The Webern “miniatures”: this term pervades public understanding of the modernist composer and a specific subset of his atonal works. Contemporary composers cite them as inspiration for their own aphoristic works; they’ve spawned a compositional movement. But what is a Webernian miniature? How did the terms “miniature” or, similarly, “aphorism,” become so ubiquitous, and how do they influence our understanding of Webern’s works and those that follow their example? 
Webern’s biographers casually singled out four works—op.7 (1910), op.9 (1911/13), op.10 (1911/13), op.11 (1914): Kolneder (1968) called them “instrumental miniatures,” Forte (1998) described them as the “aphorisms,” and the Moldenhauers (1979) hailed them as “the consummation of striving for the utmost concentration of substance and form.” Yet none of these authors define nor substantiate their use of these terms.
In this paper, I reclaim “miniature” and “aphorism” as they relate to Webern’s oeuvre. Through musical and primary-source analysis, I argue that these miniatures represent the beginning of a trend of modernist aphorisms. To do so, I dispel the myth that “miniature” is a durational label, separating these from Webern’s other, famously brief music. I reconsider the miniatures’ forms, showing that none of the pieces or collections share any formal pattern. Finally, I show evidence that the miniatures were once grouped under a single opus number (then, op.7, 1—4). 
By reclaiming terminology surrounding Webern’s “miniatures,” this paper sheds light on the category and provides an analytical foundation for later works following the paradigm: what I call the “modernist aphoristic aesthetic.”

The narrative scope of post-1960 Broadway musicals expanded greatly, eschewing the relatively straightforward plot structures of the Golden Age in favor of more complex means of storytelling. The rise of the concept musical in particular posed new challenges for audiences, given the increased number of characters and actions to follow. This begs an important question: how did musical theater composers create new forms for ensemble numbers? This paper introduces “montage form,” a strategy by which a single number presents multiple characters, stories, and points of view in an efficient and comprehensible manner. In montage form, a number juxtaposes multiple equally weighted stories from different points of view. Its musical construction reflects this multiplicity of perspectives, featuring contrasting melodies and clear sectional divisions. Additionally, shared musical material links the individual stories into an ensemble, creating connections between the disparate storylines and perspectives at hand. Montage-form numbers are often temporally set apart from the primary plot, conveying past events or providing context for the main action of the musical. After defining montage form, I will analyze the eponymous montage-form number from A Chorus Line (Hamlisch and Kleban). Finally, I will briefly discuss additional examples of montage form, including “Cell-Block Tango” (Chicago), “Prologue: Into the Woods” (Into the Woods), “Dancing Through Life” (Wicked), and “Non-Stop” (Hamilton). By showing how each of these montage-form numbers contributes to narrative development in its respective musical, I will demonstrate how form-functional study of ensemble numbers can deepen our understanding of the evolution of musical theater style.

Often associated with exotic, non-Western imagery and the continuous serpentine line, the melodic arabesque—with its soft dynamics, spiral-like contour, metric instability, short rhythmic values, and narrow range—was an important expressive device for Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Recent scholarship (Bhogal 2013; Bauer 2011; Locke 2007; Potter 2003) has focused on the figure’s evocation of “otherness,” as well as its decorative role in fin-de-siècle French music. I show that the arabesque not only persists in later French music but also shifts from an inconsequential ornamental line to a central structural feature. In this way, the figure destabilizes musical norms. 
This paper presents two structure-generating arabesque types: reinforced and absorbed arabesque. I define these types, link them to Bhogal’s (2013) “emboldened” arabesque, and show their structural roles in Olivier Messiaen’s L’Ascension (1932–1933), André Jolivet’s Incantation (1937), and Pierre Boulez’s Mémoriale (…explosante-fixe… Originel) (1985). Reinforced arabesque engenders timbral ambiguity, as multiple timbres replace a single timbre; in absorbed arabesque, the line is rhythmically and/or melodically subsumed into a non-arabesque gesture. Both types are “emboldened”: unlike Debussian-Ravelian arabesque, they feature loud dynamics, moments of metrical stability, expanded ranges, and higher registral positions.
The melodic arabesque extends beyond Debussy and Ravel, proving influential for later generations of French composers. While linked to Debussian-Ravelian precedents, later arabesque transforms in both shape and function. No longer a garnish of exoticism, the “emboldened” figure—featuring timbral ambiguity and overlapping with non-arabesque material—moves from the periphery to the center, acting as an essential structural element.

