Mirka (2009) and Grave (1995) have identified several compositional techniques by which 18^th-century composers play against listeners’ perceptions of meter, what Mirka calls metric manipulations. Sullivan (forthcoming) demonstrates that a subset of these techniques are more general schemata, which appear in a wide variety of post-tonal music. Taken together, these studies beg the question, is there a larger historical continuity spanning the 19^th century that underlies the adaptation of 18^th-century metric manipulations in the 20^th century? We offer some preliminary evidence that suggests so.

First, we demonstrate several form-functional and text-expressive uses of 18^th-century metric manipulations in 19^th-century piano music and lieder, with specific focus on the music of Beethoven and Schumann. For instance, we show that several of Schumann’s lieder use close imitation and its attendant displacement dissonance to evoke emotional or physical struggle. These examples build on the work of Krebs (1999). We also show that Beethoven’s late bagatelles (Op. 119 and Op. 126) use a variety of metric manipulations to generate cross-movement patterns of (hyper)metric tension and resolution, which formally structure the larger sets. These examples build on the work of Cone (1977) and Schmalfeldt (1985), as well as Imbrie (1973) and Temperley (2008).

Second, we survey the continued presence of some 18^th-century metric manipulations in 19^th- and 20^th-century treatises (examples from Marpurg, Koch, Cherubini, Riemann, Schenker, and others), showing a bifurcation in performance practice that reflects a current disagreement between Mirka (2009) and Krebs (1999).

Near the end of his analysis of Franz Schubert’s Moment musical in F Minor, D. 780, no. 3, Arnold Feil (1986) describes the rhythmic and metrical activity in the piece as “a kind of game played on many levels with musical-rhythmic figures.” Feil’s near-exclusive focus on rhythm and meter in an instrumental work of Schubert’s puts him in the minority: explorations of rhythm and meter in this repertoire tend to be eclipsed by parameters such as harmony, form, and Beethoven’s influence on Schubert. Yet numerous studies of rhythm and meter in the instrumental works of other 18^th- and 19^th-century composers have led to rich and exciting ways of understanding, hearing, and performing their music.

This paper places rhythm and meter at center stage in analyses of several of Schubert’s early piano sonatas—those in F minor, D. 625, B major, D. 575, and E-flat major, D. 568—in an effort to stimulate considerations of rhythm and meter as a salient expressive feature in Schubert’s instrumental music. Using Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s (1983) metrical preference rules as my primary analytical framework, I argue that Schubert plays metrical and hypermetrical games by setting up metrical problems at the beginning of movements that lead to rhythmic drama, moments of metrical clarity, and moments of metrical confusion later in the piece. Three metrical games are discussed: (1) creating tension between possible beginning- and end-accented interpretations of themes, (2) obscuring or concealing notated barlines, and (3) odd-strong/even-strong switches.

This presentation offers concrete solutions to two challenges that face theory instructors seeking to better cover post-tonal music. The first of these is the lack of curricular time dedicated to music since 1900 (Buchler 2017). The second is the attitudes frequently demonstrated by students towards topics that they prejudge to be difficult, unfamiliar, aesthetically unappealing, or entirely divorced from previous topics (Roig-Francolí 2017).

Both challenges can be partially ameliorated by early incorporation of 20^th- and 21^st-century examples into the music theory classroom without altering overall curricular structure, allowing instructors to avoid the necessity of easing into post-tonal repertoire upon arrival at a dedicated unit (Straus 2018), expanding composers and styles with which students are familiar, allowing for increased familiarity with the sound of post-tonal music, making the study of post-tonal music less daunting, and offering opportunities for increased engagement with literature utilizing even the most basic topics.

After a brief literature review I will discuss sample lessons that integrate 20^th- and 21^st-century works into lessons that fall within the first year of collegiate studies. For instance, in the teaching of pitch I utilize Mamlok’s Variations for Solo Flute, which allows students not only to identify pitches but also to engage analytically with a “real” composition by articulating observations of the palindromic pattern of pitch presentation in the theme. Other lessons offer opportunities for high-level engagement or for the integration of contemporary music into speed-drill and homework exercises.

Unlike curricular redesigns which layer diverse musical styles over an existing lesson structure, we propose a thorough reimagining of the four-semester theory curriculum that prioritizes vocational relevance for the modern musician, emphasizes competence in analysis, creation, and appreciation, and is designed from its foundation to exist in a culturally and stylistically diverse musical environment.

In constructing our curriculum, topics were granted weight based on relevance. We first focus on generalizable concepts, such as the psychophysiological qualities of sound and symbolisms used to convey sonic information, including notation and gesture. Contextually or stylistically dependent ideas are, when possible, reframed as varieties of broader topics: for example, Sprechstimme is grouped alongside other extended vocal techniques including throat-singing, beatboxing, and yodeling. Remaining concepts specific to a particular style are either approached as case studies, encouraging students to think about applications across various genres, or addressed in student- or major-specific assignments. In studying harmony, for instance, we introduce various tonal systems and narrow in on tertial harmony as only a subset of musical practices throughout the world, contextualizing our focus on specific syntaxes across genres.

By removing dependence upon a specific musical language, this approach allows concepts to be taught using any music as an emphasis and reinforces the worth, study, and critique of all musics. In doing so, it has the potential to remove a barrier to entry for students who are passionate about music and music-making in ways that previous curricula have been willing but unable to embrace.

As student and assistant of Alban Berg from 1925 to 1933, Julius Schloss (1902–73) adopted twelve-tone technique in the expressionist style of the Second Viennese School. A characteristic feature of his music, much of which is unpublished and unstudied in the literature, are its allusions to form-functional models from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tonal music. This paper examines Schloss’s distinctive integration of historical formal models and serial pitch organization in Impressions, an unpublished cycle of 23 piano pieces begun in 1926–27 and completed four decades later.

Schloss wrote movements 1–5 for Impressions during the period of his teacher’s own first large-scale twelve-tone composition, Berg’s Lyric Suite (1925–26), for which Schloss oversaw the editorial work, and the serial techniques and secret program of which he knew well at the time (McLean 1988, Perle 2001). When he composed the remaining movements of Impressions in 1964–67, long after Berg’s death in 1935 and long after Schloss’s emigration via Shanghai (1939–48) to the United States, the work became an in memoriam piece to Berg. Although Schloss does not explain them, references to his mentor abound. The number of movements is an obvious reference to Berg’s fateful number 23. Some of the titles added in 1967—such as “(In the) Beginning” and “I remember B. – (De profundis) – Sad – Enough” for the first and last movement respectively—clearly point to Schloss’s affection for Berg, as do various musical references at the level of form and character in this seminal work.

