What happens when folk music—a genre known for its constructions of authenticity—collides with collage, a compositional strategy whose overt hybridity destabilizes such constructions? This collision characterizes recent output by indie-folk collective Bon Iver, distinguishing it from the band’s earlier music. Yet collage does much more than distance new sound from old. My paper examines the multiple affordances of collage in Bon Iver’s 2016 album, 22, A Million. Centering the album’s fourth track, “33 GOD,” as a case study, I analyze how samples and quotations simultaneously underscore its formal trajectory and gesture toward a web of interrelated narrative and harmonic contexts.

In the first part of my analysis, I trace how samples and quotations interact with original material to form a coherent narrative and harmonic shape. I then zero in on the meaningful interactions between sung verses and samples from Jim Ed Brown’s 1971 country hit, “Morning.” Finally, I consider borrowed materials in “33 GOD” in relation to their original contexts, analyzing how they radiate outward toward related harmonic areas and texts. Drawing upon Christine Boone’s definition of the paint palette mashup (Boone 2013), I argue that the obscurity of the references invites the tracing of materials back to their sources—a challenge taken up in internet spaces like YouTube and Genius.com. “33 GOD” therefore both models a kind of intersubjectivity and becomes a site for collaborative encounter. This democratized aspect of Bon Iver’s music takes on an additional layer of meaning vis-à-vis frontman Justin Vernon’s pro-democracy activism.

In the final scene of HBO’s House of the Dragon, the 2022 prequel to Game of Thrones, protagonist Rhaenyra Targaryen learns that her son Lucerys has been slain while riding his dragon. The scene’s musical cue, which I term “Lucerys’ Death,” expands this event’s narrative and temporal impacts by weaving together distinct leitmotivs to combine their meanings. Through leitmotivic (Bribitzer-Stull 2015), tropological (Hatten 2004, 2014), and agential (Cumming 2000, Monahan 2013, Klorman 2015, Hatten 2018) lenses of analysis, I unpack how the cue capitalizes on those meanings to express apotheosis and how that expression reflects Rhaenyra’s unraveling. 

“Lucerys’ Death” is constructed of four interwoven themes: Girlhood, Destiny, Daenerys, and Title. Girlhood is Rhaenyra’s youthful leitmotiv, associated with Rhaenyra’s childhood friendships and innocence. Destiny, Rhaenyra’s mature leitmotiv, musically grows out of Girlhood and connotes Rhaenyra’s complicated future and fate. Daenerys is Daenerys Targaryen’s leitmotiv, imported from Game of Thrones, and represents Rhaenyra’s and Daenerys’ shared ambitions and flaws. Title is the title theme shared by Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon and serves to elevate local events to more global importance (Broad 2020). In “Lucerys’ Death,” these four leitmotivs agentially trope with each other to express Rhaenyra’s internal conflict, inescapable fate, and catalytic role in the narrative. When Rhaenyra hears of Lucerys’ death, and viewers hear the music that characterizes it, the diegesis perches on an axial tipping point, the gravity of which is only fully realized through an interpretation of the music’s thematic entanglement.

According to William Caplin’s theory of Classical formal functions, sonata form development sections are organized around a phrase-structural device called the “core”: a themelike unit comprising a large-scale model that is sequenced at least once (1998, 144). Joseph Haydn’s sonata forms pose a challenge to the core-centric assumption of this theory. As Caplin readily admits, “Haydn, in general, constructs his development sections without a core” (155). What formal techniques, then, are utilized in Haydn’s developments? Based on analysis of the 88 movements from Haydn’s keyboard sonatas, I argue that more than half of their development sections (58%) are structured like expositions, a determination I make from tonal and interthematic characteristics. 

This paper proposes three exposition-like development types: complete, incomplete, and continuous. A complete exposition-like development articulates a PAC in the principal development key at the end of a subordinate theme-like unit. An incomplete exposition-like development attains a medial half cadence (HC) or dominant arrival (DA) in the principal development key after a transition-like unit but does not achieve a PAC. Often, an apparent ST-like unit becomes a retransition (ST-like⇒RT). The final development type, continuous exposition-like, involves a single tonal motion from the development’s first key to the home key. Developments of this type allude to the inter-thematic functions of an exposition; however, no development key is confirmed cadentially. I offer several case studies of each development type. The examples highlight differences between types and within types. I conclude with questions for further research on exposition-like developments in Haydn’s oeuvre and beyond.

In this paper I explore the modal fluidity within Millennial gospel music, a salient style feature of the black gospel idiom that warrants more analytical attention. Modal fluidity deals with the traversal of the relative and parallel axes (relative and parallel minors) in relation to a centralized major tonic. This paper demonstrates how Fluidity Networks can serve as an analytical device that encompasses the visual and aural mapping of the relative and parallel fluidity within Millennial gospel, providing a modal snapshot. After exploring Tye Tribbett’s “Sinking,” I engage the scholarship surrounding double tonalities (Trevor de Clercq and Drew Nobile). From there, I highlight salient characteristics and schemata within the tonal syntax of millennial gospel. Finally, building upon the work of Braxton Shelley, my discussion culminates in an analysis of Richard Smallwood’s “Thank You” by showcasing a modally fluid mapping of tonal centers throughout the piece.

The “guitar chord” is a characteristic device of Alberto Ginastera’s musical idiolect. Its purest form consists of the six pitches of the guitar’s open strings (in standard tuning) and functions as an idiosyncratic manifestation of the “guitar topic” (Plesch 2009). Within the context of Argentine music, the chord bears strong connections with the stoic folk symbol of the gaucho and its associated iconography and poetic imagery, where the guitar boasts a central role (Schwartz-Kates 2002).

While the chord has been traditionally described as a “symbolic” compositional fingerprint present across Ginastera’s different stylistic eras (Chase 1957; Gaviria 2010), no studies have shown how its implementation was affected by the drastic changes in style between his self-defined “objective” and “subjective” nationalist periods (Suárez Urtubey 1967). While folkloristic character pieces, songs, and stage works abounded in the former, the latter favoured instrumental works in abstract forms where the folk references were subsumed into a complex post-tonal fabric.

My paper presents an account of this development through the analysis of instances of the “guitar chord” drawn from Ginastera’s works between 1934 and 1954. Additionally, I introduce a classification system, evaluating these chords in terms of their local function, structural role, and pitch content, ranging from picturesque topoi to “prime sonorities” (Laufer 2003). Finally, I contextualize Ginastera’s compositional evolution within the milieu of twentieth-century Argentine intellectuals and their troubled sense of national identity as a consequence of the dialectical oppositions (e.g., urban vs rural), which lie at the heart of the nation’s cultural heritage.

In an artistic medium where joint gesture produces co-equal audible and visual signals, what does it mean for music to be visual? The marching arts’ concept of “musical visuality” offers one answer. Prior to 2020, the musical selections of marching arts groups guided the visual design. Musical elements anchored equipment skills called “twirls” or “spinning.” Spinning could not exist without music. But in 2020, the Winterguard International (WGI) general effect adjudication guidelines introduced a new phrase: musical visuality. In moments of musical visuality, adjudicators assess the efficacy of performance when the design depends predominantly on visual elements. Foregrounding musical visuality disentangles visual and musical contributions to a group’s design, and the unlinking of compositional elements previously understood as isomorphic problematizes existing frameworks for assessing formal and semantic audiovisual congruence (Iwamiya 2013).