Leopoldo Miguéz (1850–1902), a leading figure in Brazil’s Romantic absolute music tradition, composed the first Brazilian symphony, symphonic poem, and violin sonata. As Brazil transitioned from a monarchy to a republic, Miguéz took part in the government’s push toward modernization, which lead to a shift in musical aesthetics, away from Italian opera, towards instrumental music linked to Zukunftsmusik (Andrade 2013). 
As Miguéz was probably the first Brazilian composer to use sonata form, this study examines two large-scale movements using Sonata Theory (Hepokoski and Darcy 2006): his piano piece Allegro Appassionato Op. 11 (1883), and the first movement of his violin sonata Op. 14 (1884). Using two complementary formats - “formal-harmonic layered analysis” charts (Almada 2016) and graphical schemes adapted from Kopp’s network diagrams (2002) - my study identifies four main characteristics: use of “proto-theme” – the practice of preceding the main theme’s entry by an embryonic version (like Janet Schmalfeldt’s concept of becoming); use of roving-harmony passages (Schoenberg 1969), characterized by vagrant chords and a lack of tonal reference; use of non-conventional keys for the secondary group; and wide spectrum of keys. 
Despite Miguéz’s lack of formal training, and an absence of local models, by studying scores, he assimilated the Zeitgeist and struck a balance between norm and deviation, thus advancing Brazil’s aspirations toward modernization. This study broadens discourses on nineteenth-century sonata-form practices beyond the European repertoires, adding diversity and inclusion to the canon.

Cyclical thematic units preceding a main theme—occasionally described as mottos—occur in several of Mendelssohn’s and Schumann’s orchestral works. Horton (2013) identifies mottos in three Schumann symphonies, and Vande Moortele (2017) observes similar cases in three Mendelssohn overtures. Building on their work, this paper examines how Mendelssohn and Schumann’s Danish protégé Niels Gade (1817–1890) manipulates his mottos—particularly at expositional boundaries—to express different formal functions (after Caplin 1998), thereby expanding on precedents set by Mendelssohn and Schumann. Specifically, I adapt Vande Moortele’s (2017) five-part division of slow-introduction space (prefatory, initiating, medial, closing, and epilogic) to explore the different roles mottos play within expositions.
Gade’s mottos are unique in that they often mark beginnings and endings of expositions, thus approaching Hepokoski and Darcy’s rotational understanding of sonata form, while also crossing the boundary between the parageneric space of the slow introduction and the sonata form proper. In the sixth symphony, for instance, the once prefatory motto becomes epilogic as it returns to round off the exposition. In contrast, the placement of repeat barlines in Symphony No. 5 omits the first of two mottos, urging the listener to reinterpret the boundaries of what originally appeared a periodic main theme group to a ternary structure, thereby demonstrating the effect of the mottos on expositional processes. The analyses in this paper illustrate the extents to which Gade expands on motto techniques, while simultaneously suggesting another angle from which to consider cyclicism in 19th-century sonata forms.

Following Philip Ewell’s thought-provoking plenary speech, “Music Theory’s White Racial Frame,” at the Society for Music Theory’s conference in 2019, Ewell’s resultant blog posts and publications, and the Journal of Schenkerian Studies’ published responses, the field of music theory has grappled with racism, whiteness, and inclusivity. Discussions among theorists mirror those taking place across academia and the music world amid the heightened awareness of racial inequities following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. This presentation seeks to answer one facet of Ewell's call-to-action that music theory better understand its problems with race through examination of incorporation of music by composers from marginalized groups and/or from outside the western canon in music theory teaching. 
This talk will present the findings of an anonymous survey on current pedagogical and curricular practices highlighting decisions made at these two levels and their possible influences based on inclusive pedagogy literature, cultural biases, and the time lag in (music) academia as evidenced through publications and conference presentations. This presentation will critically examine instructor responses regarding common strategies to make music theory more inclusive, such as accessibility and an empathetic environment for students, and how recognition of the interactive effect of student development and course climate on learning supports inclusivity as a means to enhance student performance. Finally, survey results suggest that ~90% of instructors are open to inclusivity in their teaching, so what is limiting their ability to be inclusive and who controls these limiting factors?

The ninetieth anniversary of the birth of Toni Morrison (1931–2019) provides an apt occasion to reconsider the Nobel Prize-winning author’s most substantial contribution to music, namely her libretto for Richard Danielpour’s opera Margaret Garner (2005). Morrison’s libretto is based on the same real-life story that inspired her novel Beloved. Margaret Garner was a slave who escaped with her family from Kentucky to Ohio in 1856. When the group was recaptured, Margaret killed her daughter rather than see the child returned to slavery. 
Throughout the two acts of Margaret Garner, Morrison’s words depicting the harrowing experiences of the slaves are set by Danielpour using octatonic collections [0,1] and/or [2,3], thus establishing a connection between these pitch collections and the institution of slavery and the toxic masculinity of the antihero, slaveowner Edward Gaines. By contrast, when Gaines seeks escape in youthful memories or when the slaves seek escape in a joyful harvest celebration, all traces of octatonicism are purged in favor of pitches from various diatonic and pentatonic collections. The octatonic and diatonic/pentatonic collections are jarringly opposed in several other pivotal dramatic scenes, with Margaret finally choosing death and freedom (represented by the white-key diatonic collection) over continued life in slavery.
 The historical record is remarkably silent about the thoughts and sentiments of the real Margaret Garner. In examining the musical language of freedom and oppression in Danielpour and Morrison’s opera, I aim to illuminate the ways in which they have given voice to an unsung heroine.

