Music Theory Midwest

Nineteenth Annual Conference


Bowling Green State University


16-18 May 2008 - Bowling Green, Ohio

ABSTRACTS

Friday, May 16

9:15–10:45 SERIALISM and SEGMENTATION

What Kind of “Patterning”? Issues of “Thematicism” Reconsidered

in Stravinsky’s Abraham and Isaac

David Carson Berry, University of Cincinnati, College-Conservatory of Music

In Stravinsky’s Abraham and Isaac (1962–63), the vocal melody is constructed of hexachordal rows from rotational-transpositional arrays. However, it is not easy to characterize formally, as it has what Anthony Payne describes as an “almost complete lack of … any musical repetition.” Indeed, Claudio Spies observes that the avoidance of “patterning” makes the work stand apart from earlier pieces by Stravinsky. In Spies’s view, formal articulation is provided by orchestral “punctuations,” which enable one to discern the “ten musical units” Stravinsky claimed to exist. But once the piece has been so parsed, a more refined sense of form is complicated by the presumed avoidance of repetition and “patterning.” How do these units relate to one another?

I argue that some vocal passages are in fact modeled on others in terms of their serial infrastructure. When choosing hexachords for the vocal line, Stravinsky typically takes them from his arrays in a patterned manner. That is, he traces systematic, graphical patterns through the arrays; and he often retraces these same patterns, but through different arrays, when creating later sections. As a result, some sections of the vocal line correspond in systematic ways to other sections, in terms of interval cycles, transpositional patterns, and even emphasized pcs and pc sets. Through a series of examples and discussions, I demonstrate that although Abraham and Isaac may lack literal melodic and rhythmic “patterning,” it does replicate highly systematic and interpretively rich patterns of other kinds. Thus, Stravinsky’s vocal melody was not derived in some kind of “through-composed” manner, but instead through a procedure that resulted in intricate correspondences between (and occasionally within) sections.

Stability Space and the Below-n Threshold: An Empirical Approach to

Segmentation and Analysis

Mike Solomon, University of Florida

Pitch-class stability in early-modern music is associated with concepts of musical “force” as defined by Larson (1997), Lerdahl (1997, 2001), Schoenberg (Cherlin, 2000), Baroni (1983), and Arnheim (Brower 2000). This paper seeks to quantify degrees of pc stability and force by constructing a notion of stability space—a nexus of the time space and pitch space in which stabilizing and destabilizing musical forces occur. Because these forces cannot be delimited by a clear hierarchical structuring mechanism as proposed by Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983), each musical moment necessarily belongs to multiple stability spaces of varying temporal and pitch dimensions. The below-n threshold is an algorithm that finds trends between these dimensions by discerning the maximum-sized time interval containing pc sets of average cardinality n in various works. Because this divisional scheme potentially cuts through events and event collections, it does not comport with traditional musical segmentation procedures as defined by Hanninen (2001). Rather, it uses an approach suggested by Mandelbrot in analyzing the correlation between measurement error and the unit of measurement (1967). A case study into the music of Scriabin uses the below-n threshold to provide an empirical description of the composer’s style and identify interesting outlier relationships in his oeuvre.

Berio’s Serialism in the 1950s: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives

Irna Priore, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

This paper addresses Luciano Berio’s compositional approach during the 1950s. Because of Berio’s association with the Darmstadt school during the same period, serialism needs to be considered at least as a point of departure, although some works may also exhibit other techniques as well. Darmstadt was not a monolithic school of thought. For Berio, reconciliation with the intrinsic struggles associated with serialism was suggested by a prominent literary scholar, his close friend Umberto Eco.

Eco proposed a new approach to structure, which he entitled the “open work.” In Eco’s observations, a work is never “open” or “closed” but the writer (or composer) strikes a compromise between the two. The open work is not all improvisatory, but allows different readings. The structure could be temporarily suspended at certain points, only to be recaptured at a later point.

The works selected for this discussion are: Allelujah I (1956), Sequenza I for solo flute (1958), and Différences for 5 instruments and magnetic tape (1959). Chronologically, the first works of the decade exhibit more apparent traits of serialism, while the later ones exhibit less. The combination of serial procedures with the “open work” approach certainly poses a monumental task for the analyst; as the difficulty in penetrating the compositional language is compounded by the multiplicity of approaches that can be simultaneously employed. The purpose of this discussion is to point out the strict background structure of such works and to demonstrate that serialism was still an important organizational principle for Berio during the 1950s.