This presentation analyzes musical visuality in the marching arts through the lens of musical embodiment and joint gesture. Drawing on theories of musical embodiment (Cox 2016, Simpson-Litke 2021, Hudson 2022), joint action (Matthews et. al 2018, Noble 2018), and choreographic musicality (Leaman 2022), I examine how visual design contributes a unique element that is not available in sound in the marching arts. I first outline intersubjective mechanisms for reliable coordination in the modern era (post-1971) marching arts as the basis for musical visuality. Then, I propose that visual musicality facilitates ensemble coordination and that musical visuality accounts for shared rhythmicity in the absence of external pulse (Wöllner and Keller 2017). Spinning in silence is now possible.

Shiina Ringo is one of the most recognized Japanese popular music artists, known for her diverse music performances styles with inspirations from Japanese tradition music and arts. Cultural historian Csaba Toth (2006) has recognized her influence on young Japanese female identities by creating a transgressive version of Japanese femininity through boundary-crossings. Van (2020) and Mata (2019) have studied her relationship to the “geographical urban” in Tokyo, constructing a community that is bonded by the urban peripheries and aesthetics that are shared within. Inspired by previous works that recognize the gender signification of vocality through imitations (Cox 2016, Heidemann 2016 ), this paper seeks to propose a framework to study gender performativity in Japanese popular music (J-Pop) through listeners’ embodiment in Shiina’s vocal performance. I discuss how Shiina’s vocal timbre contributed to constructing different images of femininities.
 
By analyzing musical videos, lyrics, and vocal timbre in Instinct (1999) and Crime and Punishment (2000). I argue that Shiina had to reinvent different images of femininity, the “Punk Youth” and the “Maternal Maturity,” to thrive through her long performance career. As reflected in these recordings, Shiina’s vocal timbre transforms and negotiates between a Western-rooted head voice and chest voice and a Japanese folk-inspired Jigoe, Uragoe, and Kobushi. I conclude that different vocal timbre strengthens various images of Japanese femininity that transgress from the mainstream female J-pop artists and groups. It provides alternative forms of femininities for her female fans to engage and participate in.

In this paper, I argue that rhythm tap dancers frequently saturate seemingly simple motor rhythms with syncopations. These syncopations are not necessarily audible but rather are choreographic and embodied, created in rhythm tap dance’s physical dimension.

Dancers mentally group the individual percussive attacks of their tap shoes into units through their choreography. Several factors influence these groupings, namely gravity and physical stability, genre conventions, reification through nomenclature, and parallelisms.Dancers often deploy these units in a manner that conflicts with the underlying metric grid. Specifically, they produce syncopations by initiating choreographic units on weak beats or misaligning their choreographic phrasing with the musical phrasing, most notably through grouping dissonances (Krebs 1999) or additive rhythms. Dancers thus experience metric dissonance from the opposing groupings between the audible aspect of their performance and the physical, embodied aspect.

Through a hierarchical notation system of my own creation, I reveal how step groupings produce embodied choreographic syncopations in motoric passages in performances by Dianne Walker, Jason Samuels Smith, and Sarah Reich. Moreover, I argue that attentive audience members well versed in tap dance’s practice might consciously or unconsciously imitate dancers’ actions through mimesis and thus experience the steps and their groupings in the same syncopated manner (Cox 2017, Leaman 2021). This research provides a framework for theorizing syntactical and embodied aspects of dance, contributes to a burgeoning music theory subfield of tap dance research, and facilitates appreciation of the choreomusical artistry exhibited by dancer-musicians in this underexamined African-American vernacular art form.

In this paper, I argue that metric manipulations in the music of Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish, Taylor Swift, and Olivia Rodrigo are used as text-expressive, storytelling devices to evoke lyrical themes of separation and growing apart. I discuss three types of manipulations: (1) displacement-dissonance inducing buildup introductions, (2) direct and indirect grouping dissonance (Krebs 1999) in asymmetrical meters, and (3) mid-song indirect grouping dissonances. Using the methodologies and hierarchy notation of Lerdahl & Jackendoff (1989) with Temperley’s (2001) revisions and expansions, and Krebs’ theories of metrical dissonance (1999) with Biamonte’s (2014, 2019) extensions to pop/rock music, I show how metric dissonance influences the listening experience, in turn embodying lyrical meaning.

The striking opening of British twelve-tone composer Elisabeth Lutyens’s The Valley of Hatsuse, Op. 62 (1965) highlights several key elements of her compositional style: dramatic registral explorations, an abundance of “altered octaves,” and a remarkable textural clarity. These features contribute to the highly gestural character of this opening passage, imparting a distinctive vibrancy to the sonic space—a quality consistent across Lutyens’s oeuvre. In this paper, I propose “performative effort” as a lens for centering these crucial gestural facets of Lutyens’s music. Performative effort arises through the enaction of gestures within particular instrumental or vocal spaces, and it is shaped by the various positionalities of performers and listeners. Because performative effort can encompass a wide range of affects, I outline several specific “effort qualities” that arise through a number of musical and gestural characteristics. I illustrate four such qualities—extension, precarity, discontinuity, and release—via analytical readings drawn from The Valley of Hatsuse. By integrating these analyses with more traditional aspects of twelve-tone analysis, I place performative effort as central to understanding experiential, embodied, and compositional facets of Lutyens’s music, inviting consideration on the relationships between performer, listener, and composer in analysis.

Screw Music, also known as “Chopped and Screwed,” is a sub-genre of hip-hop that developed in Houston, Texas in the 1990s. Usually created by slowing and pitching down existing recordings, Screw Music is often described as sounding sluggish, woozy, and relaxing. 
My presentation explores the unique affective qualities of Screw Music, using two concepts drawn from recent research into timbre as my foundation: the notion of an emergent timbre and the motor mimetic hypothesis. An emergent timbre typically arises from the seamless blending of several sounds, which exhibits qualities not readily present in any element alone. To describe the characteristic timbral features resulting from the paired lowering of pitch and tempo in Screw Music, I adapt this concept to encompass an emergent timbral transformation. Next, I suggest that this effect is overwhelmingly perceived by listeners somatically. The motor mimetic hypothesis argues that our comprehension of music at least partially results from our imagining of making those sounds ourselves—this appears to be especially true with Screw Music. Finally, I mobilise these observations into a brief analysis of a scene from the Barry Jenkins film Moonlight (2016), whose emotional climax is diegetically scored by a Screw Music song.
Accounts of timbre in hip-hop have typically focused on either its role in distinguishing a song’s textural layers or its indexical potential for nostalgia. My study foregrounds the relationship between this music’s sound and the listening body, and in so doing hopes to expand our understanding of timbre’s social dimensions.

Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” has become a stalwart of the groove experience research literature, but the fine details of the performance remain under-analyzed. Previous investigations touch upon metric factors, though are mostly confined to the song’s Introduction. This paper analyzes the construction of the metrical beat throughout Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” utilizing a theory of “pockets” of time that vary in size and shape to understand the effect of performed meter on the perceived intensity of sections.

