The importance of non-dodecaphonic rotation- and inversion-based arrays in Pierre Boulez's oeuvre after his marked stylistic shift in 1975 is well documented in the scholarly literature. Despite isolated commentary on their role in Boulez's earlier works, however, their significance to his overall compositional practice has not been examined in detail. Building on previous work and based on an analysis of Boulez's sketches and published scores, I illustrate how these arrays operated within his compositional process at various stages of his career and demonstrate how he adapted them in the mid- to late 1950s as he developed a conception of harmony that served him for the remainder of his career, thus explaining their importance to his later works.
This article reframes sign language cover songs as music analysis, arguing that Deaf listeners are expert formal analysts who use sign language to convey analytical insights into the form of existing pieces of popular music through the medium of sign language cover songs. Sign language cover songs are placed on a continuum from literal to free translations, and from descriptive to suggestive analysis. The article explores three form-defining parameters-movement type, space, and nonmanual markers-revealing how each one can be used in an American Sign Language (ASL) cover to articulate aspects of musical form.
"Au pied de mon lit," the fifth song from Lili Boulanger's cycle Clairi & egrave;res dans le ciel, is fewer than forty measures long, yet in that span it uses six distinct piano textures. Some of those textures underline shifts from one formal section to another; others happen in the middle of a section, or even the middle of a phrase. The changing accompanimental patterns, in other words, create their own form-a textural form, which is by turns aligned and at odds with the form created by harmony and melody. Texture, traditionally considered a "secondary" musical parameter, has often been seen as less essential than the "primary" parameters of melody, harmony, and rhythm; a song like "Au pied de mon lit," however, shows that this secondary parameter can be of primary importance. My article explores the relationship between textural, harmonic-melodic, and poetic form in Clairi & egrave;res dans le ciel and outlines three textural strategies that Boulanger uses throughout the cycle: juxtaposition, transition, and suspension. An analysis of these songs allows us to deepen our understanding of Boulanger's musical style and also to broaden our conception of form. Looking at her songs from different formal perspectives suggests that a single piece is not in a single form but instead in many forms at once, the number of forms dependent upon the number of parameters we attend to, the degree of correspondence or conflict among them, and the elements that captivate us most.
A corpus study of Mozart's operas and his scenes for voice and orchestra revealed 106 instances of a schema that I call the operatic cadence. Unlike the galant schemata discussed by Robert O. Gjerdingen and others, this schema is a vocal formula and it comprises a complex network of voice-leading patterns displaying several family resemblances. I propose that the second peculiarity is conditioned by the first. Because the schema is a vocal formula, it was constrained by the vocal range of the singer, and the shape of its melody had to be negotiated against this constraint. I reconstruct the compositional problem Mozart was faced with when fashioning an instance of the schema, and I model the process of triangulation that he had to embark upon in order to solve this problem. I suggest that the flexibility of voice leading displayed by the operatic cadence, which affects its recognizability, is compensated for by consistent treatment of mode, tempo, meter, rhythm, texture, dynamics, and text setting. The crucial importance of these parameters for the definition and identification of the schema problematizes the near-exclusive focus of schema theory on pitch and the association of the operatic cadence with the high style links it to topic theory.
Neoclassical ballets often do not focus on portraying stories in a conventional sense. Rather, choreographers seek to inflect our interpretation of the music. Certain compositions by J. S. Bach offer choreographers ample room for creative intervention because the music can afford multiple interpretations as to where structural articulations lie, how successive key areas relate to each other, or the location of cadences. Drawing on examples from Fantasia (1993) and Solo (1997) by choreographer Hans van Manen, this article illustrates how van Manen's choreographies provide alternative interpretations of Bach's music. Some insights about these dance-music interactions may even illuminate music-theoretical concepts more generally.
Parallelism-pattern repetition-is an important part of Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff's rhythmic theory, but they treat it only very briefly. In this essay, I offer a more rigorous account of how parallelism affects meter and grouping. Parallelism influences meter directly (though only the periods of metrical levels, not their phases); it also influences grouping directly, due to our search for an efficient encoding in which groups align with iterations of a pattern and larger groups combine successive iterations. The preference for strong beats to occur early in groups then gives rise to further, indirect effects of parallelism on meter: a tendency to hear the strongest beat early in a repeated motive, and a tendency to place the strongest beat in a series of consecutive iterations of a pattern within the first occurrence of the pattern. These effects are illustrated with examples from the common-practice repertoire.
