ABSTRACT Frédéric Chopin adhered to traditional practices in musical form to a far greater extent than hitherto acknowledged. He took certain standard formal paths with remarkable consistency throughout his compositional career and across almost all his favoured genres. His choices were grounded in eighteenth‐century routines concerning intra‐thematic functions and schemata. Chopin pursued alterations and adaptations of those formal patterns, a path that resulted in a kaleidoscopic range of variants, and in this way presented his compositions in a guise amenable to Romantic taste. This article captures Chopin's craft of musical form by means of data drawn from a broad survey of his works, presented in tables and supported by discussion of his practices and preferences. The main focus in on Chopin's treatment of the compound period and his positioning of Fonte and Monte schemata in relation to implicit small binary forms. Chopin stands out as a musician engaged with the aesthetic concerns of Romanticism but from a traditionalist starting point. He maintained a craft ethos as regards musical form which points to broad continuities linking eighteenth‐century compositional practices with later genres of popular music. In exploring these issues, this article aims to unravel something of the legacy of idealism for our understanding of nineteenth‐century music.
This article offers a detailed audio-visual analysis of Princess Mononoke (directed by Hayao Miyazaki, with music by Joe Hisaishi, and produced by Studio Ghibli; see Miyazaki [1997] 2017 and Hisaishi 1999). My analysis takes three approaches to the film: a historically established tonal scheme, a musico-dramatic scheme in the film and interaction between the ecological narrative theme and the technical details of the film score. Each of these approaches is illustrated through a modified Schenkerian method, which sheds new light on Mononoke's potential to arouse environmental criticism and on the significance of Hisaishi's music in Miyazaki's animated films.I first specify the three approaches invited by the music and drama of Mononoke. I then illustrate Edward Latham's multi-movement Ursatz (MMU) for opera and musical theatre, clarifying where I gained inspirations and how I modified Latham's method for my audio-visual analysis of Mononoke. In the main discussion, I summarise Mononoke's plot development as a background for the ecological theme that emerges in the climax and conclusion. Proposing an original MMU for these sequences and the associated score by Hisaishi, I examine both the compositional details of the score and the interaction between them and Mononoke's ecological theme. I conclude with a post-analysis commentary on two other relevant Japanese animated films, Pom Poko (1994) and Spirited Away (2001).
This article responds to the various criticisms raised against my work on the nature and function of music analysis by James Davis in his article 'Against the New Musical Idealism: Or, Listening for What May Be Otherwise', Music Analysis, 45/i (2026). I contest Davis's creation of a school of thought - the 'New Musical Idealists' - to which I apparently belong and identify his persistent tendency to misread the ways in which I mobilise various philosophical authorities. Above all, I mount a defence of the musical object, insisting that it is reasonable to posit the objectivity of musical properties in Western art music apart from politics and history, whilst simultaneously recognising the historical roles they perform.
This article discusses progressive formal strategies in the music of Johan Svendsen (1840-1911). Svendsen is one of Norway's foremost composers of large-scale orchestral music, but his works have so far garnered scant attention in Anglophone scholarship. The article provides analyses of three orchestral works by Svendsen through the lens of Steven Vande Moortele's concept of two-dimensional sonata form. It argues that Svendsen on several occasions entered into dialogue with this Lisztian formal strategy and that this is a neglected part of his formal practice. The article provides two-dimensional readings of Svendsen's Cello Concerto in D major, Op. 7 (1870), Sigurd Slembe, Op. 8 (1872) and Norwegian Rhapsody No. 2, Op. 19 (1876-7). The analyses demonstrate how Svendsen, in all three works, provides original solutions to the inherent problem in two-dimensional designs of balancing the tension between the overarching sonata form and the cycle of local movements.