According to my theory of pockets, which builds on Danielsen’s “beat bins” (2006, 2010, 2018), beats are spans of time during which an onset may be heard as being part of “the beat.” These spans are shaped so events falling at different points in the span are more or less likely to be categorized as being the beat, contra the in/out categorization of beats-as-instantaneous-points. Formalizing this concept using probabilistic distributions over the beat-spans, I explore the qualitative effects of these extended beats, how the “tight” or “loose” construction of the beat can enhance the “feel” of a section. I argue that changes in the shape of the pocket can influence our experience of musical form, illustrating this by analyzing form and timing in “Superstition” using Music Information Retrieval techniques and exploring the consequences of different pocket sizes and shapes for the track’s “feel.” Overall, this paper reframes questions of microtiming towards appreciating the subtle ways performers shape musical time in terms that capture the qualitative listener experience.

Macroharmony, as defined by Dmitri Tymoczko (2010), is "the total collection of notes heard over moderate spans of musical time." The movement between and among macroharmonic states is often difficult to describe. In the context of Stravinsky's music, Pieter van den Toorn (1983) describes the influence of octatonic and diatonic collections on one another as "interpenetration." Joseph Straus (1984) critiques his lack of "systematic criteria," and broader scholarship has not yet established precise language for the movement between these different macroharmonic states. The discrete Fourier transform (DFT) provides a more rigorous method for examining these overarching collections with Ian Quinn's chord qualia (2006/2007). The DFT provides the necessary precision for evaluating this relationship (shown by Jason Yust, 2015). To examine progressions in macroharmony over the course of a piece, my coding procedure uses overlapping windowing similar to Amiot (2017)—although I implement log2-weighted multisets instead of tallied multisets to accommodate centricity yet also curve for PC repetition. By extracting overlapping windows of discrete pitch information from a piece's MIDI data, I show how the DFT of weighted inputs characterizes multisets in a way congruent with the macroharmony. I analyze the Domine Jesu of Duruflé's Requiem, which frequently shifts between various scalar collections, to demonstrate that the DFT can reliably trace the form-defining progression of macroharmonic states through a complete piece.

Drawing on Lochhead's (2016) reconceptualization of structure in contemporary music, my paper argues that physical balance works along other musical parameters, such as form and pitch, as a mode of structuring contemporary works. This approach shifts the analytical focus from the score to the pianist's bodily experience, building on Cusick's (1994) call for a critical engagement with the performing body and on Montague's (2012) and Cizmic's (2011) emphasis on the pianist's sensations. To engage with this aspect of musical organization, I propose a method for analyzing the sense of physical balance—understood as shifts in center of gravity—experienced by a pianist. I first outline a methodology that models the way in which recent piano repertoire creates tension and resolution for the pianist. This occurs through shifts in center of gravity as both hands travel across registers. A body experiences a sense of tension when it sits in an unbalanced state, leaning, for instance, towards the left of the keyboard. It strives towards resolution, which is attained by returning to a balanced center of gravity. Then, I illustrate the methodology through analyses of recent compositions that foreground these issues: Dux (2017) by Zosha Di Castri, Garage (2007) by Alice Ping Yee Ho, and Klavierstuck II (2004) by Beat Furrer.

Recent approaches in mathematical music theory have developed ways to describe voice leadings between various kinds of sonorities. Geometric theory has shown that the voice-leading space of seven-note scales within a chromatic (mod-12) universe shares the same structure as the voice-leading space of three-note chords within a diatonic (mod-7) universe (Tymoczko 2011). In transformational theory, the algebraic group of signature transformations (Hook 2008) conveys similar information about voice-leading relationships between scales; this paper presents the analogous transformational system for diatonic triads.

The transformation group acts on a set of 21 objects: the seven diatonic triads differentiated by their three closed-position inversions. Application of the transformation v1 transforms the triad by ascending, single-step motion; repeated application of v₁ generates the entire group, with cyclic group structure C₂₁. The group can alternatively be generated by two different transformations: diatonic transposition, t₁, and triad rotation, r₁. This transformational system can be used to describe the motion of the upper three voices of a diatonic progression. Applying these transformations to a progression corresponds to transposing and/or changing the voicing of its upper voices.

The group can be expanded to include open-position triads; however, all triads must be complete. Nonetheless, similar information about chord voicing in progressions containing incomplete triads and seventh chords can be captured by visualizing the progressions as paths through a mod-7 PT-space. By treating these paths as objects in a transformational system, some transformations of the original system can be generalized as mathematical rotations and reflections in the geometric space.

Theorists agree that classical music is often composed of multiple simultaneous horizontal components, but not on what these components should be called, and how they should be defined or divided. This paper integrates three standard answers to this question—traditional music theory’s concept of the contrapuntal “voice,” music cognition’s concept of the auditory “stream,” and metaphor theory’s concept of the fictional “agent”—into a single perceptual model that accounts for their interdependence.

My model treats all of these concepts (and the concept of “texture” itself) not as material properties of a written score, but rather as modes of listener attention in response to features of a sounding performance. To demonstrate this, I examine recordings by pianists acclaimed for bringing out potential melodies in “inner voices” (Josef Hofmann, Shura Cherkassky, etc.). I show that different performances of the same passage can project different numbers of voices, streams, and agents, and re-distribute pitches differently among these components. I analyze how these pianists achieve these different segmentations through inflections of dynamics and articulation. And I examine the aesthetic discourse that surrounded this art of re-segmentation during the so-called “golden age” of Romantic piano.

This redefinition of textural labels as perceptual responses to performances affirms the need for analysts to attend to the performance practices that their analyses implicitly assume. Dynamics and articulation are not just means of expressing conceptually prior pitch structures; rather, they are integral parts of how such structures are constituted in the first place.

Medieval plainchant in the Carolingian era was pressured to become a uniform practice across Europe. However, its origin as an oral tradition has resulted in differences in practice between local communities. Such differences have yielded many chant variants that complicate both the desires of the Carolingians as well as our modern understanding of plainchant’s ontology. These variants challenge one’s sense of melodic identity.

This multiplicity reflects larger discussions regarding musical ontology, which rely on human interpretation to understand the complicated nature of the musical object (Popper 1977, Ingarden 1989, Treitler 1993, Cook 2013). Treitler likens the musical work to “that of a unicorn” (1993, 483): the unicorn’s existence relies on individual interpretations, resulting in many depictions that obscure the “ideal image” of the unicorn. The multiplicity in the representations of both unicorns and plainchant therefore precludes the possibility of a single ideal form. In other words, the musical idea itself is fuzzy.

This paper examines how fuzzy set theory (Zadeh, 1965) contributes to understanding of musical ontology. The theory admits partial members into a family of related objects, and quantifies gradations of membership based on shared characteristics. Using a fuzzy model of contour transformation, I determine a contour’s degree of familial membership by calculating the probability that each move in the contour’s pathway is shared by other family members. Using fuzzy contour membership to quantify convergences and divergences between the notated variants of a chant, one can gain a more thorough understanding of the fuzziness within the musical idea itself.