Theorists have long been fascinated by the rhythmic and metric particularities of jazz improvisers. Much of this fascination has centered around those aspects of rhythm that are not easily notatable, especially expressive microtiming, rubato, and cross-rhythm. Among the chief distinctions that can be made between such techniques is whether they occur at or below the syntactical level. While participatory discrepancies—slight deviations from an idealized prototypical tactus that compound when musicians play together—mostly fall below the level of musical syntax, microtiming can also inflect larger utterances on the syntactical level, creating gestures that stimulate group interaction.
In this paper, I examine the relationship between jazz interaction and two expressive metric devices— “pulling apart,” and “floating above”—both of which involve the simultaneous sounding of two conflicting pulse streams. “Pulling apart” refers to moments when improvisers’ delays or anticipations suggest a slowing or quickening of tempo that conflicts with the prevailing tempo, resulting in a temporary disconnect that produces microrhythmic ambiguity before eventually resolving. “Floating above” occurs when an improviser’s utterance is untethered from the groove projected by the rest of the ensemble. I argue that such utterances arise from the interactional matrix of jazz improvisation and are therefore best analyzed using theories of improvisational interaction. As irreducibly interactive gestures, instances of metric divergence are a product of the Afrological orientation of jazz improvisation; by considering these metric techniques to be fundamentally dialogic, I seek to highlight the symbiotic relationship between elements of metric divergence and cultural aesthetics.

Scholars like Roberto Leydi (2003) suggest that the presumption of Italian folk influences in primo ottocento opera is risky, to say the least. Other critics, however, have historically identified similarities between folk genres and opera numbers. Francesco Degrada (1977), for example, mentions how parallel thirds sung by women’s choirs, pervasive in Bellini’s La Sonnambula, remind him of Northern Italian folk music. What he calls “typically Po-valley” thirds are described by Tullia Magrini (1995) and Ignazio Macchiarella (2001) as a hallmark of Northern Italian ballads, which were traditionally sung by women. This parallelism seems even more striking considering Emilia Branca’s 1882 account of Bellini’s trip to Moltrasio before writing La Sonnambula, in which he allegedly collected themes sung by peasant women. In light of these and other Italian commentators’ recognition of their soundscapes in opera (see also Scherillo 1882; Pastura 1959; and Confalonieri 1968), I propose that Northern Italian ballads, in particular, may be identified as a topic—a musical style or genre used outside of its original context (Mirka 2014). I discuss how this topic may have been consolidated as a byproduct of the wane of pastoralism in nineteenth-century Italy, within what Denis Cosgrove (1985) calls “landscape ideology.” Drawing from Emanuele Senici’s (2005) research, I argue that gender relations added to the meaning of ballads in opera. Finally, I examine the musical features of the ballad topic—including what, after Magrini (1995), I call the MAGRINI closing schema—, its placement within the lyric form, and its signification.

Although the music of the rock band Phish is technically virtuosic and steeped in Western art music practice, the band has, until recently, been overlooked by American music scholarship. While much of the scholarly writing that does exist on Phish has focused on the band’s improvisations in performance—undoubtedly a critical component of their practice—it is perhaps too easy for them to overshadow the well-wrought pre-composed elements of their songs. Indeed, during his undergraduate studies, guitarist Trey Anastasio studied composition and theory with Ernie Stires, and Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier figured prominently in these lessons. As a result, baroque-influenced polyphony infuses much of his early writing, and this talk identifies four “modes of polyphony” employed by Phish: rhythmic imitation, free counterpoint, canon, and fugue, and offers several representative songs for each.

It is not rare for popular musics to employ common-practice art music techniques, including baroque-style counterpoint. Walter Everett has shown, for example, that Billy Joel uses counterpoint as part of a dichotomy between learned and vernacular styles; John Covach, Sara Gulgas and others have shown that a central conceit of 1960s and 1970s prog rock was the adoption of classical signifiers, including baroque polyphony; and William Echard has identified classicism as a topic typical of psychedelic popular music. But rather than adopting contrapuntal techniques in a marked or affected manner, this paper argues that Phish’s polyphony is a central and defining, yet rather unassuming aspect of the large repertory of topics that define their style.