This review article on William Caplin's Cadence both solidifies the foundations laid by his decades of earlier work and highlights the novel contributions of the present volume. The first section of commentary re-establishes Caplin's analytical philosophies, situating his cornerstone perspectives amongst those of contemporary scholars. The second and third sections spotlight a new framework established in Cadence - cadential 'stages', akin to those of a schema - engaging his tried-and-true Classical-era definitions. The fourth and fifth sections flesh out Caplin's extensions to Baroque-, Galant- and Romantic-era repertoire, integrating approaches by contemporary scholars when appropriate. As I aim to illustrate, Caplin's framework supports a broadly unified account of common-practice cadential behaviour - one sufficiently capacious to accommodate the many formal novelties that emerged between the seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries.
Over the past three decades we have witnessed the emergence of what is here called the 'New Musical Idealism' - a strand of contemporary musicological thought represented by figures such as Julian Horton, Julian Johnson, J. P. E. Harper-Scott and Kofi Agawu. The New Musical Idealists variously advocate for a strong understanding of musical autonomy, in which both formal-technical analysis and aesthetic appreciation are shielded from, or even provide a bulwark against, commodification and the reifications of contemporary capitalism. Yet for all their talk of music and music analysis' critical capacity, the New Musical Idealists ultimately realise a form of what Herbert Marcuse called affirmative culture - instead of critique, they offer consolation. Against such a temptation, it is argued here that music analysis may better fulfil a critical function through being historically grounded and dialectically attuned to the socio-political conditions in which it is made and heard. This is modelled through a reading of Schoenberg's Sechs kleine Klavierst & uuml;cke (1913), which attempts to show how instead of retreating from the world, music analysis may yet have a role in helping us articulate society's immanent contradictions.
As Charles Bodman Rae has shown, Witold Lutoslawski often writes melodies using just two interval classes, a technique Bodman Rae calls 'interval pairing' (1992, among others). Taking Bodman Rae's work as a point of departure, this study invokes the Tonnetz as a means for interpreting Lutoslawski's interval-pairing melodies. As it shows, these melodies tend to operate within two adjacent 'tracks' of a Tonnetz, with the activity along these tracks emerging as two threads of compound melody. Though Lutoslawski's various choices of interval pairings create melodies that sound very different from each other, this principle serves as a common thread connecting them and thus accounts for a crucial facet of the composer's musical language.
Liang Lei's serial work Garden Eight (2004, for piano) exhibits a highly pointillistic texture. Unlike conventional pointillism associated with French post-impressionist painterly techniques, the aesthetic and philosophical foundations of Liang's texture are rooted in the embodied traditions of Chinese music - specifically, the gestural notation of the seven-string zither, qin. Rather than specifying pitch and rhythm, qin tablature instructs performers through choreographed hand motions. Drawing on this visual-kinaesthetic notation, Liang creates a texture in which wide intervallic leaps are bound by imagined hand trajectories. He urges the pianist to focus on the energy required to physically traverse registral space. To distinguish this culturally embedded texture from Western precedents, I propose the term kinetic-tablature pointillism. Building on the embodied motion between pitches, this paper shifts attention to melodic contour and analyses its internal energy, defined as the total semitonal motion within a contour segment. Extending my own contour methodology, the minimally divergent contour network (2019), I normalise contour motion and categorise contour types, revealing transformational and isomorphic relationships among them. The findings demonstrate that beneath the seemingly fragmented surface lies a highly symmetrical architecture that governs both pitch and contour motion across the six movements of the work.
This article examines the ethical and methodological challenges inherent in music analysis, framing the field as one caught between the demands of rigorous critique and cultural pressures toward uncritical acclaim. It argues that the analyst's authority is inherently contingent - shaped by subjective biases, methodological choices, and cultural contexts - drawing on philosophical frameworks such as the intentional fallacy (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1946) and the critical theories of Theodor Adorno and Joseph Kerman. Through case studies of the Western canon, jazz and African musical traditions, the study demonstrates how norms of reverence, legacy and social harmony can inhibit critical discourse and foster analytical stagnation. It highlights a central tension: the analyst's ethical responsibility to offer honest assessments is often constrained by fear of professional retaliation or personal offence, especially in environments where criticism is misread as hostility. The essay advocates for an analytical practice grounded in intellectual humility, methodological transparency and respectful dialogue with composers and performers. In it, I conclude that for music analysis to sustain its intellectual integrity and relevance, the discipline must cultivate an academic culture which normalises constructive criticism as a professional standard, balancing scholarly rigour with cultural and ethical awareness.