Implicit in most thematically oriented theories of sonata form is the claim that the central drama of the sonata occurs at the 'signposts.' By this line of thinking, structural normativity is measured by the presence of certain generically mandated landmarks (Primary Theme, Transition, etc), and formal nonconformity occurs when a sonata obscures, omits, delays, reorders, or otherwise modifies these landmarks. While such paradigms have produced much insightful analytical work, they tend to give insufficient emphasis to rich thematic unorthodoxies: interpolations, displacements, superimpositions, etc., that occur between traditional theme-initiating signposts. Such theoretical paradigms become particularly problematic when applied to so-called neoclassical sonata repertories--especially the early works of Prokofiev--in which seemingly unremarkable thematic discontinuities between predictably situated sonata milestones often prove to have far-reaching structural ramifications.

My paper explores the manner in which one branch of these thematic eccentricities, namely Prokofiev's strategy of interpolating motivically 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), rendering it an empty frame from which the expected motivic and thematic contents have been hollowed out and replaced. I invoke Russian Formalist Boris Tomashevsky's concepts of 'bound' and 'free' motifs in conjunction with Viktor Shklovsky's larger theory of fabula (story) and syuzhet (plot) as a framework for clarifying and contextualizing the subversive structural function of Prokofiev's interpolations within his larger sonata text.

The interactions between meter, phrasing, rhyme, semantics, grammar, and rhythm afford rap a unique brand of poetic musicality. In the hands of skilled M.C.s these elements alternately align to create driving clear patterns of anticipation, or elide and enjamb in complex webs that thwart expectations. Building on existing theory (Adams 2008, 2009; Ohriner 2013), this paper presents a theoretical description of rap flow based on analyses of over 120 popular rap songs. From the corpus a general description of the ‘norms’ of rap are statistically quantified: the most common phrase schemata, rhythms, uses of rhyme, etc.

These statistical generalizations are then used as a reference point against which to identify and analyze the most exceptional and creative passages in the corpus. The corpus approach affords a well-defined comparison of the stylistic features of different rappers’ flow, as well as changes in rap flow over time. For instance, the current corpus reveals several historical trends including a significant decrease in the average tempo in rap songs, and an increase in the number of rhymes through the early 2000s.

Using measures from information theory, the complexity and predictability of rap rhyme schemes is quantified in a probabilistic theoretical model. It is shown that skilled rappers alternatively maximize or minimize entropy and unpredictability in their flow, creating the balance between tension and release, which is central to musical experience. In addition, an autocorrelational approach is adopted to identify and measure repetition at various time scales in the rap delivery.

The ballet Fancy Free premiered at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1944, marking the beginning of the creative collaboration between composer Leonard Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins. This paper presents a choreo-musical analysis of the balletexploring the intertwining relationships between music and dance. I argue that the complementary metric and rhythmic choices create unique characterizations for each of the three sailors’ solo variations in the sixth movement. The placement and repetition of rhythmic and choreographic phrasesdistinguish the personalities of each sailor.

Building on recent discussions by music theorists and dance scholars, my analysis aligns the dance steps alongside musical analysis to see how they inform each other, paying close attention to choreographic and musical accents. The energetic first variation features the acrobatic, gregarious sailor, and the tension between choreographic and musical phrases depicts a man of vigor. I focus on the second variation, which while titled “Waltz” is not in a pure triple meter. I illustrate how the choreography can confirm or contradict the waltz topic, portraying the sailor’s unassuming playfulness. The third movement is the most metrically straightforward and the choreography matches effortlessly with the main motives, providing a slick characterization for the group’s suave leader. I take this in-depth look at the Fancy Free variations to illustrate how choreo-musical analysis can enrich our understanding of the synergy of music and movement.

She blushes. She turns pale. She casts down her eyes. These are some of the gestures 18^th century English novelists used to portray their characters’ sensibility and moral virtue. The literary idea that words were inadequate for expressing Sensibility, which must instead be expressed through gestures, maps well onto the textless signification of topic theory. As a musical topic, Sensibility is often associated with the north German keyboard style of C.P.E. Bach, however I suggest that this is too limited of a definition. Instead, it can function as a topical world (Monelle) with multiple signifiers and a complex signified, and at times even be expanded into an expressive genre (Hatten).

In this paper I will show how movements from Haydn’s string quartets often embody musical Sensibility, such as in the slow movement in opus 64/5, an exemplar of the style. I will then show how Haydn integrates the unmarked, galant style and the marked, sensible style in the slow movement from opus 33/3, as a musical commentary on the balance between reason and sentiment. Finally, I will show how Sensibility functions as an expressive genre in the slow movement of opus 76/3, in which the learned, pastoral, and hymn topics are combined under the dramatic trajectory of Sensibility, portraying the attainment of 18^th century moral virtue in music.

After three attempts to provide his opera with an adequate introduction, Beethoven composed a completely new overture for the 1814 revival of Fidelio. Critics often describe the Fidelio Overture Op.72 b as lighter and less ambitious than its predecessors, but it raises tonal issues that anticipate crucial forthcoming events — not only in the opera, but also in Beethoven’s stylistic development. The overture and other newly composed fragments emphasize an opposition between the keys of C major and E major, which were often associated with nature and heavens respectively (Steblin, 1996). I argue that Beethoven draws on these loose expressive characteristics to construct, through key relationships and musical topics, a complex musical metaphor that captures a metaphysical worldview. C major appears repeatedly as a stable tonic that is eventually transformed into a flat submediant through a Le-Sol-Fi-Sol schema (Byros, 2012). In this fashion, C major –paired with the pastoral topic – becomes a transitional space that leads to E major – paired with the ‘sacred hymn topic’ (McKee, 2007)–, providing a musical analogy to the transience of earthly matters and their subordination to the domain of spirit.

The revisions of 1814 indicate a potential transformation in Beethoven’s conception of the drama, emphasizing the spiritual component and downplaying its political implications. Although Fidelio is traditionally considered a quintessentially heroic work, I suggest that the last version functions as an evolutionary link between Beethoven’s middle and late styles, participating in tonal strategies for the expression of spirituality and transcendence found in the late works.

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

Carolyn Abbate’s provocative essay “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” served as an important check on the tendency of analysts to carry out their work in an abstract conceptual space, one detached from one’s real experience of music. Yet her eloquent revalorization of the “drastic” nonetheless invites charges of a regressive mode of listening—one incompatible with innumerable works composed self-consciously as art music and inarguably intended to provoke much in the listener beyond the force of their presence in performance. This paper aims to bring musical meaning and the listener’s experience into closer contact by way of an examination of the famous “Heiliger Dankgesang” from Beethoven’s op. 132—a movement whose distinct styles act as topical signifiers. Pursuing the distinction between sign codification and sign production drawn by Umberto Eco in his semiotic, as well as Rosen’s conception of style as achievement, I propose an aesthetics of stylistic signification in which signifiers are revealed as intensely fragile and precarious entities. A refocusing of attention in our appreciation of musical meaning—from signified to signifier—carries the potential to reanimate our “gnostic” experience of music with a new sense of drama and—in the case of op. 132—a confrontation with issues of transcendence, disability, and mortality. My paper thus aims to extend topic theory by way of a new engagement with the sensuous material of music, while suggesting one means by which listener-centered approaches to music can accommodate considerations of musical meaning.