In the first movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in C Minor, op. 13, the music after the medial caesura, which “should” inaugurate a secondary theme in the mediant (E-flat major) instead initiates a thirty-eight-bar excursion in E-flat minor that takes place over an unstable dominant pedal. A similar situation occurs in the first movement of Louise Farrenc’s Trio for Piano, Flute, and Cello in E Minor, op. 45 where a six-bar phrase prolonging the dominant in the minor mediant (G minor) follows the medial caesura. Both of these minor-mode interjections are followed by passages in the major mediant which lead to authentic cadences in their respective keys. 
Although these instances may seem like formal quirks, they descend from a late-Baroque and early-Classical practice that used the minor mode to provide modal contrast in major-mode movements. Shifts between parallel major and minor keys occur frequently in the works of Vivaldi and continue to be used in early-Classical works like the finale of Haydn’s String Quartet in E-flat major, op. 1, no. 2. Although in the eighteenth century this one finds this device primarily in major-mode movements, a precedent for Beethoven and Farrenc’s minor-key adaptations of it occurs in Carlos Seixas’s Sonata in E minor. This paper recognizes the historical precedents for the examples by Beethoven and Farrenc and transforms them from seeming anomalies to updated versions of a well-established structural and stylistic device.

The subject of virtual agency has enjoyed an increased presence in the music-theoretical discourse over the past decade with notable offerings from Seth Monahan (2013), Edward Klorman, (2016), and Robert Hatten (2018). At the foundation of this scholarship lies The Composer’s Voice by Edward T. Cone (1974). Within this influential collection of essays, Cone sets forth to tease apart the composer-as-historical-person from the composer-as-fictional-persona. In this pursuit, Cone locates virtual agents—musical characters—who take the forms of individual instruments, sections of the orchestra, identifiable melodies, and other musical segmentations.

Cone uses Berlioz as a starting point for this study of virtual agency in Western instrumental music and hints at the narrating role that a virtual agent plays in Harold in Italy. His examination of the piece is brief but illuminating, especially amid recent scholarship. In this paper, I revisit Cone’s analysis and advance it to reveal more adequately how Berlioz creates a narrating agent within the symphony. I begin by exploring the exceptional task of staging narrative agency in instrumental music by drawing on the literary theories of Ge?rard Genette (1980) and Mieke Bal (1985). I then turn to the second movement of Harold in Italy, where a narrating agent—Harold—observes and reports on actions of the musical “story” while remaining at a narrative distance. In essence, this musical narrator speaks about the actions of story-level events without himself participating in them, a rare feat considering the inherently mimetic nature of untexted music (Abbate 1991, Cox 2016).

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.

Innovations in audio recording and playback technology continue to raise our expectations of sound reproduction quality. At the same time, the advancements of technology have allowed musicians the ability to subvert that expectation for artistic expression. One approach involves sonic emulation of older playback devices (e.g., an AM radio receiver, a gramophone) or even devices not designed for music at all (e.g., a telephone). Expanding on the work of Dibben (2012), Moore (2017), Moylan (2012), and Zagorski-Thomas (2018), I suggest the effect of such cases goes beyond playful gimmick or nostalgia—it produces an additional mediative layer to the listening experience, thereby impacting how listeners interpret their relationship to musical sound and, consequently, its perceived expression and meaning. Billie Eilish’s “Party Favor” (2017) begins by creating the impression that Eilish is leaving a voicemail message to sever ties with her significant other, but this perspective is transformed gradually until a sound quality typical of a modern pop record is reached in the first chorus. While Eilish’s narrative voice remains unchanged throughout this process, the sound of her voice and other instrumental components creates an emergent shift of listening perspective (from the significant other to Eilish). The manipulation of spatial impressions through production techniques creates a dynamic listening experience that allows us to inhabit both perspectives as listeners. I argue such listening experiences demonstrate that spatial impressions do not represent an isolated aspect of musical encounters, but rather function as an integral element that can influence all facets of song production.

While The Bad Plus (TBP) is hardly the only jazz piano trio to perform covers of modern popular songs, their approach is more consistently heard as ironic by fans and critics alike. The band has rejected this facile interpretation, asserting that their covers are earnest attempts to “make rock, pop, and electronica songs vehicles for contemporary improvisation” (TBP 2007). But the trio maintains a reputation “for being irony-steeped hipsters who play irreverent pop covers, and who like nothing better than to thumb their noses at the jazz tradition” (Argue 2006).
 
In this paper, I argue that these two dimensions of TBP’s covering practices are interdependent. Building on work on musical irony by Janet Bourne (2016), I posit three recurring TBP arranging techniques that court ironic hearings by flouting various combinations of so-called Gricean maxims that govern “cooperative” verbal conversation. After examining the first two techniques—side-slipping and overextension—I explore what I call parameter shifts: changes in the structures that trio members use to coordinate their individual and collective improvisations. While such changes yield pronounced incongruities that are the stuff of musical irony, they also amount to shifts in how the trio treats a source song as an improvisational referent, creating contrasting types of solo spaces in cover performances. By analyzing interactions between these three techniques, I suggest that TBP’s cover transformations can yield both compelling developmental processes and dynamic improvisational environments, even when—or perhaps, especially when—these transformations are catalyzed by ironic subversion.