9:15–10:45 Song

Youthful Idealism in Brahms’s “Frühlingslied,” Op. 85, no. 5

Melissa Hoag, Oakland University

Brahms’s setting of Emanuel Geibel’s poem “Frühlingslied” (composed 1882) appears to convey a boisterous celebration of nature. Below its surface, however, lies a more bittersweet disposition, betraying that the protagonist’s joy may not be as blithe as the setting suggests. Using voice-leading and motivic analysis, this paper examines how Brahms’s setting concretizes meaning in Geibel’s poem in two principal ways: first, the dissonant relationship between the voice and the piano’s right-hand part, as immediately characterized by the voice’s opening leap and the piano’s subsequent sounding of the “ideal” pitch G; and second, the de-emphasis of scale-degree 1 near the end of the song.

That which cannot be attained is the idealism of youth; this idealism is represented poetically by an ideal view of nature and is represented musically by the relationship between the voice and the piano. This view explains the persistent dissonance between the voice and the piano’s right-hand part: the voice wants to join the piano’s youthful idealism, but it can only experience this idealism vicariously in the rare moments where it is able to join or rise above the piano’s uppermost part.

The idealism of youth is also represented musically by avoidance of closure at the end of the song. Scale-degree 7 consistently avoids ascending to scale-degree, and the insertion of buoyant raised scale-degree 2 near the end of the song keeps the piano part from descending to scale-degree 1. The equivocal balance on scale-degree 3 represents the protagonist’s resigned contentment to remain in a dream world.

Schoenberg’s “Lockung”: Schwebende Tonalität and the Great Escape

Cynthia I. Gonzales (Texas State University–San Marcos)

Arnold Schoenberg twice selected “Lockung,” op. 6, no. 7 (1905), to model the notion of schwebende Tonalität (“suspended tonality”). In Theory of Harmony (1911), he declared that the song “expresses Eß major tonality without once in the course of the piece giving an Eß major triad in such a way that one could regard it as a pure tonic.” In Structural Functions (completed 1948), he stated “that the tonic, Eß, does not appear throughout the whole piece.” In spite of Schoenberg’s protestations, I identify a true dominant-tonic progression in mm. 48–50. This presentation examines the harmonic syntax created by Schwebende tonalität and the voice leading revealed through Schenkerian analysis. These two analytical approaches provide a close reading of “Lockung” that uncover sophisticated text-music relationships. Whereas analyses by Allen Forte and Bryan Simms omit reference to the lyrics, the poem is the cornerstone of my analysis.

Like Severine Neff, I argue that the three-stanza poem describes a seductive chase in which the narrator pursues another character. The dominant-tonic progression in E-flat major (mm. 48–50) signifies the moment of capture. Prior to this, numerous V⁷/E-flat decidedly lead away from tonic or precede a flurry of chromatic sixteenths that are harmonically ambiguous. Regardless, thwarted dominants prolong the chase, whereas V–I ends it. “Lockung” concludes with the narrator’s victory boast: “Mein bist du, mein!” Text-music relationships, however, will expose that his celebratory braggadocio is specious.

Fauré and the Art of the Sequence in La Chanson d’Ève

Clare Sher Ling Eng, Yale University

Recent scholarship on the sequence has focused on: (1) the history of its use and theory, and (2) its classification. While there has been disagreement over definition, terminology, and whether it is a harmonic or melodic phenomenon, the literature has consistently affirmed that the “life cycle” of the sequence extended from the 17th to the late-19th century, between Corelli and Wagner. We are told that sequences ceased to be used as musical aesthetics came to disfavor repetition. I challenge this chapter in the history of the sequence by examining the extensive and varied use of repetition and sequencing in Fauré’s La Chanson d’Ève, op. 95. Through analysis of different passages, I demonstrate the multiplicity of roles repetition and sequencing can perform within a post-common-practice tonal work. I also show how some passages can be understood as “noisy” sequences that illustrate the development of the technique and the importance of the sequence model in musical unfolding and process.

Three aspects are highlighted in the analyses: (1) music-text relationships, (2) structural voice leading, and (3) interaction between sequences and harmonic rhythm. I suggest that, contrary to popular belief, the art of sequencing did not disappear from tonal music after Wagner; rather, it was developed in new and expressive ways. More generally, I urge a reassessment of our current view of turn-of-the-century musical aesthetics, and a consideration of the extent to which we have allowed a handful of didactic texts to speak for what was considered musically beautiful at that time.