Conventionally, tonal structure in Bach’s binary dance movements is described as a first reprise modulating from I to V (or i to v for minor-key pieces), followed by a second reprise modulating from V to I. As this paper demonstrates via a comprehensive survey, that stereotype is mistaken with respect to the tonal structure of second reprises, which, in fact, normally do not begin in a non-tonic key at all. Instead, second reprises usually begin with what I term the V–I paradigm, in which the reprise begins on an active dominant in the tonic key, which then proceeds without overt cadential rhetoric to a tonic chord. Only after this reiteration of dominant-to-tonic harmonic motion, which occurs in about 70% of Bach’s binary dances whose first reprises end in the key of V, does the second reprise proceed with the tonicization of a secondary key area and an eventual cadence in tonic. Because the V–I paradigm occurs in a variety of prolongational contexts, I argue that it functions as a schema in the sense recently popularized by Robert O. Gjerdingen (2007). The V–I paradigm also serves as the structural underpinning for the subjects of certain fugues: those in the second reprises of binary gigues in Bach’s keyboard suites. As such, the V–I paradigm allows us to construct a supplement to the otherwise exhaustive categorization of subjects and exposition patterns described by William Renwick (1995).

Orlande de Lassus’ Prologue to the Prophetiae Sybillarum sounds strange and provocative, with abrupt changes of accidentals. It is surely in part for this reason that Lowinsky (1961), Mitchell (1970), Berger (1980, 1985), and Lake (1991) have sought to make sense of it. These analyses, however, conflict as to the degree to which the piece does or does not “fit” tonality or a hierarchical modal system. In addition, beyond Lowinsky’s reference to “excessive modulation within so small a space” (39), these scholars do not adequately explain what makes the piece sound so bizarre. This presentation will attempt a more complete explanation of this piece by modeling abstract and literal counterpoint.

This presentation will proceed in three parts. First, I will describe the ways 16th-century and modern scholars have talked about abstract counterpoint. Second, I will demonstrate the (mostly) strict rules Lassus used to create sounding counterpoint, and how this relates to the process of composition in the 16th century as described by Owens (1997). Finally, I will use the concepts of abstract and literal counterpoint to show that the most interesting and shocking aspect of this piece is not just that it is chromatic, but that it is so chromatic because of its carefully chosen, contrapuntally-correct path.

Music theorists often use the words archetype and schema interchangeably: both words describe a musical pattern learned from the experience of listening. These words, however, have quite different epistemological underpinnings. In the context of style analysis, Leonard B. Meyer describes an archetype as a pattern that is “stable over time” and that “may help to illuminate the nature of the changes that have occurred in the history of…music.” Schema, on the other hand, comes from a cognitive bent and Robert O. Gjerdingen defines it simply as a “mental representation.” There may be merit in keeping these terms separate, with “schema” operating within a style and “archetype” transcending styles. This paper will first compare two Galant schemata—the Prinner and the Romanesca—with two analogous schemata from the vastly different music of Elton John—schemata that I have termed the Levon and the Chameleon. Then the style-specific features of these two pairs of structurally similar schemata will be removed to approximate the two metastylistic archetypes: the 4-3-2-1 stepwise bass descent archetype and the stepwise octave bass descent archetype. Finally, I will briefly discuss two possible uses for archetypes: archetypes as analytic tools used to detect changes in musical styles and archetypes as superordinate schemata abstracted from listening to a diverse repertoire of music.

In the forty?five years since composer Arthur Berger called for a “new branch of music theory” to address the language of post?tonal repertoires, the proliferation of analytical tools for examining the structure of such works has been considerable. There remains, however, a considerable gap between the analytical results provided by such tools and their relevance to musical performance—a gap that I contend is far narrower in tonal analysis. In this paper, I propose that the comprehension of even the most basic atonal structures is largely unhelpful to a musician in developing an informed and meaningful performance. To fill this gap, I propose a multifaceted analytical approach grounded in the field of musical meaning, an approach that utilizes recent theories of musical gesture, embodiment, and intertextuality.

Defending his twelve?tone method in 1936, Arnold Schoenberg wrote that he instructed his students to, “… use the same kind of form or expression, the same themes, melodies, sounds, rhythms, as you did before.” This paper takes Schoenberg’s compositional advice as analytical imperative. Focusing on one of the most over?analyzed works of atonal music in the repertoire, the second movement of Webern’s Piano Variations, op. 27, this discussion avoids any mention of row forms, inverted canons, pitch?class symmetries, or fixed?registral dyads. Rather, using Peter Stadlen’s 1936 performance edition as a starting point, I suggest specific gestural and topical prototypes, establishing the movement’s connection to the past through various recompositions. My aim is to demonstrate that the movement derives its meaning from the expressionistic distortion of these prototypes.

It is common to speak of there being a “syntax” in music, but much less commonly is this term defined. In its linguistic sense, “syntax” invokes the notion of lexical category (e.g., noun, verb, adjective). Musicologists generally agree that there is no musical parallel to lexical category. Yet “order” (taxis) is clearly important in music—causing the same C major chord, for instance, to sound as a dominant in F, a subdominant in G, and a flat sixth in E. Music is literally, then, “with order.” It is this intuition that leads theorists to claim—correctly, I believe—that musical utterances are syntactic. Nevertheless, without a proper understanding of what “syntax” is, describing music as such carries little theoretical weight. The comparison with language is problematic largely because of the fact that, in both music and language, syntax is already speciated. What is needed is a general theory against which to compare both. I argue that such a general understanding can be arrived at by means of (a) a comparison of the syntactic behaviors used communicatively throughout the animal kingdom, and (b) a consideration of how syntacticity functions within those communication systems. Much communication, human or otherwise, is nonsyntactic (e.g., crying, cooing, gesturing, laughing). Syntacticity affords a certain set of benefits above and beyond those afforded by nonsyntactic communication, but evolutionary pressures would presumably be required to bring them about. Evolutionary theory thus offers one way of accounting for what musical syntacticity is, how it functions, and why it emerged.

Critical responses to Schubert’s music have traditionally been preoccupied with appraising his craft in relation to the Beethovenian ideal. They have especially focused on judging the worthiness of Schubert’s sonata forms; these are found to be lacking, a result of their supposedly excessive length, repetitiveness, and propensity to become “lost” in temporally directionless memory-worlds. Recently, some authors—inspired by Adorno’s 1928 essay, “Schubert”—have taken a more affirmative approach to these traits, focusing on the power of those very moments at which Schubert appears to be lost. So far, most have identified modulations as the primary activator of  Schubert’s dream-spaces.

I demonstrate in this paper that Schubert frequently opens his characteristic interior spaces not just with kaleidoscopic modulation and arresting melody, but by recourse to a continuum of increasingly etherealized mechanical topics. Drawing on Elaine Sisman’s work on memory and Carolyn Abbate’s study of mechanical music, I show how Schubert’s sensitivity to texture and timbre allowed him to create a range of mechanical style types, arrayed from the most grotesque (the Gothic horror of Der Leiermann), up through Arcadian musettes and tinkling music-boxes, to encounters with transcendent angelic voices. Schubert’s use of mechanical topics to create his memory-worlds takes on even richer meaning when it is considered in light of the composer’s cultural and biographical circumstances, including Romantic conceptions of memory and the pastoral, musical automata, Biedermeier Viennese psychology, and Schubert’s own cautious involvement with Mesmerism.

