissonance, and irregular hypermeter. Each of them is also characterized by the presence of the cowboy. I argue that this imagery responds to, and reflects, broader midcentury ideas about the role of the American West in American consciousness (Smith 1950; Marx 1964; Slotkin 1992). 

This paper explores the role of rhythm and meter within the context of musical borrowing. While existing literature on John Adams’s borrowing techniques primarily emphasizes pitch and formal structures—along with their extra-musical implications (Hardie 2010; Rörich and Jankowitz 2005; Sanchez-Behar 2015 and 2023)—his interest in rhythm and meter, particularly pulsation, warrants further investigation. Adams’s Absolute Jest serves as an ideal case study, where he borrows fragments from Beethoven’s late compositions and places them into a “hall of mirrors.” This raises important questions: How does Adams manipulate late Beethoven materials through his pulsation practice, and how do these choices shape the associated metrical processes?

To contextualize the borrowing techniques in Absolute Jest, this paper first proposes a generalized framework for Adams’s pulsation practices, drawing on John Roeder’s (1994) theory of pulse stream and incorporating insights from other scholars who have individually explored this aspect (Buchler 2006; Everett 2015; Fyr 2011; Kleppinger 2001; Skretta 2015). I further identify three specific techniques in Absolute Jest. First, the temporal characteristics of the borrowed materials employed and developed within passages of the new work. Second, these passages exhibit an interplay of multiple pulsation layers, highlighting significant events and fostering metrical processes. Finally, a referential moment, often coinciding with a quotation, marks formal boundaries and concludes the preceding metrical progression. Overall, this paper contributes to the growing literature on rhythm and meter in post-tonal music and enhances the broader comprehension of musical borrowing by incorporating the role of rhythm and meter.

This paper investigates the intersection of two disparate views—empirical research on music perception and technoculturally mediated twenty-first-century listening techniques—on the issue of selective attention in highly familiar, potentially boring, music listening experiences. In the former category, I survey literature that details expectation-based listening pleasure (Gold et al. 2019; Huron 2006; Kraus 2020) alongside research on musical habituation (Mutschler et al. 2010; Flom & Pick 2012), music repetition (Margulis 2014; Deutsch 2019), information theory (Meyer 1957; Temperley 2014, 2019), and the relationship between familiarity and liking (Madison & Schiölde 2017; Osborn 2017). In the latter category, I consider broader viewpoints on contemporary listening habits concerned with emotional regulation (DeNora 2000; Huron 2005), ubiquitous music (Kassabian 2013; Szabo 2018), and the influence of streaming services (Drott 2024). The synthesis of these perspectives suggests both that listeners frequently attend to excessively familiar recordings, but that their listening techniques develop to sustain interest by attending to subtler musical features as more prominent ones are habituated.  

Similarly to Richard Beaudoin (2024), I study what “noise” lies dormant in contemporary recordings—squeaky piano pedals, inhalations, incorrect notes—and how these elements can nevertheless provide rewarding musical experiences. In line with Friedrich Kittler (1986), I argue that contemporary recording and playback media operate in a mutually influential feedback loop with musical expression whereby media-afforded “noises” transform into implied musical subjects.  

After outlining these two epistemologies and the pervasiveness of such “noises,” I offer three analytical vignettes that showcase the relationship between production media and artistic expression. First, I investigate the deliberate prominence of key clicks, circular breathing, and humming in virtuoso saxophonist Colin Stetson’s recent albums. Then, I explore the teleological role the medium of production plays in William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops (2001), following what Kim Cascone (2000) terms the “aesthetics of failure.” And finally, I connect my analytical observations of Eric Wubbels’ This is this is this is (2010) to its extramusical program: a 2005 commencement at Kenyon College given by author David Foster Wallace on the role of self-motivated awareness and vigilance over one’s perspective in the face of monotonous routine.  