Considerations of form in György Ligeti’s Études pour piano are generally not the focus of analytical study. Book I attracts the most analytical interest (Bouliane and Lang 2006, Callender 2007, Edwards 2001, Taylor 1997). I address this imbalance by analyzing three Études from Book II — “Der Zauberlehrling,” “Entrelacs,” and “Galamb Borong”— that share an underlying “pattern-meccanico” style (Clendinning 1993). Ligeti describes his tendency to mark “formal junctures” with specific intervallic “signals” (Várnai 1983), some of which Cuciurean (2012) has shown to generate larger collections in works from the ‘60s–‘70s. Discussion of signals, however, is absent from the Études. I argue that, in “Der Zauberlehrling,” signal [025] effects the move between local collections, whereas in “Entrelacs” and “Galamb Borong” the diminished seventh [0369] and minor seventh [0358] chord signals trigger developmental processes, impacting formal structure.

In spite of differing musical surfaces, all three Études are structured around the Golden Ratio, and owing to their relative brevity, one can identify formal junctures through what I call “Fibonacci markers.” In “Der Zauberlehrling,” [025] signals trigger transitions into large-scale harmonic change, articulating larger sections. In “Entrelacs,” referential pitches and sonorities mark significant events like the Golden Section, thus acting signal-like, while in “Galamb Borong” pattern changes are triggered by the seventh chord signals. Ultimately, I aim to arrive at a deeper understanding of what Ligeti signals are and can be by showing their relationship not only to the local surface, but also through their impact on larger structures.

Dissonant counterpoint, a compositional technique used by “ultra-modernist” composers in America during the 1920s and 1930s, is designed to exclude tonal references through a rigorous process of “dissonation.” A treatise co-authored by Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford outlines the precepts of dissonant counterpoint, whose ultimate goal was for polyphonic voices to “sound apart,” or be independent, to create “heterophony” (Seeger 1930, 1994).

Vivian Fine (1913–2000), Crawford’s most prolific and successful student, followed the compositional style of her teacher in many ways (Lumsden 2017), including the use of dissonant counterpoint in the music she wrote while studying, or shortly after studying, with Crawford. But there is one important and previously unnoted exception: within a generally dissonant framework, Fine’s music makes extensive reference to tonal materials, including melodic fourths and fifths, and major and minor triads. The coalescence of these two irreconcilable forces creates a tension that suggests a new kind of heterophony, one in which the “sounding apart” occurs between the tonal references and the dissonant framework that struggles to contain them.

By analyzing several of Fine’s ultra-modernist pieces, I aim to show the ways in which she manipulated dissonant counterpoint into her own unique style, one in which tonal materials play a fundamental role in the heterophonic “sounding apart.” Ultimately, this paper extends the notion of dissonance beyond the quality of an interval or chord to include the conceptual conflict between consonances and dissonances themselves.

Brittany Howard echoes a sentiment common amongst practicing popular musicians: “I got my education by just listening to records… I don’t really care about chords.” Howard instead outlines how her experiences growing up black and poor in rural Alabama act as pressures on her characteristic sound—she frames her guitar playing by gesture (“the eagle claw”) and style (“the James Brown lick”) and describes herself as a songwriter, not a vocalist or guitarist, due to her perceived lack of training.

Music-theoretic analysis traditionally prioritizes expert perspectives on harmony to evaluate musical function and structure. Such a focus in popular music presents methodological and potential moral implications. Given that harmonic patterning in popular music is syntactic (Nobile 2016), diffuse (White and Quinn 2018), generally inaccessible (Pollard-Gott 1983), and deprioritized in practice, expert-listener perspectives are invariably privileged—incongruent with those of musicians like Howard who face barriers to formal training.

This study reinforces the perceptual validity of practicing pop-rock musicians through accessible methods of performance analysis. I use low-cost motion-capture techniques to investigate how a performer’s instrument, training/experience, and stylistic preferences influence their real-time generation of musical texture. Results demonstrate that guitarists consistently prioritize fretboard parsimony, regardless of style (e.g., “rock” or “pop”), and utilize pronounced gestures to articulate formal boundaries, regardless of harmonic context. From this, I argue that performance gestures are functional (i.e., convey identity and syntax, like harmony) and demonstrate the utility of gestural analysis in case studies of performances by guitarists Brittany Howard, St. Vincent, and Nancy Wilson.

Previous research has connected b2 (as part of a triad) to sadness in common-practice music and power in metal. In post-millennial pop music, however, as evidenced by my corpus of over 50 songs, b2 acts overwhelmingly as a melodic (not harmonic!) signifier of hotness. I use examples by a variety of artists, including Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, and Miley Cyrus, to demonstrate the prevalence of the Hot-b2 topic, frame it as a connection between hotness and exoticism, and identify its typical schemata.

Previous scholars have identified how b2 evokes non-Western—particularly Andalusian and Arab—scales. As such, its sound is deeply intertwined with a long history of sexualization of the “other” and of appropriating “foreignness” to seem worldly. b2, as a signifier of exoticism, conveys a combination of sexiness and extravagance: in other words, hotness. Some songs make this connection explicit through lyrics, b2–natural-3 augmented seconds, and “exotic” timbres.

The most common context for b2 is accompanimental, as an upper leading tone to 1. Typically, it manifests as a looped neighbor motion, sometimes presented as an isolated, tonally ambiguous half step. Occasionally, it also occurs as a passing note in a chromatic descent from b3.

In identifying the cultural and gestural contexts for Hot b2, we set a precedent for topical and gestural listening in post-millennial pop music. Future work will examine the topical associations of other scale degrees and extend the premise to rap, trap, EDM, and other related genres.

The debut album of 17-year-old Billie Eilish was #1 on the Billboard Top 200 Albums of 2019 chart. Audiences have marveled at how her music employs various electroacoustic techniques, such as close miking, whispering, binaural effects, and the use of dentist drills. Similar microphone techniques are thought to have contributed to the popularity of radio crooners in the late 1920s (McCracken 1999, 2015). In this paper, I will explore how the same techniques that contributed to Bing Crosby’s status as America’s crooner may have also helped cement Billie Eilish as a popular artist in American culture in 2020. In response to some “sonically intimate” sounds, certain listeners experience Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR). These listeners feel the same sense of relaxation and pleasure usually associated with being near a close friend (Andersen 2015, Kovacevich and Huron 2019). I will present a theory that the popularity of recordings that use these techniques, including the music of Billie Eilish and Bing Crosby, can partially be explained by the need for new methods of physical proximity after the rise of social media (Barratt and Davis 2015). Given the popularity of ASMR among Millennials and Gen Z listeners—a single ASMR YouTube channel has over 700 million views—the investigation of these techniques in popular music could provide insight into the relationship between musical preferences and sensory perceptions, as well as how Billie’s music is being used to evoke emotions in listeners across the world.