Leading cognitive studies of galant music treat schematism as both a device and an ethos. The devices - whether called pre-fabs, tiles or schemata - undergird a mechanistic and passive ethos of inventiveness. In vision and practice, this constellation of approaches directs inquiry away from a musical depth that one contemplates and towards a musical surface that one experiences. A prime philosophical inspiration for this anti-traditional, revisionist music theory comes from John Dewey, whose aesthetics looks to restore art's native connection to sentience across the animal world.This essay proposes that such studies in fact run at odds with Dewey's conception of experience. Although framed by a critique of the field's scientific and philosophical underpinnings, the body of this essay focuses on analyses of works by Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven. With Haydn, formula and convention are obviously integral to his manner. Yet his schematism ultimately qualifies as 'weak' (rather than as 'strong', or causal, & agrave; la cognitive studies) because he treats such devices as tensions to resolve. In Dewey's wording, Haydn makes the 'hum-drum' sound necessary and original. With the much-discussed opening of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, meanwhile, local pattern is so entwined in overall design that it resists assimilation as a model for tasteful imitation. Beethoven obviously drew on precedent, but less to imitate pre-existing material than to emulate his predecessors' creative freedom. With both composers, an individuating drive to shape and probe their musical worlds comports with Dewey's sense of aesthetic experience but clashes with cognitive musicology's prizing of predictability and replication.
Perhaps two of the most infamous sonorities in tonal music, the Salome and Elektra chords have prompted a multitude of multifaceted harmonic and voice-leading interpretations from analysts. Rather than pursuing further harmonic-functional analysis, this article links the construction of these peculiar chords to the associative key structure of each opera. In short, the pitch content of each chord reflects a tangible hypostatisation of the keys associated with some of the operas' main characters. I use this analysis to discuss intersections between tonal structure and psychological drama in these operas and note that such parallelisms - between unordered pitches and associative key structures - extend the types of structural parallelisms typically discerned in antecedents such as Verdi and Wagner. I conclude by speculating on ways in which this approach might be productively applied to Strauss's later, and far less studied, operas.
The double return of the principal theme and home key has long held pride of place in theories of sonata form. For James Webster (2001) it is the paramount feature of sonata form; similarly, for James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy (2006) it is the feature that lies at the heart of their sonata-theory typology, distinguishing between their types 1, 2 and 3. Several scholars have already noted that off-tonic recapitulations render this typology fuzzy, with John L. Snyder (1991, p. 53) wondering whether a subdominant recapitulation can 'legitimately be called a recapitulation' and, consequently, whether the movement as a whole can be truly considered a sonata-form movement. In this article I take this argument further, demonstrating that the off-tonic recapitulation is itself a fuzzy category. I discuss examples from a variety of works composed from the 1750s to the 1770s in which it is difficult to determine whether or not the recapitulation should be considered off-tonic. In some, the moment of return itself is unstable, yet not entirely off-tonic. In others, it seemingly begins on the tonic, but quickly destabilises the sense of tonal return. In yet other examples there are both tonic and off-tonic returns, with either of these holding equal stakes as to the status of the 'true' return (if such a status can be considered historically valid at all). I present these examples within the broader context of the gradual transformation of binary form into sonata form's 'synthesis between binary and ternary principles' (Webster 2001), demonstrating how the balance between these principles gradually tips over time.