The theorization of aesthetic attention offers a powerful framework for analyzing how art songs transform poetry. I extend Alford’s theory of attentional modes (2020), in combination with gestural analysis (Hatten 2004; Rao 2016; Neidhöfer 2024) to develop a formalist analytical practice for reading how (ex)changes between a song and its poem inflect attentional experience in various ways. I employ a paradigm wherein formal poetic analysis reveals the modes of attention a poem pays to its object, analysis of music-text interaction clarifies how the song transforms and develops potential attentional stances, and gestural analysis suggests how the song conveys and directs an attentional mode to its listeners. I demonstrate the approach with two analyses of Ned Rorem songs setting poetry by William Carlos Williams: “The Dance,” and “Nantucket.”

A poem pays attention to its object through interest, passivity, focus, and spatiotemporal remove. From these coordinates, modes of attention like contemplation, desire, recollection, and imagination emerge. My example analyses demonstrate how a song replicates a poem’s dominant attentional stance or develops a latent attentional mode. The poem “The Dance” attends to its object through voyeuristic desire, but Rorem’s setting neutralizes voyeurism by ignoring enjambment, and through rapid, syllabic text-setting. The song opens a latent imaginative mode through a family of centripetal gestures that embody dancing: rocking, circling, and spiraling. By contrast, the poem for “Nantucket” portrays disinterested contemplation, a mode Rorem adopts, complementing the poem’s evenhanded, disinterested presentation of its object with vocal gestures lacking in strong directional energy.

Over the last several decades, theorists have wrestled with scale theory’s circularity problem. Critics point out that scale theorists often assume the existence of certain scales a priori in order to identify them in dubious circumstances. One solution, adopted in Yust 2016, is to deal only in the pitch classes that literally appear on the score. But this comes with a major interpretive concession, since scales are most interesting precisely when they go beyond a description of the score and access hidden—but very real—perceptual information. I propose a solution that does not make this concession: I define scales as schemas.

Scale schemas are holistic mental categories, formed from repeated exposure to a particular style or composer, that encode correlated features from across multiple domains. My identification methodology uses these correlated (non-pitch-class) features as evidence to infer the presence of scales in passages with incomplete pitch-class information. I demonstrate my approach with a case study on the music of Herbert Howells.

This paper proposes the existence of the major-minor gambit, an opening gambit used in a variety of jazz compositions from 1940-1970. Building on prior work from Smither (2019), Love (2012), and Terefenko (2004, 2018), I introduce the concept of compositional schemata: collections of musical events describing harmonic and melodic emphases within a jazz composition. The major-minor gambit is a compositional schema characterized by a parallel transformation from I7 to i7, each placed with strong rhythmic emphasis, and a melodic progression emphasizing ^3 to ^ ?3 or ^7 to ^ ?7. The modal mixture resulting from the parallel transformation creates modal ambiguity, and the melody reinforces the active chord tones through the chord change.  

Since the schema acts as an opening gambit, three typical paths for subsequent activity are identified: 1) the i7 can act as a pivot to a new tonality (in which case it is followed by a chord with dominant function, typically V7/ ? VII), 2) the chords that follow can create further modal ambiguity, or 3) the modal ambiguity is disregarded and the opening tonality is reinforced.  

Compositions such as How High the Moon, On Green Dolphin Street, I’m Glad There is You, and Four are discussed to justify the schema’s existence and to show how the schema can be set. To close, examples of the major-minor gambit’s use in jazz-influenced popular music, such as in SZA’s Love Me 4 Me, exemplify how the schema has undergone imitation and development into the modern day.

Idiosyncratic notes played by Thelonious Monk, a mid-twentieth-century bebop pianist, challenge expectations of harmony and melody that listeners bring to tonal jazz. These notes elicit evocative reactions from listeners, such as “wrong notes,” “melodic glitches,” and “trickster dissonance” (Levine 1995; Feurzeig 2011; Kellman 2022). Scholars have explored such notes through theories of intentionality (they are not mistakes—they have meaning) and embodiment (Feurzeig 2011; Givan 2009), but there is room to consider the notes in an analytical-listening context.