Fanfare topics coordinate with galant recitative schemata to thematize otherwise formulaic closure in accompanied recitatives from Don Giovanni (“Don Ottavio, son morta!”) and Così fan tutte (“Ah scostati”). Mozart plays on the closing function of these fanfare topics in the Count’s recitative “Hai già vinta la causa!” from Le nozze di Figaro. Fanfares throughout this accompanied recitative struggle to push the Count to begin the aria. The delay heightens listeners’ expectations as, presumably, the Count will proclaim his punishment for Figaro and Susanna in the forthcoming aria. The lyrical melody and accompaniment pattern in the violins in mm. 24–28 and the addition of the accompaniment pattern to the fanfare in mm. 30–34 suggest an intrusion of lyrical, aria space into recitative space. After demonstrating his reluctance by ignoring the prompting fanfares, the Count finally follows the orchestra’s lead into the aria “Vedrò mentre io sospiro.”

This paper investigates music-theoretic uses of the terms prototype and prototypical, first broadly and then with specific application to form in popular music. Based on an examination of almost 200 music-theoretical articles and selected monographs, three usages emerge: (a) an underlying structure for a musical event, more basic or skeletal than the event itself; (b) a prior model for a musical event, either in the same work or in an earlier work; and (c) a particularly central or noteworthy exemplar of a musical category. The first meaning’s emphasis is synchronic and intrasegmental, focusing “downward” from the surface to more “basic” musical formations. The second sense of “prototype,” that of a prior model, concrete or abstract, is diachronic and intersegmental or interopus in its application, with an emphasis on discovering and explaining relationships between time-ordered events, whether within a work developmentally or between works historically. The third sense involves “centrality” or “noteworthiness,” and invokes aesthetic or hermeneutic perspectives and goals; in analytic application it typically combines aspects of the synchronic and diachronic viewpoints. These music-theoretic notions are situated within cognitive science’s understanding of prototoypes and memory, both episodic and semantic, and then applied to analysis of popular songs. Two studies are described on prototypicality in songs’ forms, the first a corpus study of some 600 songs (Billboard Top 10, 1958–2018) explicating formal commonality and diversity in these songs’ forms, and the second an experimental study, revealing how how listeners use structural (formal) and non-structural (aesthetic, social) factors in understanding song prototypes.

Listeners familiar with tonal classical music generally expect leading tones within dominant harmonies to resolve up to tonic. In many operatic melodies from the primo ottocento (ca. 1800–1850), however, leading tones in the soloists’ parts, even when supported by a cadential V, may descend to ^5, ^3, or the ^1 an octave lower than expected. Examination of primo ottocento operas reveals that the descending leading-tone figure is so pervasive that it can be considered an idiomatic feature of this repertory. In this essay, I offer representative examples of descending leading tones from five early Romantic Italian operas: Il barbiere di Siviglia (1816) and Guillaume Tell (1829) by Rossini, Norma (1831) by Bellini, L’elisir d’amore (1832) by Donizetti, and Rigoletto (1851) by Verdi. Examination of these excerpts will reveal several common presentation types for the idiomatic descent. Also, I discuss examples in which the prototypical descents are masked, i.e., obscured by elements of the musical surface, thus resulting either in the mitigation of their effect or in the frustration of an expectation of downward motion. Before introducing these analyses, I address the issue of historical precedents for descending leading tones, tracing them back to the nineteenth-century Italian ballata. I close the essay with speculation about why, within this repertory, the descending leading-tone figure is accepted so easily by the ear.

The closing chapter of Hugo Leichtentritt’s Musical Form (1951) presents a recompositional analysis of Arnold Schoenberg’s Opp. 11 and 19, arguing that both can be heard as tonal. This paper explores Leichtentritt’s analyses, positioning them within three successively larger contexts: Leichtentritt’s own methods of instruction, earlier in the treatise; the critical and analytical tradition that surrounds Stravinsky’s neoclassical works; and recompositional approaches to post-tonal works more broadly. Arguing that a given masterwork “must inevitably be shaped as it is,” Leichtentritt repeatedly derived and narrated prototypical versions of phrases by Mozart, Beethoven, and others. His recompositions of Schoenberg argue that the music is fundamentally tonal, and is only “falsely alleged” to be atonal by the dissonant harmonies, complex rhythms, and extremes of register.

The construction of hypothetical prototypes is more readily identified with the analysis of Stravinsky: as Lynne Rogers has shown, there is evidence that Stravinsky worked in stages, transforming simple phrases into more complex tonal and rhythmic structures. While a method of recompositional analysis was first suggested, dismissively, by Heinrich Schenker, contemporary scholars like Straus, Traut, and Iker have argued that reconstructing hypothetical models is an effective way to understand Stravinsky’s neoclassical music. In Leichtentritt’s Musical Form, then, we find an important antecedent to these contemporary recompositional analyses, a dramatization of the distinction between structure and perception, and a foil for the scientific discourse that would soon be ushered into music theory by Milton Babbitt and Allen Forte.

Through the structural conventions of symphonic sonata form, the outer movements of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D Major create expectations of tonal closure for the listener (Monahan 2015). Tonal closure can evoke emotional responses to music, yet there is scant literature that investigates how form is experienced during performance (Huron 2008, Leech-Wilkinson 2009). In this paper, I utilize Huron’s ITPRA (Imagination, Tension, Prediction, Response, Appraisal) theory of emotional expectation to examine how moments of Durchbruch in this symphony—German for “breakthrough,” describing decisive tonal and structural moments in Mahler’s symphonies—evoke an emotional response. Supplementing traditional analyses with this dynamic cognitive model reveals how form is psychologically experienced by the listener and how expressive changes in performance can alter this experience.

Analysis of the nearly identical passages leading up to the Durchbruch moments in the first and last movement reveals how Mahler creates tension and expectation for the listener. Using Huron’s model, I show how slight changes to the passage in the fourth movement manipulate tonal and thematic predictability, heightening the listener’s emotional response. Additionally, I discuss how expressive performance choices in the Durchbruch passages are historically situated. Data from a recently curated corpus of performances allow for an examination of expressive influence between conductors, as well as differences in expressive treatment of the Durchbruch moments between movements in a single performance. Findings from this corpus analysis will be used in future studies to ecologically situate this model, examining listeners’ psychological responses to the Durchbruch passages in real time.