“Mathematicians tend to think of the notion of symmetry as being virtually synonymous with the theory of groups and their actions.” (Weinstein, 1996) Since the publication of the influential and pioneering work of music theorist David Lewin (1987),  group theory has informed many serious studies in music but mathematically-inclined music theorists need not be bound by group-theoretical thinking alone.  This paper examines how groups and, in particular, groupoids handle symmetry in music with groupoids exemplifying a “rogue” symmetry.  Music theorists have recently considered groupoids in a categorical setting applied to poly-Klumpenhouwer Networks (PK-Nets) (Popoff et al., 2016; Popoff, 2019).  An equivalent algebraic approach considers a groupoid of order 12 within the Riemann group of UTTs, a simply transitive subgroup of the group formalized by Julian Hook in his seminal paper “Uniform Triadic Transformations” (Hook, 2002).  This groupoid includes the important PLR transformations and the N transformation (Cohn, 2000) of Neo-Riemannian theory.  An examination of the algebraic and music theoretic structure of this groupoid follows in detail, and this paper demonstrates how tonic and dominant functions arise as epiphenomena of the groupoid structure.  All of the appealing properties of this groupoid are a result of the transformations having a distribution that can be described as maximally even which expands the analytic scope of this concept from diatonic scale theory (Clough and Douthett, 1991) to transformational theory.  Beethoven’s “An die ferne Geliebte” (1816) and Bartók’s “Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta” (1936) provide basic and advanced examples respectively of this analytic technique.

While recent publications exploring the instrumental affordances of the guitar through transformational theory such as De Souza (2017; 2018) focus on the concept of embodiment, the explanatory power of such transformations with regard to voicings has yet to be examined. In this paper, I develop a methodology involving the interaction between pitch content and fretboard transformations to investigate the limited number of voicings used by Toru Takemitsu in “Rosedale” from In the Woods (1995). I introduce fretboard prime forms (fbsets), which are generic hand shapes that can be transposed up and down the fretboard while maintaining the same intervallic pitch relationships. Fbsets thus correspond to voicings, with each voicing yielding several fbsets when plotted on the fretboard GIS. Furthermore, I discuss various fretboard transformations that model chord successions in fretboard space such the the SINT transformation, which preserves same-shapedness across strings, and the S and A operations, which adjust the “soprano” and “alto” voices respectively. Using these transformations to map fbsets, I construct a network that demonstrates the proximate relationships of the voicings that Takemitsu selects.
Ultimately, these results clarify that the close relationships among pitch sets in this piece are related to fingerings on the guitar. Specifically, these relationships are manifest in idiomatic chord successions that allow phrases to be performed smoothly and with legato execution. Thus, by choosing proximate voicings throughout “Rosedale,” Takemitsu demonstrates a deep understanding of the relationship between pitch content and the classical guitar’s affordances.

Grazyna Bacewicz’s late-period works (1955–1969) have received occasional criticism for possessing “a repetitive [and] formulistic quality” and “an invention [that] is not especially striking” (Wood 1983, 118; Thomas 1985, 115). In this paper, I examine one of these formulas—the repeated fifth transposition of short melodic gestures—to demonstrate how Bacewicz exhaustively and inventively explores the technique’s compositional possibilities. Specifically, I focus on two melodic figures appearing throughout the late period: two-note tritonal skips or glissandi, and three-note (frequently scalar) motives. Deploying George Perle’s (1990) interval cycles alongside transformational tools, I track Bacewicz’s fifth transpositions of these gestures throughout three compositions: Music for Strings, Trumpets, and Percussion (1958), Piano Quintet no. 2 (1965), and Divertimento for String Orchestra (1965). Besides redressing the general lack of English-language scholarship on the composer, my analyses provide a glimpse into a larger organizational principle—the construction of interval-cyclic and inversionally symmetrical pitch structures within both horizontal and vertical dimensions—that helps define Bacewicz’s late-period style.

Harmonic analyses of popular music typically take the minor tonic to be Roman numeral “one.” By nature, this “one-based” approach requires a new numbering scheme when songs shift between relative key centers. Recent scholarship has argued, however, that popular music often involves ambiguity between relative tonalities, as exemplified in the “Axis” progression, if not sometimes a tonal fusion of two relative keys. I thus argue for the utility of a “six-based” approach to the minor tonic, where the minor tonic is taken to be ^6. This six-based approach, common among practitioners of popular music as seen in the Nashville number system, avoids the forced choice of a single tonic, and it thus offers a consistent way to track chord function and behavior across shifts between relative key centers. After considering these shifts in a diatonic context on the levels of both phrase and song form, I posit that popular music involves three possible tonalities, together which form a “triple-tonic complex” akin to Stephenson’s three harmonic palettes: a major system, a parallel-minor system, and a relative-minor system. I conclude by considering how chromatic chords common in a major key, such as II and bVII, correspond to their counterparts in the relative minor, IV and bII, thereby collapsing the landscape of diatonic modes into three modal complexes. Overall, the paper serves to reveal the logic of six-based minor—why it is useful, what issues it resolves, and what types of insights it can afford us about harmonic syntax in popular music.