With this in mind, I propose a three-layer model as a listening framework for exploring the deeper implications of these “wrong (but right) notes” in their musical context: layer 1 is what jazz historians refer to as “American Popular Song” (1920s-50s Broadway and Tin Pan Alley lead sheets, more or less) characterized by vocally conceived melodies, tonal harmony with functional chromaticism, symmetrical phrases, and popular song forms; layer 2 is a bebop reinterpretation of American Popular Song, which incorporates virtuosic instrumentally conceived melodies, extravagant chromaticism, substitution and extended tertian chords, stable and unstable harmonies, emphasis on non-harmonic tones, etc.; layer 3 contains Monk’s “wrong notes,” which exceed the usual instrumental idiom of bebop, creating startling textures and effects as harshly dissonant features (major/minor second intervals, multiple-note clusters,  unexpected dynamics and articulation, etc.) that are incongruent with the layer 1 and 2 tonal contexts.

This paper analyzes Monk’s performance of “Body and Soul,” showing nested “wrong” but “right” notes—congruences and incongruences—among musical events in the three layers, from an analytical-listening perspective.

This paper interrogates the formal role and constituent composition of the bridge unit in recent popular music through an examination of the songs that contain a bridge on the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles charts of 2022, 2023 and 2024—approximately two thirds of the songs in each year’s chart. In recent scholarship on popular music, the bridge is defined as a formal unit that “transition[s] the listener from the main body of the song to the final part of the song” (de Clercq 2025, 24), “connects” two sections (Stephenson 2002, 137), or sets up “a climactic return to the main material” (Nobile 2020, 107). Many scholars define the bridge as featuring contrast (Covach 2005, 71 and Temperley 2018, 153) or instability (Nobile 2020, 94) primarily brought about through harmonic criteria (Everett 2009, 148). I argue instead that the contrasting role of the bridge in recent popular music arises primarily through modifications in texture, instrumentation, and dynamic intensity, in addition to formal blending (de Clercq 2017) with anterior (i.e. “previously heard”) units.

The bridge can be divided based on a syntactical arrangement of novel and/or anterior material into a 1- 2- or 3-part structure. This paper will show the most common syntactical arrangements of 1-, 2- and 3-part bridges, and illustrate how texture and dynamic intensity contribute primarily to the contrast inherent to bridges in recent popular music. It will conclude by examining bridges that resist straightforward categorization or that have an anomalous internal distribution of anterior and novel material.

Owing to its compelling fusion of heavy metal, spectralism, and sub-bass drones, the music of the guitar duo Sunn O))) (pronounced “sun”) has attracted significant academic attention. Two Sunn O))) songs bring many of the topics in the scholarly literature into focus: “Alice,” an instrumental homage to jazz pianist/harpist Alice Coltrane, and “Kannon 2,” whose lyrics recount a miracle performed by the gender-shifting Buddhist deity Kannon (a.k.a. Guanyin). In both songs, Sunn O))) mobilize expressive strategies to convey stories about these figures. I argue that these songs depict spiritual transformations through musical and lyrical means: Coltrane undergoes a transformation; Kannon undergoes then executes one.  

The analysis of “Alice” proceeds from the band’s description of the song as “a transformation of sound and timbre through a series of instruments.” Distinct timbral/instrumental combinations allegorize stages of Coltrane’s life, culminating in her spiritual transformation into a guru who reached sannyasa. In “Kannon 2,” Aliza Shvarts observes a near-palindromic arrangement of lyrics and interprets the wordless music in the center as the locus of Kannon’s miracle: transforming hell into paradise. However, Kannon’s transformation occurs amid mixed musical signals; I explore the extent to which they can and should be reconciled.