In the 2003 documentary Woman of Heart and Mind, Joni Mitchell states, "Chords are depictions of emotions. These chords that I was getting by twisting the knobs on the guitar until I could get these chords that I heard inside that suited me, they feel like my feelings. You know, I called them, not knowing, chords of inquiry." In investigating Mitchell's music, we address the integration of guitar, harmony, and expression of feeling exemplified by "chords of inquiry." We take as a corpus her early songs from 1968 to 1972 in which she accompanies herself on guitar. Our study extends prior scholarly research and practical guitar lore by first offering a systematic, affordance-based integrative approach to Mitchell's use of alternate guitar tunings and their attendant chord shapes. We then show how her approach to the guitar influences text-music relationships in selected songs. Central to our analysis is "expressive opposition," that is, her creation of analogs between oppositions in her lyrics and oppositions manifested in her performed chord shapes and fretboard.
This article builds on the theory of long-form non-isochronous meters, or meters that contain an irregular metric level immediately slower than the beat. Martin Clayton, who coined the term, argues that prior music-theoretical knowledge is a sufficient condition for entraining to irregular measures within cycles that last longer than the upper limit for metric perception. Through an analysis of Pacific-Colombian canto de boga performance practice, I argue that melodic cyclicity similarly allows listeners to entrain to these long-form non-isochronous meters, therefore expanding Clayton's theory to include styles with flexible meters that are not as explicitly theorized by their musicians.
This article examines the transformation of the rounded binary form in the piano works of Robert Schumann. Whereas the Classical rounded binary is characterized by a clear separation between the contrasting middle and the recapitulation, Schumann's rounded binaries often join together these two sections by treating the recapitulation as a continuation, a cadence, or a cadential extension to the contrasting middle.
This article argues that Yuri Kholopov's (1932-2003) allegedly formalist music theory was ideologically undergirded by Russian Orthodox Christianity and Eurocentrism. Part I sketches the institutional origins of Kholopov's formalism, tracing the contemporaneous disciplinary battles between theorists and historical musicologists vis-& agrave;-vis Soviet communism's attacks on modernist music and the academic study of music. Part II explores the relationship between Kholopov's theory of musical logic and its relation to evolutionism. In Part III, the theory of musical logic is placed in dialogue with the aesthetic, philosophical, and religious thought of Aleksei Losev (1893-1988)-Kholopov's most esteemed Russian philosopher. Lastly, Part IV identifies the ideological valence of the Christian foundations of Kholopov's theory within the competing frameworks of das Abendland and Eurasianism. By showing how Kholopov's formalism was entangled in ideology and politics, this article ultimately questions whether formalism is indeed an epistemic system capable of severing form from content.
Open strings are a central compositional-aesthetic feature in a range of repertoires, from overdriven guitar parts in early rock music to stopped-string passages in Western European classical art music. Despite their ubiquity, existing fretboard-space models are currently underequipped to consider their use-open strings are either simply ignored or treated as an unreachable position outside the range of the instrument. Such an approach complicates Cartesian analyses, presents additional caveats to voice leading, and ultimately decouples fretboard theory from real-world practice. To address these latent issues, I adopt a range of interdisciplinary analytical techniques to propose a series of modifications to existing fretboard spaces such that open strings are treated as a point of indeterminacy between a grounded physical fretboard space and an underlying pitch network. Analytical vignettes of popular-music guitar performances by Brushy One String, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Celisse Henderson, Kurt Cobain, and Lenny Kravitz showcase this indeterminacy, demonstrating that open strings are primarily used in two ways: to instantly access otherwise unreachable fretted notes without shifting the fretting hand, or to facilitate otherwise difficult lateral leaps by "borrowing" time from adjacent rhythmic values. Both techniques are manipulations of distance and travel speed as factors of Fitts's Law during goal-directed physical movement. In this way, I argue open-string usage is analogous to Lorentzian wormholes-interstellar gateways that can act as a shortcut between time and space-that share similarities with other common pitch-space transitions such as modulations between distant keys. Such considerations inform a proposed set of modifications for transformational fretboard spaces that provide a more accurate summation of distance calculations between fretted- and open-string events. I then showcase the utility of the proposed modifications when estimating performance difficulty in a computationally assisted analysis of the first movement, Allegro Moderato, from the Concerto in G major for double bass by & Eacute;douard Nanny. There, I apply the proposed modifications to open strings in fingerboard space to offer an accurate perspective on lateral transitions and their influence on shifts in a performer's bodily balance as it relates to formal organization, fretboard transformations, and sonic clarity.