The majority of Kate Soper’s (b. 1981) output as a composer-vocalist focuses intensely on the relationship between words and music. Methods of text and music analysis have primarily focused on relating musical materials to the semantic meaning of texts or have studied the ways composers musicalize sounds and use the materiality of poetry. Building on past scholarship and drawing from Soper’s program note to?Door?(2007), a setting of poems by Martha Collins for soprano, flute, tenor saxophone, accordion, and electric guitar, I develop a model that looks beyond semantics to investigate the roles of acoustic and aesthetic properties of words. My novel approach examines the relationship between music and words through four different but interrelated interpretive lenses: 1. Literal, 2. Figurative, 3. Acoustic, and 4. Aesthetic. 
I demonstrate my methodology using the third movement of Door as a case study. I use Literal interpretation to interrogate the text setting and piece-specific associations developed by Soper. My Figurative interpretation draws on the meaning of the words and extrapolates meaning from the poem before finding sonic analogues within the music. Acoustic interpretation involves inspecting the phonemes and acoustic envelopes of words and relating them to Soper’s choice of instruments. Finally, I observe which qualities of the poem and text resonate with me and through Aesthetic interpretation I attempt to understand what makes these qualities appealing. This multifaceted approach opens the door to consideration of new dimensions of comparison between text and music.

Scholarly praise for Arthur Sullivan’s operetta music often singles out his varied rhythmic treatment of Gilbert’s highly regular verse. Prior studies tend to examine Sullivan’s text-setting in a vacuum, without a framework for comparing his approach to that of 19th-century composers more generally. Such a framework has emerged in recent scholarship on German art song by Harald Krebs, Yonatan Malin, Stephen Rodgers, Robert Snarrenberg, and others. This paper thus has two goals: (1) to use current theory to pinpoint the distinctive aspects of Sullivan’s approach; (2) to use Sullivan’s music to expand our conception of the possible relationships between poetic and musical meters.
 
I take Malin’s theory of “declamatory schemas” as my main jumping-off point. Composers create variety within a song by changing from one schema to another. Rather than describing these moments as successions (in which one schema follows another), I instead treat them as transformations (in which one schema is converted into another). I focus on four of Sullivan’s techniques of schema transformation—stress deletion, stress addition, grouping dissonance, and selective compression/expansion. I show how Sullivan’s deployment of these transformations is motivated by characterization and the inflection of particular words.
 
I conclude by affirming: (1) the value of applying declamatory schema theory to music that is neither German nor “serious”; (2) the necessity of performing style analysis within a framework that discloses an individual composer’s dialogue with common musical practices, shedding light on composer and practice alike.

Jaqueline Leclair’s 2020 album, Music for English Horn Alone, represents a landmark for the versatile—but often underestimated—English horn. The album includes the premiere of Karola Obermüller’s different forms of phosphorus. I offer a timbral-motivic analysis of this piece, arguing that formal understanding is best achieved by considering timbre as a primary parameter. 
Obermüller’s genius in different forms of phosphorus comes in part from her elegant mastery of motivic narrative. Although the motives include melodic and rhythmic content, their distinct perceptual characters emerge from timbral properties, sometimes evinced by variation of other properties. Four principal motives are woven together to create a musical narrative of coalescence, each dominating one large-scale formal section. The pedal motive is a harmonically rich, sustained tone which explores timbral variation through manipulation of vibrato and microtonality, while the multiphonic motive contributes texture. The singing motive manifests in two versions, keening and plangent, primarily differentiated by registral effects on timbre. The drip-drop motive, characterized by crisp articulation and short durations, interacts with the “extreme reverb” to produce rich, densely layered overtones. These motives begin as apparently separate entities but struggle for integration throughout, culminating in a climactic, energetic stream spiraling out into the ether, leaving the impression that these motivic processes—and their momentum—endure beyond our listening. 
Finally, I address how this timbral-motivic approach can be applied to other works, including multi-instrumental music, and I reflect on the piece/analysis in a wider context as they confront three types of underrepresentation within music theory.

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.