Since its emergence in the 1990s, neo-soul has been associated with the term “groove” by creators and critics alike. Describing “On & On” by Erykah Badu, the “Queen of Neo-Soul,” Jon Pareles highlights the song’s “slow, undulating groove and the way its melody [ripples] down with light syncopations” (1997, 20). Researhers have characterized groove as the pleasurable experience of moving to music, though details of specific movements are limited. My paper explores how it is embodied in six live videos of Badu’s “On & On,” demonstrating how the coordination of the singer’s physical movements and sound enhances aspects of musical structure and lyrical meaning. Following Sterbenz (2017), I observe bodily movements as shapes in time and attend to sympathetic affective sensations that involve tension, relaxation, and the effort of creating movement. 

First, I examine the relationship between movement, rhythm, and meter, showing how Badu’s entrained arm/hand gestures reach their highest heights on metrical downbeats. I draw on Danielsen’s (2018) theory of “beat bins” (extended beats) to explain Badu’s arm movements as embodiments of metrical accents within wide beat bins. Second, I investigate how movement-music interactions reveal Badu’s incarnate text painting of verse lyrics. Consistent choreographed motions—termed, “circling” and “relaxed-shrug”—enacted throughout the song and across multiple performances suggest that embodied storytelling motions are integral to live performance. Finally, using Laban dance/theatre movement analysis terminology, I trace the general effort of Badu’s movements to elucidate how different approaches to movement bring out the song’s formal delineations.

Pop-jazz wunderkind Jacob Collier has become a Rorschach test in online musical discourse. His audacious musicianship and prominence as a public music theorist have prompted fans to label him an inspiring musical genius whose “genre is YouTube” (Chinen 2024). But his unapologetic maximalism also elicits scorn: critics often pan his music as overwrought, unexpressive, and soulless.

My paper examines this tension in the context of Collier’s participatory covers: live, lengthy piano-ballad renditions of famous songs, designed with sophisticated opportunities for his “Audience Choir” to sing along. Synthesizing scholarship about liveness and fandom, the aesthetics of covers, the dynamics of online music theory communities, and instrumental affordances as site of cultural meaning, I contend that Collier’s Audience Choir is an instrument whose affordances he collaboratively develops in public view. I plot the evolving relationships between these affordances, Collier’s virtuosic cover transformations, and musical social media, demonstrating Collier’s consistent reliance on a small number of musical schemas across his live concerts. And I interrogate the kinds of public music theory being enacted by these participatory performances, foregrounding how Collier’s musical designs and internet presence complicate notions of creativity, authorship, freedom, and musical agency. Ultimately, I suggest that the internet-fueled circulation of musical content among Collier and his devoted fans should raise fresh questions about the types of relational listening and musical ontology that live cover performances evoke in the 2020s.

Pop-jazz wunderkind Jacob Collier has become a Rorschach test in online musical discourse. His audacious musicianship and prominence as a public music theorist have prompted fans to label him an inspiring musical genius whose “genre is YouTube” (Chinen 2024). But his unapologetic maximalism also elicits scorn: critics often pan his music as overwrought, unexpressive, and soulless.

My paper examines this tension in the context of Collier’s participatory covers: live, lengthy piano-ballad renditions of famous songs, designed with sophisticated opportunities for his “Audience Choir” to sing along. Synthesizing scholarship about liveness and fandom, the aesthetics of covers, the dynamics of online music theory communities, and instrumental affordances as site of cultural meaning, I contend that Collier’s Audience Choir is an instrument whose affordances he collaboratively develops in public view. I plot the evolving relationships between these affordances, Collier’s virtuosic cover transformations, and musical social media, demonstrating Collier’s consistent reliance on a small number of musical schemas across his live concerts. And I interrogate the kinds of public music theory being enacted by these participatory performances, foregrounding how Collier’s musical designs and internet presence complicate notions of creativity, authorship, freedom, and musical agency. Ultimately, I suggest that the internet-fueled circulation of musical content among Collier and his devoted fans should raise fresh questions about the types of relational listening and musical ontology that live cover performances evoke in the 2020s.