Time, in music, may seem dramatically different to different listeners. This article collects instances of this observation in existing literature under the umbrella term “temporal parallax” and analyzes examples from metal in which metric cardinality and/or phase, tempo, isochronicity, and durational proportion may seem irreconcilably different depending on how one approaches the music. This article also argues for adopting a parallactic attitude in analysis—that is, a way of thinking about musical time that takes a plurality of perspectives on a single musical surface seriously. Ultimately, these analyses both concretize and pluralize music theory’s “listener.”
Recent studies have examined the specific characteristics of nineteenth-century sonata form (Schmalfeldt [2011]; Vande Moortele [2013]; Taylor [2016]; Horton [2017]; Davis [2017]; Hunt [2020]; Hyland [2023]). A distinctive feature of Romantic-era music is its new sensitivity to temporality. Concepts such as "becoming" (Schmalfeldt), "functional transformation" (Horton), "atemporal interpolation" (Davis), and "lyric form" (Hyland) have refined our understanding of formal processes that undermine or problematize the unidirectional flow of Romantic sonata-form movements. This article provides a fresh approach to a related processual phenomenon, which I term "Retracted Tonal Areas" (RTAs). RTAs are tonally distinct and structurally articulated thematic action spaces that are interpolated into one of the two main theme zones of the exposition, occupy a remote tonality, and eventually revert to the previous key. In this article, I differentiate RTA situations from other established theoretical models and focus on an RTA type that emerges within the S-zone and "interrupts" the flow of the subordinate key (SK), resulting in what I label "Interrupted SK Expositions." Additionally, this article aims to expand the purview of investigation beyond the familiar canon. While previous studies on early-Romantic sonata expositions have primarily focused on Schubert's music, here I contextualize his formal approach by examining it alongside works by some of his contemporaries, including Anton Reicha, Norbert Burgm & uuml;ller, Louis Ferdinand Prince of Prussia, Franz Berwald, George Onslow, and Philip Cipriani Potter. Thus, this research offers a broader view of sonata form practices during the Romantic era.
In this article, we formalize and analyze qualia motion, i.e., the process by which a composition transitions across distinct harmonic qualities through the Fourier qualia space (FQS)-a multidimensional and transposition-independent space based on the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) coefficients' magnitude. In the FQS, the plot of set classes relies on their harmonic qualities-such as diatonicity and octatonicity-enabling us to (1) identify the pitch-class set in a musical phrase that best represents its qualia-a reference sonority; (2) define a harmonic progression using all sequential reference sonorities in a piece; (3) visualize trajectory in space; and (4) establish a statistical metric for the ambiguity of harmonic qualia. Finally, we discuss Schoenberg's Op. 19, No. 1, analyzing the sense of its harmonic path. The proposed space leverages a bipartite, symmetrical, and consequential structure and unveils ambiguity as an element of nondirected linearity and counterpoint.
In the syncretic eclecticism of K-pop song production, the quotation of themes from classical works has become a recurrent trope. This paper examines the case of Red Velvet's borrowing of the Air from Orchestral Suite No. 3 by J. S. Bach, BWV 1068 in their hit single "Feel My Rhythm" (2022). In this elaborate reworking, substantial parts of the original counterpoint were paraphrased using techniques reminiscent of historic musical practice. Drawing on Carolyn Abbate's conceptualization of the musical tombeau, the analysis proposed here contextualizes "Feel My Rhythm" as an act of commemorative mimesis whose invocation of the past occurs on several different levels of the audiovisual assemblage. Reading the song as a negotiation of power relations between multiple authorial voices, the analysis considers ways in which the commemorative gesture invests the idols with vocal agency and authority.
Of the eighteen slow movements in Joseph Haydn's string quartets Op. 9 (1769-70), Op. 17 (1771), and Op. 20 (1772), fourteen are in sonata form. In eleven of these, their second reprise divides into two parts, the start of the second part signaled, in nine, by a double return and the regaining of the structural tonic chord. However, in the remaining three movements (Op. 9, No. 5; Op. 17, No. 4; and Op. 20, No. 6), the second reprise is not divided into two parts and the opening theme does not appear in the tonic; instead, the tonic key, the first reprise's thematic material, and the structural tonic chord all appear at different points. This study focuses on the interactions among phrase structure, key areas, caesuras, and voice-leading structure in the second reprises of the three slow movements, arguing that the return in them is a process, not a moment.