Experiencing a minimalist work has seldom been described as an active process. Yet, there are certain pieces that seem to imply a participatory role for the listener in virtue of their structural design. In this paper I examine Steve Reich’s Drumming, exploring how the formal plan of the work suggests a participatory listening strategy—one that is both active and creative.

Through a procedure Reich calls “pointing out,” resulting patterns are highlighted from the successive phase relationships; in effect allowing new melodies to emerge from the music in a slow crescendo, and then fade out just as gradually. Though from a listener’s perspective, even after these patterns fade they are still mentally present. These “trace melodies” are then overwritten by new resulting patterns, creating the temporal equivalent of a palimpsest.

At a certain point, the performers cease to point out these melodies, yet the sustained phase relationship suggests that the listener should take on this role. Building on the work of Cohn, Horlacher, and Rink, I demonstrate how Part I of Drumming has a teleological formal shape, providing both a crescendo of attack points and an increasing variety of possible resultant patterns. Yet, it becomes the responsibility of the listener to mentally contribute to this composite, and without this participation the structure is anti-climactic; it is the listener who completes the formal process. After exploring how Drumming encourages the listener to take on this active role, I conclude by pointing out some of the rewards that come from engaging the piece in this way.

Musical scholarship on the relationship between analysis and performance continues to flourish. The first wave of this research, conducted throughout the 1980s and early 1990s with predecessors in Schenker, sought to establish a correspondence between marked structural events and their interpretation in performance. A second, more recent wave, dissatisfied with the formalism of such analyses, has sought to balance the contributions of the analyst and the performer in a more holistic musical understanding.

The rise of performance-driven analysis mirrors the growing work on musical agency. As yet, these two streams remain distinct. This paper seeks to examine the relationship between agency and performance using the first movement of Schubert’s Sonata in A Minor, D. 845, as a text. I will propose an agential reading of the piece and demonstrate how various performances by established pianists recast and ultimately enrich that reading. By modulating the marked oppositions within their jurisdiction (i.e., expressive timing, dynamics, and articulation), performers can attenuate the listener’s sense of narrative or refute it altogether.

No performer projects all aspects of my agential analysis; however, I do not assert that my reading is the only possible narrative. Rather, my aim is to show how the concept of agency can be a useful tool for comparing different performances. By speculating on the expressive motivations of performance choices, a theorist can interpret the microstructural variables behind such easy labels as “romantic,” “passionate,” or “mechanical.” This approach complements hermeneutic analysis by according the performer a more equal role in the creation of musical meaning.

In recent music discourse, scholars have struggled to explain the sudden harmonic shifts, remote tonal regions, and discontinuity of musical gestures in Schubert's music. In an effort to rationalize these idiosyncrasies by relating them to a unified whole, some scholars have retooled pre-existing analytical systems by extending concepts of diatony; others have sought to devise new systems altogether, or have turned to hermeneutic models. What seems to fuel this drive toward integrating disparate musical events is an aesthetic of unity. This paper asks what other options might be available to us and how pursuing an alternative to an aesthetic of unity can affect our understanding of Schubert's music.

      Using the Moment Musical, Op. 94, No. 2, as a case in point, my paper will suggest that certain pieces can be thought of in terms of irony, fostering a double-consciousness by engaging in a dialogic relationship with themselves and with formal and harmonic structures drawn from the past. The paper will (1) provide an alternative to perceiving Schubert's music as a monologic, unified consciousness, whereby idiosyncratic musical events are explained as contributing to a greater, continuous whole; (2) show how Schubert's use of tonality and form can coexist with notions of conventional diatony and form, and need not be understood either as a derivative of these customary procedures or as independent from them.

Is there a way to conceive of a musical work's beginning and ending keys, even if there are exactly the same, as symbolized by two different places? If so, what is the kind of journey that unfolds in between, if it does not involve a homecoming? This analysis applies an innovative analytical technique published recently by Yale music professor Daniel Harrison ("Nonconformist Notions of Nineteenth-Century Enharmonicism", Music Analysis 21/2 (2002): 115-160.) to one of Michael Torke's most popular chamber works: Telephone Book (1985/95). Torke's Telephone Book with its many full-circle modulations is a musical depiction of the alphabetical ordering found in phone books. Application of Harrison's new theory now enables these modulations to be coherent with the idea of alphabetical order, with each move around the circle-of-fifths now seen as a move to a new entity like the alphabet cycling through letters and arriving at new ones (A???s to B???s etc.) There are eight such modulatory cycles in Telephone Book. A collection-by-collection analysis reveals pivot tones that are often at the forefront of melodic activity and ensemble interplay. Using Harrison's ideas of enharmonicism to reveal a unique tonal path for every modulatory cycle in Torke's Telephone Book shows a musical equivalency of alphabetical order. A telephone book arranged in alphabetical order, is a linear event, never returning but gradually moving to new letters. Torke's Telephone Book does this musically and Harrison's new analytical technique helps us to see how.

Stravinsky's harmonic practice has been a challenge to theoretical notions that propose to integrate chromaticism within a prevalent diatonic-invoking surface. Octatonicism has been posited as the primary cause for such integration, whether acting at the surface or controlling larger-scale formal articulations as a background space. However, such ambitious explanations attributed to octatonicism have recently been questioned, opening up the possibility for other pitch relationships to emerge, especially in neo-classical pieces, like the Serenade en La, in which superimposed and juxtaposed diatonic segments equally resist octatonicism and tonal interpretations.

This paper proposes a pitch-class framework capable of modeling the superimposition and juxtaposition of scalar segments as well as accounting for their syntactical progression. The paper advances the notion that scalar segments can be thought of as specifying locations within a framework which integrates all diatonic phenomena. This framework, which I label Guidonean space reflecting its conjunct hexachords, is specially suited to model various types of pitch relationships which are prevalent in the "Hymne" from the Serenade en La.

The paper explains the theoretical model underpinning the Guidonean space, addressing its intervallic structure and measuring the movement between its pitches (through an operation I call ). It also contextualizes this space within a larger family of hybrid spaces. The paper then provides an analysis of the whole "Hymne," as well as some passages of the last movement, the "Cadenza Finala."

Heinrich Schenker’s Ursatz exemplifies the traditional functional roles of outer voices in tonal music, with the upper voice as principal bearer of melody and the lower voice as provider of harmonic support. What would happen if these traditional roles were reversed? Is this kind of role reversal possible? In this study, I examine exceptional pieces in which the lowest sounding voice is the principal bearer of the melody. My principal focus is on piano compositions in which the melody is played by the left hand. Among the issues I consider are: what happens to the bass line in these works; what role do the upper voices play; and can the fundamental line be positioned entirely in a lower voice?

The analyses in this study show that, rather than role reversal, the melodic bass is generally forced into a dual role, in the form of a compound melody with both a functional bass and melodic tenor. The upper voices provide an accompaniment that can sometimes be interpreted as Urlinie tones, but a stronger case can often be made for an Urlinie in the tenor. In support of this approach, I cite Carl Schachter’s concept of a “submerged Urlinie,” defined as “a fundamental line that is introduced in the middle of the texture rather than on top.” The dynamic tension that may emerge between a lower voice that attempts to take on a melodic Urlinie role and a competing upper voice that may resist such attempts is what I term “Urlinie Envy.”