This paper will explore the musical uncanny in the Finale of Brahms’s Piano Quintet in F Minor. Several scholars have contributed to the discourse of music and the uncanny (Cherlin 1993; Kramer 1990, 2002; Cohn 2004; Klein 2005; Smith 2005; Péteri 2007; Venn 2015). Smith mentions the unheimlich E-naturals in the Piano Quartet in C Minor, Op. 60: “The E naturals instantiate the Unheimliche as an indication of the harmonic and expressive range of the movement and the piece as a whole, and signal an unusual attention to that pitch globally to an extent that remains unresolved within the section or even within the movement.” He also explains that the uncanniness is eventually resolved in the coda with a delayed tonal resolution. I argue that the uncanny is not something awaiting resolution; rather it invites us on a hermeneutical journey and reflects a composer’s private world, their subjectivity. The notion of das Unheimliche comes from Jentsch and Freud. Jentsch’s uncanny emphasizes a feeling of intellectual uncertainty, in which the uncanny arises when a subject is uncertain about whether an object is alive or not, or real or unreal. Freud’s uncanny has a more complex framing as a combination of feelings, situations, and objects, in which a subject feels something horrifying in what was once familiar. In this paper, I will show how the musical uncanny shapes the narrative of a piece, using the Finale of the Brahms’s Piano Quintet as a case study.

Neo-Riemannian theory focuses on the non-functional properties of the triad and other special diatonic chords. Advances in the theory often entail the discovery of a new way that one of these special chords relates to itself via parsimonious motion. A thorough examination of this relation can provide great insight into how the prominent chords have been used in the literature as well as offer a richer view of our 12-tone space and beyond. For instance, Richard Cohn (1997) used his equations expressing how a triad relates to itself to determine functional analogues to the triad in different equal temperaments. This paper introduces a new “equation” that describes a way in which 4–27 (the dominant seventh chord and its half-diminished inverse) maps onto itself. This “equation” is a set of reflections over 4–27’s intervallic axes, its constituent P5 and tritone dyads. This set of intervallic reflections offers an analogue to Cohn and others’ LPR transformations, and it enables the exploration of an important structural connection between the pc set 3–5 and the diatonic 4–16. Moreover, this “discovery” came about through studying a pc-set representation of the Melakarta, a classification system for Carnatic Ragas. The Melakarta’s preponderance of 4–27 is directly related to its symmetrical construction, and its distribution of perfect fifths. These intervallic reflections could aid future investigations into other musical systems, provide insight into post-tonal composers’ usage of 4–27, and elaborate previously unseen ways in which other notable pc sets are manifested in a 12-tone space.

Uniform Triadic Transformations, or UTTs (Hook 2002), may be used to generate three-dimensional voice-leading spaces that accommodate Alfred Schnittke’s triadic language when tonal and twelve-tone systems fall short. Recent explorations of Schnittke’s triadic music include Segall’s PSM voice-leading spaces (2017) and Honarmand’s aggregate and quasi-aggregate completion (2019). I propose that the compound transformation PRP used in Honarmand’s analysis of Schnittke’s Piano Sonata No. 1 is not necessary since each of these motions can be understood as a single application of the UTT <3,2>. In this study, I consider triadic passages from the first and third movements of Schnittke’s Piano Sonata No. 1 that employ the UTT <3,2>. While the UTT <3,2> is the primary measure of voice-leading proximity in these passages, I propose that secondary measures of distance may also be considered based on common tone retention and parsimonious voice leading. For the sake of this study, harmonies adhering to the secondary parameters of voice leading are limited to P, L, R, S, L′, and R′ (Morris 1998). I then explore how UTT <3,2> space gains three-dimensional shape when every other triad “bonds” to a partner that is related by secondary voice-leading measures. This bonding reveals a secondary UTT that can also be observed in a tile of the bonded-UTT space that is constructed through the intersection of two UTTs at 90° angles. In this projection of the space, the primary UTT is placed on the x axis, and the secondary UTT occupies the y axis.

A chord can be thought of as an idealized set of pitch relationships that do not depend on timbre, register, duration, etc. A chord can also be thought of as an actual, sounding event in the world, where it inevitably possesses characteristics that pertain to “extra-harmonic” parameters such as timbre, register, and duration. Although thinking of chords in that abstract way facilitates our structuring, memorizing, and understanding music, chords as actual sounding events are also likely to play an important role in our experiencing of music. The present study investigates chords as actual sounding events by testing the ability to identify popular songs from single chords taken from well-known recordings. Although it is currently believed that timbre plays a primary role in the identification of songs from very brief excerpts of music, it is possible that vertical pitch structures may also play a role in that type of rapid identification. Chords’ timbral brightness and, to a lesser extent, their attack time, chord-type commonness, duration, and the songs’ year of release contributed to the songs’ rapid recognition. This study shows that memory for chords as actual sounding events can be detailed enough to allow listeners with and without musical training to identify songs from a single piano chord. Results also suggest that both harmonic and extra-harmonic characteristics of single chords are encoded in auditory long-term memory and contribute to the rapid identification of songs from single chords.

Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century, regulations on expert testimony have sought to minimize the impact of disagreeing experts. Yet, as seen in recent cases like Williams v. Gaye (2018), Skidmore v. Led Zeppelin (2018), and Gray v. Perry (2019), disagreements between forensic musicologists still play a large role in contemporary music copyright decisions. This paper suggests that the disagreement between partisan experts is due, in part, to confirmation bias rather than ethical or financial allegiance. Confirmation bias is defined as “a cognitive tendency to search for and evaluate information in ways that are partial to an already formed hypothesis” (Lidén, Gräns, and Juslin 2018). Investigating confirmation bias in music analysis can shed light on issues in forensic musicology and the broader field of music scholarship.

Because music analysis is a subjective act rather than an objective one, there is certainly risk for confirmation bias in forensic musicology. An expert hired by a plaintiff, or the party alleging copyright infringement, may start their analyses by searching for similarities between two works. On the other hand, an expert retained by the defendant, or the party denying infringement, may start their analysis by searching for differences. Given the multiple musical components present in even the “simplest” musical work, both starting points will lead to valid observations about the work, allowing for expert disagreement. This paper proposes that appointing a panel of third-party musicologists to conduct forensic analyses from a neutral starting point could minimize the effect of confirmation bias in such cases.

The art of “song signing” involves the use of rhythmicized signs from a signed language, such as American Sign Language (ASL), in a musical context. Song signing encompasses a variety of subgenres, including ASL hip-hop or “dip-hop,” a term coined by Deaf rapper Wawa in 2005 (Best 2015–16, 73). A typical dip-hop performance involves a Deaf or hard-of-hearing artist simultaneously performing vocalized and signed rapping over a looped background beat. Although dip-hop began as a grassroots movement in the early 1990s (ibid., 71), it has received little analytical attention in the scholarly literature on hip-hop. In this paper, the authors combine techniques adapted from analyzing rhythm in non-signed rap music with techniques adapted from analyzing non-rapped signed songs (Maler 2013, 2015) to analyze the rhythmic flow of tracks by dip-hop artists Sean Forbes, Wawa, and Signmark.

Condit-Schultz (2016) states that “rap is made musical, as opposed to poetic, by its rhythm.” Much of the current analytical literature on rap music reflects this sentiment by describing rhythmic paradigms in non-signed hip-hop (Adams 2009, Condit-Schultz 2016, Ohriner 2016, Komaniecki 2017). Dip-hop presents a unique format, however, as artists rhythmically convey lyrics in two distinct languages simultaneously.