While the opening of Gérard Grisey’s Partiels (1975) is the quintessential emblem of spectralism, the series of gongs and winds that begins Henri Dutilleux’s Timbres, espace, mouvement (1978) enacts an equally striking rendering of the materiality of sound. This paper further explores the protospectral tendencies in the music of Dutilleux (a contemporary of Messiaen, Murail, and Grisey, his pupil). I chart a lineage from Messiaen to Grisey by way of Dutilleux, demonstrating how the latter theorized harmonic resonance and sonic materiality.
In the 1960s and 70s, Dutilleux explored three principal sources of resonance, all of which reflect Messiaen’s influence: sympathetic vibration, the octatonic collection(s), and the older composer’s “chord of resonance” and “chord of fourths.” Sympathetic resonance governs the first movement of Dutilleux’s Figures de Résonances for two pianos (1970–76). The sonorities performed by the Piano 1 combine to form Messiaen’s “chord of resonance,” a subset of his third mode of limited transposition that is based on the overtone series. At the end of Figures de Résonances, Dutilleux deploys the octatonic collection (Messiaen’s second mode) as a means of generating resonance. Alongside the pitch elements at work, the opposite dynamics and articulations between the two pianos result in an overall transfer of energy from the staccato Piano 2 to the sustained Piano 1. Finally, the ending of Métaboles (1963–64) employs Messiaen’s “chord of fourths,” a rendering of his fifth mode. These examples reveal that, building on Messiaen’s fascination with resonance, Dutilleux himself deeply engaged with spectral thinking.

Previous works of scholarship dealing with mode or aspects of Renaissance tonalities often treat all cadences within a piece equally by emphasizing the cadence pitches in a statistical manner, or have concluded that a generalized system of cadence weight is not feasible for Renaissance polyphony because of the high amount of cadential variables. In this paper, I interrogate these viewpoints and propose a starting place for weighting Renaissance cadences by identifying paradigmatic cadential structures to create a classification model, while also leaving room in analysis for variables such as the duration of the cadence pitches, the number of voices present at the cadence, and embellishment. 
        My model draws exclusively from the masses of Josquin Des Prez, chosen both for their diversity in compositional organization and uniformity in genre. The clausula vera is perhaps the most familiar Renaissance cadence. However, it is not the only two-voice cadence formula found within the multi-part texture of Josquin’s masses. In addition to it, I identify four other cadence types. They are distinguished from each other by both intervallic content and rhythmic interaction between the pair of voices articulating the cadence. Using this classification system, I show how these cadence formulas as well as other musical factors can lead toward a more refined picture of cadence weight in Josquin’s masses. This in turn would add a new layer to pitch-structure analysis of Renaissance polyphony.

Much like speech, a great deal of music both within and beyond the common practice is comprised entirely of Sätze (sentences or clauses), which are approximately the same as what William E. Caplin calls “thematic units,” yet the basic question of what constitutes a Satz remains as vexing as when it was first asked centuries ago by theorists such as Heinrich C. Koch. Áine Heneghan has achieved the start of a breakthrough by showing that a Satz for Arnold Schoenberg embraces not only the so-called “sentence” design but also the so-called “period” and “hybrid”; however, she still confines the concept of Satz to themes. Drawing on comparative analysis of Western art music and chant from the Republic of Georgia (which is emically understood as being comprised of mukhlebi, literally Sätze), I argue that both Sätze and their component phrases are differentiated in the same way with respect to the eight structural functions described by Matthew Arndt. Two of the phrase types have grammatical analogues (subject and predicate); the others are strictly rhetorical. This clarification of phrase types and Satz types cuts through the inconsistent and needlessly multiplied terminology currently applied to Sätze and makes it relatively easy to analyze them, regardless of their style, formal position, or complications, such as truncation, interpolation, elision, and compounding. This elucidation of Sätze reaches beyond the common practice while actually enhancing analytical precision.

In Polish-music studies, ethnomusicologists have shown that mazurka rhythms crystallized alongside the standardization of penultimate stress in the Polish language, suggesting a connection between Polish spoken and musical accent (Zaborowski 2013). This connection might contextualize claims about weak-beat accent patterns in Polish musical cadences (McKee 2017; Paczkowski 2011), though there have yet to be empirical evaluations of such.  
We bring empirical support to such claims by using the Common-Practice Cadence Corpus (CPCC)—a corpus of over 1,000 cadences encoded by hand. By studying the CPCC, we show that nineteenth-century mazurkas are more likely to have paroxytonic (weak-beat) cadences and, additionally, feature two distinct step-skip cadential schemata: the “escape-tone” and “fa-mi-do” cadence. Further, we conjecture that the prevailing penultimate stress in untexted music may have been carried over from Polish texted music and language.

Following the precedent of scholars of musical form, most choreomusicologists, scholars of dance and music, model the form of a dance by asserting discrete sectional boundaries. However, dancers and dance scholars adopt a continuous view of time, space, and motion in dance. This paper proposes that because of this continuity, it is often difficult to pinpoint precise sectional boundaries in dance, and as such, dance often comments on the relationship between successive passages of music in creative ways. This phenomenon is especially interesting in neo-classical ballets choreographed to the music of J. S.Bach, since both the music and the dance frequently do not admit tidy sectionalization. Neo-classical ballets are additionally suitable for exploring the question of form because the ballets, being non-narrative, are often abstract commentaries on the music.
 