This paper investigates a link between metric displacements and romantic longing (Sehnsucht) in selected Lieder by Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms. Sybille Reichert has shown that expressions of Sehnsucht generally involve movement outwards, towards the infinite, followed by a return to the self. Metric displacements have the potential to generate “energy profiles” (Lewin) that correlate with this gesture of longing. The correlation is inevitably loose, however, for while the resolution of metric displacements brings about a relative state of rest, the longing subject who returns to him- or herself achieves neither resolution nor rest. The songs presented here compensate for this discrepancy in a variety of ways.

In Schubert’s “Wandrers Nachtlied II” metric displacements reflect the outward movement of the Wanderer’s longing. They cease with the turn to self-consciousness, but their “kinetic energy” is transferred to the vocal line, and the singer reaches up to his or her melodic climax in the final phrases. Ultimately Schubert’s song achieves a state of rest that lies outside of the “temporal actuality” of the poem. Metric displacements in Schumann’s “Intermezzo” are introduced as the poet gazes inward at an image of his beloved, intensified as he sings a song which flies out towards her, and resolved as he returns to the image in his heart. Schumann’s postlude, however, undermines the sense of full closure. In Brahms’s “Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer” the dying protagonist performs her urgent longing for the beloved with metric displacements, and her life energy dissipates as the displacements resolve.

            A distinctive compositional signature for Bartók’s post-1926 contrapuntal style consists of the superposition of strands in different keys. Analytical approaches to this music seem to divide along a standard tonal/atonal boundary. However, both approaches suppress the individuality and coherence of diatonic strands, the first by reducing chromaticism into diatonicism, the second by scattering diatonicism into chromaticism.

            This paper proposes an alternative framework in which to conceive superposed diatonic spaces, without specifying diatonic collections nor appealing to pitch-centers. The starting point is the analytical tradition inspired by Bartók’s notion of polymodal chromaticism, and its subsequent crystallization as a prolongational model, the Lydian-Phrygian polymode. It is suggested that polymodes can be viewed independently of pitch-centric constraints, through a space I call dasian, after the dasian scale discussed in the medieval Enchiriadis treatises. The dasian space is a 48-element cycle, in which the twelve diatonic pitch-spaces are represented. It is thus a hybrid space: diatonic at the regional level and chromatic when gradually venturing outside each region. However, subsegments are defined not by their key affiliation, but by their (sometimes multiple) location within the cycle. Hence, the space draws its coherence not from the differentiation between key areas, but from its intervallic coherence and autonomous patterning. The navigation of the dasian system (through stepwise motion, and through an operation I call channeling) during mm. 1–38 of Bartók’s Piano Sonata, mvt. III, retains the individual diatonic strands within the dasian space, as the music engages in a process of coherent exploration of that space.

Few have denied the value of performing a musical work. Yet more often than not we tend to dismiss the performer's role as a mere conduit through which we can hear the "work." The variety and nature of recorded interpretations has challenged musicologists and theorists alike to reconsider the nature of a musical work, its theory, and the entire system of values by which we evaluate music.

In this paper, I propose a radical shift away from perceiving the musical score as the single arbiter of a musical work and toward a view in which the performance and score collaborate to create a final work. It is my contention that we do not yet sufficiently understand the importance of performance; we credit the score for saying more than it really does. I examine a six-bar phrase from the third movement of Beethoven's "Waldstein" Sonata, Op. 53. and its development within the Rondo as performed by Arthur Schnabel, Ernst Levy, and most importantly, Josef Hofmann; Hofmann presents a three-note motive, a motive which, although not absent in the score, is not present in any other performances. Once brought to our attention, the motive governs our hearing of the entire movement and its overall structure. Drawing on the work of the cognitive linguist Ronald Langacker, I discuss the ways in which our perception of an otherwise unnoted motive might determine musical meaning.

John Adams's Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986) is an engaging work that brings its listeners to the very edge of metrical experience. According to the composer, this orchestral fanfare is inspired by the experience of driving a too-fast sports car. In its first thirty seconds meter is manipulated in such a way as to make its very presence uncertain at best-though enough regularity (i.e., periodicity) is present at multiple hierarchical levels to tease the listener into making constant attempts to discover and latch on to a metered surface. The resulting aural sensation reflects that of wrestling to keep control over a powerful machine, as the title suggests.

This analysis uses several potential rebarrings to represent the ways in which a listener might apprehend the music's complex metric features. The discussion surveys the multiple levels of metric dissonance present in this fanfare's opening, as different phenomenological elements blur the perception of metric subdivisions, the tactus, the (periodic) measure, and the hypermeasure. The analysis also includes consideration for the perception of metric modulation and/or multiple simultaneous meters.

        At moments of cadential expectation in 'Noctuelles', Ravel suddenly introduces motifs of short, irregularly grouped rhythmic values that suspend the basic pulse, dissipate the rhythmic energy, fragment the prevailing 3/4 meter, and disrupt hypermetric regularity. In this way, Ravel delays the clear establishment of 3/4 meter in order to manipulate the listener's expectations of metric stability. I characterise these moments as "metrically unmeasured units of (musical) time" because their intrusion suspends the basic pulse which in turn prevents the perception of 3/4 meter and disrupts hypermetric regularity. In studying the effects of these units upon hypermetric patterns, I investigate complex dissonant relationships between hierarchic levels. I refer to the work of Justin London, Jonathan Kramer and Richard Cohn to show how Ravel establishes unstable metric hierarchies by resolving dissonances on one, but not between interrelated levels. The function of these units to create dissonance is enhanced through Ravel's manipulation of form which gives rise to a disorienting musical experience. However, such an experience is not pervasive since two transformations of dissonant motifs hint at the eventual reinstatement of meter. In examining Ravel's manipulation of metric and formal expectations, I show how this neglected perspective provides an insight into many perplexing yet characteristic aspects of his music.

A simple algebraic framework is proposed for studying triadic transformations. Included are the "neo-Riemannian" transformations P, L,and R, and other transformations recently studied by Cohn, Hyer, and Lewin. Hyer's group of 144 transformations is extended to a group of 288, in which composition of transformations may be defined in a simpler and more unified fashion. The 144 non-Hyerian transformations include some of particular musical importance, such as the "diatonic mediant" transformation. Briefly, each transformation is represented by a sign (indicating mode-preserving or mode-reversing) and two transposition levels (one for major triads, one for minor). The study of the structure of this group generalizes some results of Cohn about the self-inverse property of some neo- Riemannian transformations, and provides some clarification of the relationship between those transformations that behave in characteristically "neo-Riemannian" ways and others (such as the "dominant" transformation) that do not--a relationship that some have found disturbing. The group may be regarded as the group of intervals in a suitable Generalized Interval System in the sense of Lewin. The methods presented are readily adaptable to transformations of set classes other than triads and to equal-tempered systems other than that with 12 notes.

The author views late works of Morton Feldman through the window of the metaphor 'living on the edge.' Analysis of the 1983 work Clarinet and String Quartet shows how fleeting hints of process, ordering and pattern engage the listener's perception at the threshold of intelligibility, and create a narrow 'zone of possibility' in which much of the activity of the piece takes place. In many ways the music adheres to the dictum formulated by Cage, Feldman, and their associates of the early 1950's: that sounds were to be heard 'as sounds themselves.' However, the author shows how the construction and presentation of material both validates and questions this idea.