In this paper, the authors demonstrate that dip-hop artists have developed genre-specific rhythmic paradigms and tropes to convey the periodicity and rhyme that are fundamental to rap music. Specifically, we address the alignment (or lack thereof) of rhythm and meter in signed and vocal rap and the conveyance of a repeated “beat” through rhythmic signing.

In The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (1988), Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls attention to a figure who appears with startling frequency and variation across African and New World African-American mythologies. From individual stories scattered throughout Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas, Gates assembles the unified figure Esu-Elegbara, the divine African trickster who uses language and hermeneutics in order to survive within its hostile environment. Furthermore, Gates demonstrates how the collective mythologies of Esu persist within the practices of present-day African-American art forms. In many ways, Gates’s theory of troping resonates with Brian Kane’s (2017) study on the ontology of jazz performances, where the musical work of a jazz standard is defined as a network of performances and their associations. Key to Kane’s theory are a tune’s replications, associations between musical properties of performances, and nominations, associations between names of performances. Kane’s framework provides a rich foundation for music analysts to explore the work-determinative properties between jazz standards through replications. This presentation instead proposes a more robust nomination framework that complements Kane’s ontology through Gates’s theory of signifyin(g) and Roland Barthes’s (1957) semiotic theory of myths. In celebration of Charlie Parker’s (1920–55) centenary, analytical demonstrations will be drawn from a network of recordings that revolve around his tune “Confirmation.” This presentation ends with an account of how networks of nominations and replications animate bebop’s historical function as a thread of resistance against social injustice (Born 2017, Iyer 2004, Lott 1995).

In 1609 the lutenist John Dowland released his English translation of Andreas Ornithoparchus’s Musice active micrologus (1517). A largely faithful translation, this is Dowland’s only major theoretical publication. The volume provides a comprehensive introduction to “the Art of Singing,” from the elements of music to the rules of counterpoint. Published in Germany on the eve of the Reformation, large portions of Ornithoparchus’s text are concerned with the proper singing of Latin liturgical music. Dramatic changes in the religious and musical situation in England in the century between the treatise’s Latin publication and its English translation meant that much of the work had become obsolete.

What business did Dowland, dogged by his past association with Catholicism, have in translating Ornithoparchus’s century-old treatise on the fundamentals of singing in Catholic liturgical practice and trying to sell it in Protestant England? The answer lies in a complicated web of the professional realities of the working musician. Following Gibson (2007, 2012) and building on Gale (2013) and Freeman (2017), I read Dowland as embarking on a project of creative self-fashioning with his treatise. Dowland’s translation helps to shed light on the myriad activities in which professional musicians took part in the early seventeenth century, smudging clearly defined divisions and suggesting a more complex professional marketplace in which a musician needed a multifaceted approach in order to survive. It also draws attention to the importance of translation in a variety of senses: Latin into English, pre-Reformation Catholicism into English Protestantism, practical theory into speculative abstraction.

Fétis’s Traité complet (1844), known for its historical approach to tonalité, is also a visionary work that anticipated some of the most iconic sonorities of the late nineteenth century. Fétis acknowledged that the extensions of tonality he illustrated “generate a large number of new chords not yet employed by composers.” Among these new chords are “half-diminished” augmented sixths that have gone largely unremarked in the Fétisian literature (Christensen 2019, Campos 2013) and that closely resemble Wagner’s Tristan chord (1865) and Strauss’s “Till sixth” (1895). How did Fétis manage to theorize these chords that were only composed decades later?

Fétis wrote extensively about Wagner in later publications but never discussed harmony (Christensen 2019). His treatise nevertheless gives insight into how he would have analyzed the Tristan chord: for Fétis, the augmented sixth did not constitute a genuine harmony since it results from two simultaneous suspensions. In contrast, he regarded the “Till sixth” as a legitimate chord (V⁷) where ^b6 and ^#2 replace ^5 and ^2. Although these modifications occur in earlier treatises, Fétis appears to be the first to combine them.

Early twentieth-century theorists––e.g., Louis and Thuille, Schoenberg, Vinée––became increasingly interested in explaining new, non-standard augmented sixths; unsurprisingly, they recognized a wider range of resolutions than Fétis. His accomplishment in the Traité complet is nevertheless remarkable. It is precisely because he based his tonal theory on abstract principles rather than contemporaneous practices that he managed to predict extensions of tonality that became commonplace in the late Romantic era.

Johannes Lippius (1585–1612) is widely acclaimed as the first author to articulate fully the modern concept of the musical triad, which could be inverted and otherwise permuted without changing its identity. Lippius speaks of the triad’s fundamental pitch, which maintains its status even when not present in the lowest voice. He also he uses the term “root” (radix), but not for that fundamental pitch: curiously, Lippius’s notion of the triadic root scarcely overlaps at all with our modern idea. Indeed, his concept is even more peculiar than scholars have heretofore recognized. Previous literature has explained Lippius’s root as a simple pedagogical expedient, akin to reducing proportions to their lowest terms. Lippius, by contrast, talks at times of reducing all roots to unisons, and he also explains that roots ultimately are numbers. Attending to the complexities of Lippius’s conception of the root, I demonstrate its hitherto overlooked relationship to Nicholas of Cusa’s (1401–64) notion of the “unitary root” in his idiosyncratic and influential fusion of Trinitarian doctrine and Neopythagorean numerology. I reveal that the concept of the root in Lippius’s triadic theory is certainly not a fundamental pitch, nor is it even merely a derivation of simpler musical phenomena from more complex ones. Rather, for Lippius the root is the first unfolding of the principle of number itself and thus is a powerful expression of music’s relationship to the divine.

For over fifty years, Steve Reich (b. 1936) has written music chiefly characterized by repeated melodic patterns that are put in unison canons against themselves. Much has been written about Reich’s creativity with this technique in works from decades past (Cohn 1992, Horlacher 2001, Roeder 2003); however, little has been written about Reich’s canons in works from the 2000s onward. How does Reich achieve variety and create a forward trajectory with the above technique in his later pieces?

In working towards an answer to this question, I find it instructive to not only investigate what the musical elements—such as melody, harmony, canon, and augmentation—are, per se, but what these musical elements do. To describe what these musical elements are doing, I articulate an analytical framework consisting of three principal actions: building up, staying steady, and changing. Each action behaves and manifests in different ways, interacting with and reacting to each other to create larger structures of music. To illustrate my framework, I discuss the first movement of Double Sextet (2007). At once qualitative, evaluative, and interpretive, this analytical framework offers a detailed, fine-grained way of observing what the musical elements are doing. In turn, this enables us to learn one of the ways in which Reich achieves variety and creates a forward trajectory via canon: when he repeats melodic patterns in canon, he challenges our hearing by increasingly divorcing melody and phrase, inviting us to expand our temporal comprehension of the former.