Motivated by these observations, the paper analyzes the second movement of George Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco (1941), choreographed to the second movement of Bach’s Double Violin Concerto (BWV 1043). The music does not lend itself to obvious sectionalization, and the dance at times clarifies, at times complicates where and how formal junctures appear in the music. By using dance to interpret formal aspects of music, this paper helps to balance the more typical practice in choreomusicology where music-analytical methods are adapted to dance, leading to the neglect of minute details that give dance its expressive meaning.

Previous scholarship in dance and music often treats choreography as a response to musical cues. This model does not account for the reciprocal relationship between synchronous gesture and sound; the musical score, an unchanging object, serves as the source of information for gesture (Leman and Naveda, 2010). I challenge this model by arguing that dance and music reciprocally reinforce or contradict one another. This dialectical approach incorporates choreographic analysis into musical analysis, destabilizing what appears fixed in the score. 
        The centerpiece for the study is Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s choreography to Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4, titled Bartók/Aantekeningen and released as the award-winning film Hoppla! My analysis translates choreographic ideas into systematic patterns, emphasizing visual and kinesthetic experiences of dance, and expanding on Kozak’s exploration of “musical forms that challenge notions of a linear and uniformly moving time” (Kozak, 2020). I contribute to the rich body of literature on Bartók by reevaluating existing musical analyses informed by interactions with Keersmaeker’s choreography.
My methodology undertakes two analyses, one musical and one gestural, then fuses them to discover their connections and discords. Investigations of metrical layers, pitch collections, and form will bring new perspectives into music- and dance-analytical relationships. Mapping choreography alongside score analysis offers added layers of complexity to formalized music-theoretical elements, giving the music new meanings beyond the fixed score. 

Harmonic function is most typically understood as “the intrinsic potentiality of a given chord to progress in a particular way” (Smith 2020), which usually enables the prospective determination of a chord’s relationship to a tonic (Hyer 2011, Harrison 1994, Kopp 1995). While prospective accounts of function are typically accurate in eighteenth-century syntaxes, chromatic proliferation in nineteenth-century tonality challenges these postulates: dominant and half-diminished seventh chords exhibit behaviors that deny their anticipated function (Hutchinson 2021), chromatic triads create tonal “paradoxes” (Cohn 1996, Hutchinson 2020), and accented six-four sonorities appear as independent entities despite their non-functional appearance. 
While words like ‘non-functional’ and ‘paradoxical’ give the impression that chromatic tonality operates outside the framework of functional tonality, this assessment is directly influenced by preconceptions of function as a primarily prospective phenomenon. This paper contends that the concept of prospective function relies on entrenched preconceptions of functional defaults (after Hepokoski and Darcy 2006) derived from conditioning in the harmonic style of classical tonality (after Cohn 2012). Rather than relying explicitly on these defaults – and by extension dismissing other behaviors as ‘non-functional’ – I propose the concept of processual tonality, a term used in dialogue with Schmalfeldt’s (2011) conception of “processual form,” as a means of reconceptualizing harmonic function by reconceiving it as a retrospective, rather than prospective, property, derived through voice-leading behaviour. By tracking how chordal behaviour reflects idiomatic common-practice voice-leading processes, atypical behaviors of common-practice harmonies can be described in functional terms, rather than referring to them as abnegations of functional tonality.

Much scholarly work on György Kurtág’s music centers on its use of historical allusion. Alan Williams and Friedemann Sallis, in their respective analyses of the Officium Breve op. 28, both draw a connection between this use of allusion and Kurtág’s aphoristic approach to form. They both identify references to tonality that, in such a fragmentary formal context, remain unstable and open-ended with regard to musical meaning. In these inquiries, the relationship between historical allusion and syntax remains untheorized. Indeed, Paul Griffiths, commenting on Kurtág’s earlier op. 7, goes as far to suggest that Kurtág’s use of miniatures forms evade syntax altogether.
I take up the passages analyzed by Griffiths, Williams, and Sallis and build upon their observations regarding the interrelation between historical allusion, ambiguity, and aphorism. I do not advocate a definitive set of criteria for what constitutes a syntax for Kurtág’s music. Rather, by appeal to a bundle of considerations bound up with the notion, I suggest that Kurtág’s music supports multivalent analyses of musical structures that approach syntax-like conditions. Ambiguity in Kurtág rises beyond the level of indeterminate momentary allusion. In select passages from Kurtag’s op. 7 and op. 28, I show how coherent, near-comprehensive patterns or processes fail in specific, isolated instances; the very terms of this failure give way to another competing near-comprehensive analytical explanation. Thus, Kurtág’s music relates competing musical vocabularies in determinate ways. I suggest that Kurtág’s fragmentary aesthetic is multivalent and ambiguous without being diffuse or merely suggestive.