Voice-leading parsimony is a term employed in recent work by Richard Cohn (1996) to describe situations in which every voice in a motion between two simultaneities is either retained as a common tone or moves incrementally, a half-step in chromatic space. This paper explores three relations of parsimonious voiceleading in Scriabin's nontonal music. The Pn-relation is a formalization of parsimonious voice-leading between chords for which there exists a one to one mapping, where n denotes the number of voices moving by half-step. P2-relations hold between any Teven-related Mystic chords (set-class 6-34), a common chord sequence in Scriabin's music. Split voice-leading which holds between a single pc and a dyad consisting of that pc's upper and lower neighbors, for example between {F} and {E,F#), is formalized as a split-relation. This relation employs a grouping based on registral proximity, and thus provides an alternative to the assumptions of one-to-one mapping of most theories of voice-leading. A Generalized Interval System of splitrelations is developed which demonstrates: (1) that T6-related acoustic collections (set-class 7-34), sister sonority of the Mystic chord, possess the potential for parsimonious voiceleading via splitrelations; and (2) an explicit means of describing the function of the acoustic collection as a mediating structure between whole-tone and octatonic collections. A generalized relation is developed which allows any instance of voice-leading parsimony to be decomposed into its constituent Pn- and splitrelations. Examples from Scriabin's Etude, op. 65, no. 3, demonstrate the inherent potential for parsimonious voiceleading of his preferred pitch structures, suggesting a relational network which obtains among them.

    Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1843) adds a powerful nonverbal dimension to Shakespeare’s play, sometimes furthering and other times suspending or transforming the dramatic narrative. More than any of the other movements, the Nocturne poses a potential conflict between musical and dramatic narrative by temporarily halting the staged action. While the mortal lovers on stage rest as the result of supernatural intervention, the audience too is forced to take a pause from the dramatic action by the external intervention of Mendelssohn’s nondiegetic music. By being thus musically drawn into the Dream, the audience is—like the characters on stage—subject to some harmless deception, revealed in the following act through a surprising conjunction of music and words.

Morton Subotnick's A Key to Songs (1985) is the first piece in a trilogy of works each based on a separate collage "novel" by the Surrealist artist Max Ernst; A Key to Songs is based on the 1934 novel Une semaine de bonté, ou les sept éléments capitaux (A Week of Kindness, of the Seven Deadly Elements). In each piece of the trilogy, Subotnick attempts to represent musically the bizarre worlds of Ernst's collage novels. In A Key to Songs, the methods of representation include imitating Ernst's collage technique and drawing upon some musical corollaries of the primary influences on Ernst's collages. Subotnick collages direct quotations and the stylistic variations from 19th century German Romantic lieder together in rapidly alternating sections, creating a formal collage of themes which is camouflaged by the surface smoothness of the music; in addition, Subotnick collages the acoustic and electronic instruments together, creating hybrid sounds. The result is an overall collage of 19th century Romanticism with Subotnick's contemporary computer music, and a collage technique analogous to that of Ernst's and including influences ranging from Freudian psychology to literary theory.

Anton Webern’s famous assertion that as early as 1911 “he had the feeling, ‘when all twelve notes have gone by, the piece is over’” suggests that he may have anticipated the serial concept of aggregation before Schoenberg. Unique among Webern’s works, the 1910 composition of Op. 7/3 appears to support such a conclusion: it actually unfolds a single aggregate and ends precisely once all twelve pitch classes are heard.
    This paper explores the remarkable history of Op. 7/3, and examines how and why it came to embody a single aggregate. As a result of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, Universal suspended its imminent publication of Op. 7 under an “Act of God” condition in its publishing agreement. Prior analyses of Op. 7/3 by Allen Forte, David Lewin, and other have all addressed the 1922 post-war publication. Based on new research at the Webern archives in Switzerland, analytic comparison between the published score and Werbern’s original 1914 manuscript reveals that he made critical revisions in 1922. These revisions are scrutinized from a set-theoretical perspective and a new analytic model for assessing aggregational unfolding in a non-serial atonal work. The result shows that unlike the revised version, the original consisted of two aggregate cycles rather than one. Op. 7/3 only became a uni-aggregational piece through revision in 1922, long after Webern’s aggregational feeling of 1911. Based upon this analysis, questions are raised as to the credibility of Webern’s famous remark, his anticipation of Schoenberg’s serial thought, and possible reasons for his curious revision of the atonal work to embody a single aggregate years after it was composed.

This paper approaches analytical problems of tonal spaces and harmonic function in Wagner’s Parifsal, with particular attention to “Grail” motive passages. It suggests Richard Cohn’s “hexatonic space” as a tool that mediates easily between the diatonic and the chromatic tendencies in the music. It then presents a hexatonic analysis of Grail passages, showing progress of hexatonic strategies towards the final scene. The paper then addresses the place of the Leittonwechsel transformation, which is characteristic of hexatonic space, in Parsifal, and shows it to be associated with the central Christological image of Blood, and thus to the Grail usage previously described.

Most analysts currently agree that the actual set of variations in Anton Webern’s Variations for the Piano, Op. 27, are present in the third movement. However, Webern’s own comments suggest that the initial eleven measures of this movement serve as a theme not only for the subsequent five variations, but also for the entire composition. This presentation seeks to explicate Webern’s remarks and suggests that the theme emerges as the kernel of the relationships employed in the work. The paper demonstrates ways in which the underlying structures of each movement are derived from the relationships inherent in the theme. These relationships arise from a division of the theme phrases into melodic and accompanying pitches. The manner in which the underlying structures become audible at the musical surface will be emphasized. The paper concludes with considerations of the nature of interaction between the underlying structures and the musical surface.

        Schoenberg's Gurre-lieder strikes me as a young composer’s self-conscious agon with received musical tradition. On the one hand, he demonstrates his mastery of the craft of his predecessors—he makes it his own. On the other, he begins the struggle to find his own distinctive voice as a composer. The range of musical styles within the work—from the reactionary to the innovative—seems almost to constitute a musical symbol that parallels an important theme of the text: generational conflict, change, and renewal. 

        My presentation will demonstrate the range of styles with respect to one particular musical parameter: phrase rhythm; I will contrast three distinct styles of phrase rhythm found in Gurre-lieder and discuss their respective relationships to musical tradition and to subsequent musical developments. The first shows Schoenberg using phrase rhythm in a “classical” manner. The second shows the in?uence of Wagner's style of “musical prose” and “endless melody.” Finally, the third exhibits an unprecedented degree of metric conflict and complexity that is very progressive, but which I interpret to be a development of the technique of Brahms in particular.  

        In Elliot Carter‘s music, the sense of departure and arrival is essential and forms a prominent pan of our listening experience with this music. This presentation focuses on the manner in which Carter articulates these goal-oriented moves in his Second String Quartet in the domain of pitch. Special emphasis is given to the interaction between the various aspects of the composition of these moves. These aspects involve: 1) the register and registral distribution of the pitch material, 2) the generation of the pitch material from all-interval tetrachords and from different combinations of these tetrachords, and 3) the intricate interplay within and between the instrumental parts based on the intervallic repertoire assigned to each instrument. The paper proposes that it is from the interaction between these different aspects that the sense of motion in the Second String Quartet arises.