How does musical form unfold in listening? Recent approaches have rethought form as a process that takes time (Schmalfeldt 2011, Waltham-Smith 2017) and relies on the active and continuous “structuring” of sounds by its listeners (Lochhead 2015). These viewpoints resonate with event cognition, an area of research into how people perceive, understand, remember, and respond to events unfolding around them. Such tasks are facilitated by event models, or mental summaries of experiences, which act as snapshots of events and support activities such as interpretation, prediction, and action-planning.

Drawing on Gabriel Radvansky and Jeffrey M. Zacks’s Event Horizon Model (2014), this talk explores how form develops during in-time listening—a process I relate to event-based “coping” with everyday environments (Reybrouck 2005). My analytical focus is on process music—which I define as music that structurally foregrounds audible, repetitive, and gradual processes. Analysis of the music of Tristan Murail, Meredith Monk, and Steve Reich elucidates the provisional, interpretive, and selective nature of formal listening. This discussion leads to a larger question about the relationship between perception and analysis: how can an experience feel like a continuous flow while also presenting a relatively stable structure to consciousness? In addressing this question, I seek to reconcile the relatively local and temporal level of phenomenological inquiry with the more global and synoptic perspective of formal analysis. As I argue, event cognition’s common coding of perception and action (Hommel et al. 2001) suggests one way to bridge this gap between preconceptual listening and conceptualization—and analysis.

Process music is a subset of minimalist music in which the compositional design is coextensive with the audible materiality of the piece. Ian Quinn has argued that the high redundancy and low information content of process music requires a radically different way of thinking about the methods and goals of analysis: not a refinement of the surface into basic elements, but its enrichment into theory. In this view, rather than “How does this music work?” an analysis ought to ask “What else works like this music?” In this paper I examine how dance can serve as just such an analysis by looking at one of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s earliest dance pieces, Violin Phase (1982), a solo choreographed to Steve Reich’s homonymously titled work (1967). Inspired by Reich’s compositional technique, Keersmaeker emphasizes three aspects of her choreography: (1) phasing, which here translates to a process of incrementally adding and eliminating a small number of dance moves; (2) repetition, seen both on the small scale within each variation, as well as over the course of the whole work; and (3) accumulation of energy and intensity. By examining the relationship between the music and Keersmaeker’s movements, how together they create the space of the dance, and how the accumulated energy structures the intensity of the encounter between the dancer and her audience, I argue that the choreography draws attention to novel temporal aspects of Reich’s piece.

This paper suggests that the acoustic properties of katajjaq (throat singing) sounds are best situated on a set of continua of relative values for Tanya Tagaq’s voice and performance style. Tagaq, an experimental vocalist originally from Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, employs six sounds in her katajjaq-inspired passages: Silence, Breath In, Exhaling Deep, Inhaling Deep, Exhaling High, and Inhaling High. In order to compare the acoustic properties of these sounds, a more robust method is needed than a timbral opposition chart (Cogan 1984), which shows major differences between the deep and high pitches but does not indicate a difference between exhaled and inhaled sounds with similar pitches. With the aid of computer-analyzed acoustic measurements, I suggest that these sounds be placed on a set of continua of various acoustic properties, allowing for a more in-depth comparison of the sounds. First, I import the audio file of Tagaq’s demonstrations of katajjaq into Sonic Visualiser and apply plugins for RMS energy (loudness), periodicity (noisiness), and spectral centroid (brightness) to the audio signal. Using these data, I create box and whisker graphs for each of the three parameters, establishing the central tendency values for each of the six sounds. Based on these graphs, I construct continua of the acoustic properties of Tagaq’s katajjaq sounds—a continuum of loudness, of noisiness, and of brightness. These continua provide a nuanced way of describing the subtle, but important, differences between Tagaq’s katajjaq sounds that are not apparent from a timbral opposition chart.

Why do barbershop chords “ring”? In this paper I argue that the best barbershop quartets produce “ringing” chords due to spectral fission, which I define as the perception of timbral upper partials as discrete pitches when they have enough amplitude to be separably audible and are prominent in their regions of the frequency spectrum. I apply two complementary computational models to recordings by two championship quartets—Vocal Spectrum and Ringmasters—to demonstrate how their “ringing” chords fulfill both the amplitude and prominence requirements of spectral fission and to highlight the relationships between chord spacing, intervallic content, and pitch perception. The first of these is a vowel-neutral predictive model of vocal timbre that identifies probable frequencies of maximal spectral overlap due to formant tuning and vertical just intonation. The second is an original digital signal processing script based on a rivalry model of spectral prominence that recursively compares amplitudes across frequencies using the Discrete Fourier Transform, yielding frequencies that represent candidates for spectral fission. Correspondences between my timbral model’s predictions and my script’s candidate frequencies provide an explanation for our aural experience of barbershop’s “ringing” chords. Ultimately, understanding the distinctive qualities of these chords—both as acoustical signals and as auditory percepts—has practical implications for composers and arrangers of this style and offers a new avenue of inquiry into other a cappella vocal repertoires.

This paper addresses how study of the cognitive linguistics of timbre can inform music theoretical discourse and provide a basis for music analysis. I present a method of timbre and orchestration analysis, called Timbre Trait Analysis, which is built from several empirical studies of timbre semantics. Studies using open-ended interviews and rating tasks produced a 20-dimensional model of the cognitive linguistics of timbre. The model dimensions include: rumbling/low, soft/singing, watery/fluid, direct/loud, nasal/reedy, shrill/noisy, percussive, pure/clear, brassy/metallic, raspy/grainy, ringing/long decay, sparkling/brilliant, airy/breathy, resonant/vibrant, hollow, woody, muted/veiled, sustained/even, open, and focused/compact. An additional rating study of 34 common Western instruments used participant responses to generate Timbre Trait Profiles, which serve as the foundation for the orchestration analysis method. I present a computational program which, given a musical score as input, generates a semantic orchestration plot and real-time, animated visual analysis. Timbre Trait Analysis provides information on how the semantic dimensions of timbre evolve throughout a work, using a model that combines Timbre Trait Profiles based on orchestration and employs intensity modifiers according to dynamic indications. In the second part of this talk, I provide musical analyses that account for timbre as an organizing principle of composition and of listener experience. Through these analyses, I address how musical meaning and narrative arise from the interaction of timbre and form. Finally, I consider future possibilities of related methods for analysis of other genres, including popular musics, electroacoustic music, and non-Western musics.