ABSTRACT Within the discourse on the arts, architecture holds a special place as the most musical of art forms. Critics observed that architectural metaphors such as space, structure and proportion are ubiquitous in music discourse, noting the arts forms’ shared capacity for shaping one's experience of time. This study identifies a strategy for expressing relationships between musical works and physical structures used in two recent compositions that invite listeners to experience physical spaces through the mediation of musical agents. Both works – Caroline Shaw's Plan and Elevation (2015) and Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel (1971) – take as their subject matter physical spaces endowed with aesthetic as well as spiritual qualities. In this intertextual analysis I propose that Plan and Elevation and Rothko Chapel can be richly experienced by listeners as dramatic narratives shaped by virtual subjectivity, formed contextually in each work by its persisting presence, which is expressed in consistent thematic, timbral and textural features that identify and differentiate it from its musical landscape. Moreover, examining virtual agency in each work reveals a narrative of transcendence, as each subject's identity gradually transforms towards abstraction, reproducing a metaphor for the spiritual process one may experience in the physical space.
Recent scholarship of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sonata forms reveals a range of possibilities for approaching the recapitulation. Building on this work, I present select findings from my analysis of nineteenth-century recapitulations composed between 1800 and 1850, slightly before and after sonata form crystallised in critical discourse. Prioritising lesser-analysed composers, my analyses centre on pieces by H & eacute;l & egrave;ne Liebmann, Friedrich Kalkbrenner, George Onslow, Norbert Burgm & uuml;ller and Niels Gade. Drawing connections to articles by L. Poundie Burstein and Yoel Greenberg, my examples foreground the process of recapitulating as manifest in these nineteenth-century works. The notion of recapitulation-as-process is especially evident in these pieces, which contain examples of off-tonic returns, formal hybridity between sonata types, recapitulatory overlap and reordered recapitulations.
Edward Elgar's 1907 part-song 'There Is Sweet Music' (Op. 53 No. 1) is at once a 'minor' piece and a highly significant one that richly rewards investigation. It is notable as an early instance of bitonality, being notated simultaneously in two keys - the male choir in G major and the female choir in A|. Yet despite the apparent discordance of the two semitonally adjacent keys, the result is remarkably mellow - indeed 'sweet', aptly realising the music described in Tennyson's text. As befits the subject matter, this contribution consists of a pair of complementary essays on Elgar's song by two different authors, followed by a colloquy in which they engage with each other's readings in more explicit dialogue. In offering a discussion of the same song, the two inevitably go over some of the same material, but frequently in different registers and from different perspectives, sometimes rubbing against each other in mild dissonance, sometimes in complete accord. Both manifest a strong concern with detailed analytical engagement with the song and a close reading of the text and music, to this end drawing on music theory and hermeneutics. And both are open to the plurality of narratives that may be constructed around a single piece and its diverse interpretative possibilities, in their different ways exploring the current standpoint of a wider discipline through the differing interpretative possibilities of a single, small musical object.
ABSTRACT This article presents a methodology for understanding large‐scale form in rock/pop music, focusing on the much‐discussed AABA form. Though previous authors on rock/pop form differ on what situations should be classified as AABA, this article argues that there are four essential patterns with which AABA songs might engage: AA–BA–BA, AAB–AB–(A), AA–B–A and AA–B/A. These four types are differentiated by their highest‐level manifestation of form, whereby the A and B sections are grouped into distinct patterns. Building on previous research, the analysis focuses on the surface‐level aspects that generate these larger patterns, which encompass harmony, melody, texture, dynamics, lyrics and clock time. The structure and function of the B section is particularly crucial in articulating each pattern. In presenting a wider notion of what might constitute B music, I explain how different options for constructing a B section can produce distinct trajectories within the larger umbrella of the given AABA type. Additionally, this methodology exploits the concepts of formal functionality and rotational form to illuminate the dynamic relations within AABA forms, demonstrating how the tonal layout of a B section affects its grouping potential and how larger cycles that reference the thematic components of the A sections can occur in the latter portions of certain AABA types.