In this presentation I demonstrate how direct identification with some aspect of the music can support, diverge from, or nuance interpretations of composed musical “agency”—or the experience of consistent, independent, and intentional actions or emotions (Hatten 2018). Kendall Walton’s (2014) concept of “thoughtwriting” indicates a process analogous to speechwriting, in which the reader/listener adopts the words/music of the writer as their own direct expression. This level of engagement results in an experience of musical structures (whether or not intended by a composer) as the virtual action or emotion of a virtual listening agent. While the listener does have an actual (as opposed to virtual) body, their role as an agent causing the musical expression remains virtual. Social psychologist Tia DeNora’s ethnography further emphasizes that the music “itself” is not divorced from personal identification, but that the two mutually impact each other. In this paper, I argue that the “agential listener” resides at the top of the virtual agential hierarchy, altering lower-level interpretations due to the importation of personalized “grounds,” which I will demonstrate by engaging Hatten’s analysis of Chopin’s Ballade in F Minor, Op. 52. This subjective analysis does not require a loss in specificity; instead, analysts can engage with their own personalized grounds to the extent that they identify as an agential listener, and explore interpretations that can arise from audiences with particular shared experiences.

How do instruments present themselves to composers? Although the technics of notation keep instruments and bodies at length, recent scholarship (De Souza 2017) has explored the many ways in which procedural, embodied knowledge of instruments may still inform compositional practice. But how do composers come to grips with instruments they do not play?

My paper explores an instructive limit case: Leoš Janáček’s peculiar fixation on the viola d’amore. Previous scholarship has argued that Janáček demonstrates little knowledge of the instrument’s unique affordances, interpreting the composer’s use of the instrument as naïve and crudely symbolic (Tyrrell 1982). I argue for a more productive relationship. In particular, I show how Janáček pairs the instrument with a consistent cluster of timbral and sonic effects that seem to amplify or exaggerate certain imagined features of the instrument, even as the viola d’amore part is paradoxically ill-suited for performance on the instrument itself. I thus suggest other bases for Janáček’s knowledge of the viola d’amore, such as the organ stop of the same name, and the suggestive overlap with the composer’s idiosyncratic harmonic theories.

I propose thinking of Janáček’s viola d’amore as a qualified kind of virtual instrument, in the literal sense of selecting and exaggerating imagined “virtues.” This formulation invites us to attend to the gaps in knowledge and (mis)readings made possible by naïve, disembodied encounters with musical instruments, and the new avenues of compositional productivity they make possible.

This paper examines the ways trauma is musically conveyed during the crucial “body discovery” scenes of serial murder mysteries. It will contrast the finding of the body of Laura Palmer in David Lynch’s paradigmatic Twin Peaks (1990) with analogous scenes in shows the series inspired—The Killing (2011), Broadchurch (2013), Top of the Lake (2013), and True Detective (2014). Each case study will focus on its rendering of the most common traumatic reaction: dissociation, a state of fugue that results in feelings of unreality, uncertainty about boundaries, and hyperfocus on seemingly irrelevant details. The paper argues that in musical multimedia, this state is conveyed through analogous disconnections between meanings in music, cinematography, and sound design. Semiotic analyses of non-diegetic music are thus read in light of their degree of subordination to the images and sound design of the diegesis. Disjunctures between them can thus be considered analogues to dissociation. When taken together, these analyses point to broader trends in television scoring. Whereas the more recent shows use music to create an emotional continuity that affords viewers a sense of narrative safety, in Twin Peaks, the music is itself disjunct from the sound and visual elements, affording the viewer a more direct experience of the trauma on screen. Jarring and unsettling, this is an analytical opportunity to bridge a dialogue between the important and growing literature in the sciences about trauma’s effects on individuals with the analysis of musical multimedia.

In its popular reception and within scholarly discourse, Ishiro Honda’s 1954 film Gojira (“Godzilla”) is considered an allegory for nuclear disaster (Ryfle and Godziszewski 2017). While the music has been attributed as part of the film’s narrative success (Kalat 2017), the compositional and technical aspects of Akira Ifukube’s (1914–2006) score have yet to be analyzed in depth. I propose that his music not only heightens the emotional and allegorical drama on screen but also codifies Japan’s nuclear disasters as “cultural trauma” (Alexander 2004) during a period of commemorative uncertainty (Saito 2006). To show this, I examine the score using analysis of musical topics and perspectives from trauma studies to reveal how Ifukube represents the film’s allegory.

Ifukube incorporates Western and Japanese stylistic markers into musical topics—styles and genres used out of their proper context (Mirka 2014)—to reflect Japan’s shifting conception of collective grief after 1945. Specifically, he uses the ombra and tempesta topics (McClelland 2014) to signify nuclear apocalypse, the military topic (Monelle 2006) to signify Japanese militarism and collective strength, and the chorale topic (Watabe 2016) to signify recovery and mourning. I analyze how these topics are used in relation to narrative and imagery to show that Ifukube creates a nationalist cultural artifact, a Japanese score that allows for collective mourning of distinctly Japanese grief. My analysis of Ifukube’s film score expands current literature on topics in film music beyond Western cinema, while also demonstrating how music becomes a powerful component of representations of trauma on screen.

Joni Mitchell’s album Blue (1971) is lauded as the zenith of confessional songwriting, with lyrics acting as intimate personal documents and songs as vehicles for self-expression. The album’s titular track illustrates several techniques of lyrical expression in performance. Lloyd Whitesell (2008) explores the role of harmony in reflecting the song’s unresolved central relationship, which is “poised between anchored commitment and undone moorings” (137). But the flexible timing of Mitchell’s studio recording—afforded by her self-accompanied performance practice—is also critical to understanding the song’s expressive impact. My paper explores this central relationship of “Blue” as expressed through Mitchell’s various levels of engagement with metric hierarchy, which vacillate between “anchored” regular meter and moments of lost salience, when hierarchic structures come “undone.” For this analysis, I employ a flexible theory of meter (Murphy 2015) that analyzes metric regularity with grid-based theories (particularly Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983), accounts for reinterpretation with modifications to metric grids (Horlacher 1995), and illustrates loss of meter using projective theory (Hasty 1997). Analyzing flexible meter in “Blue” illustrates the timing freedoms afforded by Mitchell’s solo performance practice and how the varying level of metric salience interacts with themes of freedom in her revelatory lyrics. The close connection between metric structure and semantic content in “Blue” suggests that the metric freedoms afforded by Mitchell’s performance practice are powerful methods of self-expression in her solo confessional songs.

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.

As the overwhelming majority of Western popular music is in some kind of 4/4, the rare track in 5/4 is going to stand out. The few, brief scholarly engagements with such outliers have treated them as examples of fairly abstract theoretical phenomena—non-isochronicity, Euclidean rhythms, Platonic-trochaic successions. By contrast, this paper identifies rhythmic/metric similarities between several of these 5/4 songs that are far more specific than what these abstract concepts are designed to capture. These similar features are so specific, in fact, that they suggest a direct historical connection between these otherwise disparate songs. A natural question, then, is when and where do these features originate? This paper argues that the likely fountainhead of these shared 5/4 elements is the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s cool-jazz hit “Take Five” (1959).

“Take Five” is dominated by a looping rhythm-section vamp with three pertinent features: (1) a consistent 5/4 meter grouped as 3+2; (2) a 2:3 cross-rhythm within the first three beats; and (3) a trio of attacks before beat 2 and on beats 3 and 5—a kind of distorted backbeat. Some or all of these specific features can be found in later songs by Lalo Schifrin, Nick Drake, Jethro Tull, Blind Faith, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Led Zeppelin, and others, a fact that suggests a small but significant intertextual lineage hitherto unappreciated.

In this presentation I explore how marching arts performers successfully change their spatial relationship to one another while playing and moving together. Drawing on theories of meter (London 2004, Levitin et al. 2018, Hudson 2019, Toiviainen et al. 2010), I show how intersubjective embodied meter plays a critical role in generating musically and visually cohesive performances in movement-centric ensembles that include marching band, drum corps, colorguard, indoor drumline, and winterguard.

In construction-based theories of meter, feelings of beat are created in real time by calling upon familiar motions (Hudson 2019). Using this approach to embodied meter, I disambiguate how marching arts performers are able to execute musically, visually, and physically demanding productions: I argue that the performers’ awareness and consistent replication (via rehearsal) of embodied meter is essential for marching arts ensembles. I use two case studies to illustrate the challenges performers face when production design requires them to rely on embodied meter as a source of musical time: Marian Catholic High School’s 2018 production, “Triptych,” and University of Central Florida Pegasus World Independent Winterguard’s 2018 production, “Guernica.”

Despite recent sociological, technological, and composer-specific scholarship on the twentieth-century musical avant-garde (Piekut 2014, Iverson 2018, Cline 2016), analytical tools available for engaging with aleatory and improvisatory musics remain under-established. In this paper, I present an analytical approach that accounts for the listening and performing body, applying a gestural analysis to piano works by Cecil Taylor and Morton Feldman. My approach considers the intersections between instrumental affordances (Windsor 2017, De Souza 2017), pianistic gestural conventions (a concept I develop), and listener subjectivity (Cumming 2000), while addressing layers of mediation in performance and reception. I take a personal, “mimetic” listening experience (Cox 2016) as the basis for investigating a broader question: How might a body-oriented analysis shed light on potential approaches to this repertoire?

To explore this question, I analyze two video performances of Taylor’s and Feldman’s music, identifying and categorizing “foundational gestures”—discrete, identifiable performer movements that may be observed, described, and (potentially) replicated. Building on this categorization and description, my analysis builds a body-centric gestural lexicon for Taylor’s and Feldman’s piano music. This identification and analysis of bodily gestures, along with their corresponding sounding musical gestures, opens the door for listeners to engage with this music in new ways. Because aleatory and improvisatory works often feature realizations that differ widely between performances or lack a score altogether, these kinds of gestural readings prove especially beneficial for the analyst.

With its post-minimalist diatonicism, strong rhythmic pulse, and melodic repetition throughout all four movements, the surface of Shaw’s Partita for 8 Voices is quite accessible, but I argue that its general public acclaim results from various degrees of mimetic invitation within this composition, a perspective also explored by Fulton (2019). Drawing from Arnie Cox’s mimetic hypothesis (2011), I illustrate how these degrees of mimetic imagery, most notability a work’s “singability” and “danceability,” correspond with the formal structure in the “Allemande” and “Passacaglia.” Further, I map the opposition of mimetic attenuation and invitation onto the ideas of individualism and community. Shaw’s use of intertextual references throughout this piece (Belcher 2019), especially those from American vernacular traditions eliciting communal participation, support this reading. This perspective casts the listener as an active agent in the creation of a musical community.

As this represents a subjective, bodily way of knowing this music, it raises the important question: whose voice and body is represented in this analysis (Cusick 1994)? While I can experience a narrative of communal joy in this composition, others may experience a systematic oppression of the voice of the “other,” as sounds that I can’t imagine singing are exploited and exoticized (Davids 2019). Considering degrees of mimetic engagement and the way it shapes musical meaning as situated in the analyst speaks to the wider concern of inclusivity in our field.

The discrete Fourier transform (DFT) is a mathematical tool that can provide insight into large-scale harmonic motions in music of disparate styles. The DFT can be used to quantify differences in harmonic language by analyzing what Tymoczko refers to as macroharmonies, or “the total collection of notes heard over moderate spans of musical time.” Building on work by Quinn, Yust, Amiot, and Chiu, I apply the DFT to music by Mozart and Messiaen to illustrate how this single analytical methodology can describe the macroharmonic motions used by two vastly different composers.

When the DFT is applied to pitch classes, the resultant data are divided into six components, each analogous to a different “flavor” or quale of harmony. These components correspond to readily recognized harmonic properties. The DFT calculates two features—magnitude (amount) and phase (direction)—for each component. The magnitude of each component corresponds to its salience, while phase correlates with specific pitch-class collections. For example, in the case of the f₅ component (diatonicity), the specific phase indicates a particular diatonic collection.

To demonstrate this methodology, I examine two passages of music: the exposition of the first movement of Mozart’s String Quartet K. 157 and the theme from Messiaen’s Theme and Variations for Violin and Piano. Using data from a DFT analysis of the score, I discuss overarching macroharmonies and fluctuations within these spans. These analyses serve as a proof of concept that my computational methodology confirms and aligns with well-established music-theoretical practices within exhaustively studied repertoire.

Recent extensions to Clough’s (1979) diatonic set theory have adapted mathematical approaches to capture voice leading in mod-7 space. Although often used to describe diatonic progressions, these transformational and geometric systems are constructed from generic pitch space, meaning that each element in these spaces represents an entire equivalence class containing a letter name with any accidental attached. As a result, any generic voice-leading structure can be interpreted as a chromatic progression by inflecting each generic chord with a different scalar collection; thus, chromatic voice leading is understood as two concurrent levels of voice leadings: one at the level of generic structure and another at the level of the underlying scale.

This paper combines existing transformational and geometric tools for describing voice leadings between generic chords (Frederick 2018, 2019) with analogous approaches to scales (Hook 2008, 2011; Tymoczko 2004, 2011) to provide a new perspective on chromatic voice leading informed by diatonic set theory. Unlike the mod-12 neo-Riemannian approach, this mod-7 conception of chromatic voice leading can efficiently describe both functional and non-functional chromatic relationships, as well as differentiate between enharmonically equivalent spellings of chromatic chords.

The first part of the paper presents the chromatic voice-leading transformation group, which acts on the infinite set of closed-position triads belonging to any diatonic collection. This system acts only on complete closed-position triads and diatonic collections; however, it is possible to capture similar information about the voice leading in progressions with non-triadic chords and non-diatonic scales using geometric techniques for both chords and scales.