11:00–12:30 Minimalism

Metric Dissonance and Form in Steve Reich’s Different Trains

Paul Sherrill (Yale University)

Rhythm, a formal determinant in Steve Reich’s early music (Cohn 1992, Roeder 2003), plays a similar role in his 1988 Different Trains for string quartet and tape. Grouping and displacement dissonance (Krebs 1999) are the primary structural forces of each subsection of the piece’s first movement, with a general progression from grouping to displacement across the core of the movement. The setting of “one of the fastest trains” exemplifies the complex hemiolas described in Cohn 2001 and stimulates an extension of his two-dimensional “ski-hill graph” into a third dimension, as its span is the product of three distinct primes (2, 3, and 5). The extended ski-hill graph helps visualize the levels of conflict embodied by the dissonance: eighth versus dotted eighth, quarter and half versus five dotted eighths, etc. It also captures how the grouping dissonance determines the section’s large-scale proportions. A superparticular ratio between the lengths of the two musical cycles results in an incremental divergence that ultimately realigns, marking the end of the section.

Musical Minimalism in the Twenty-First Century: Marc Mellits’s

Etude No. 2: Defensive Chili

Daniel Goldberg, Carleton College

As a protégé of Steve Reich, emerging composer Marc Mellits would seem to be among the heirs apparent of the minimalist movement in American music. Indeed, the influence of composers like Reich and Glass is instantly recognizable in the repetitive, shifting motivic patterns that characterize much of Mellits’s work. Yet Mellits does not merely reproduce classic minimalist styles and procedures, and his comments about the compositional process reveal an awareness of musical thought from long before the 1960s.

An analysis of the recent piano piece Etude No. 2: Defensive Chili exemplifies Mellits’s use of a minimalist musical palette, constructing a cyclical process of motivic transformation that originates from a single “seed.” Consistent with Timothy Johnson’s argument that composers have mostly moved beyond the aesthetic and style categories that characterized the founding impetus of minimalism, the Etude employs minimalism primarily as a compositional technique. Furthermore, Mellits’s statements about his method of composition echo ideas expressed by earlier twentieth-century composers, such as Stravinsky’s emphasis on self-imposed limitations and Schoenberg’s concepts of the “emancipation of the dissonance” and motivically generated organic unity. In fact, aspects of minimalist technique in Etude No. 2 can be understood in terms of Schoenbergian formal principles like the Grundgestalt and developing variation. Not only does this cognizance of historical compositional approaches facilitate Mellits’s creative process, but it also demonstrates how contemporary music with strong elements of minimalism relates to the longstanding tradition of Western art music.

Resulting Patterns, Palimpsests, and “Pointing Out” the Role of the Listener

in Reich’s Drumming

Philip Duker, University of Michigan

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

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

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

11:00-12:30 Harmony and Modality in Pop-rock Music

Harmonic Oscillation in Björk’s “Triumph of a Heart” and “Who Is It”

Victoria Malawey, Kenyon College

Drawing upon theories of Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, William Echard, and others, this paper examines harmonic oscillation in “Triumph of a Heart” and “Who Is It” from Björk Gu∂mundsdóttir’s 2004 all-vocal album Medúlla. Harmonic oscillation refers to the alternation of two or more harmonies.

If listeners attend to hierarchical chord relationships between oscillating harmonies, they may perceive tonal effects involving “repose” (tonic) and “departure” (non-tonic). “Triumph of a Heart” offers two models of oscillation: (1) “repose-departure” in the verses, where the ending sonority gives rise to the repetition of the oscillating event, and (2) “departure-repose” in the choruses, which suggests tonal closure at the conclusion of each repetition and each chorus as a whole. In contrast to these models, which imply hierarchy, listeners may attend to the continual, open-ended qualities of oscillation, which engage a cyclic process rather than a single harmonic goal. Harmonic oscillation in “Who Is It” negates tonal hierarchy through re-harmonization and re-ordering of harmonies. Overarching harmonic fields occupy the song’s formal sections, giving rise to a larger-level oscillation between verses and choruses. Harmonic oscillation is an important strategy of repetition at all levels of construction in both songs, involving both chord-to-chord and section-to-section relationships.

Finally, this paper considers schemata used to describe oscillation given by William Echard and Tim Hughes. I offer an image schema for harmonic oscillation as an alternative to Echard’s model. I combine Hughes’s “wave” and “staircase” models to approach oscillation, which supports the narrative depicted in the music video for “Triumph of a Heart.”

Modal Ambiguity and the Hybrid Mode in the Music of Gryphon

Russell A. Kahmann, University of Kentucky

During the time following the British and American folk revivals (c. 1955–1975) and at the height of the progressive rock movement (early and mid-1970s), Gryphon entered the musical scene with its self-titled debut album, Gryphon (1973). The freshman album contained folk songs and arrangements of traditional tunes that highlight the early music and English folk influences of the founding band members. From these and other influences, Gryphon gained a familiarity with modalities beyond the basic major/minor tonal system.

The focus of this presentation is an analysis of the modal ambiguity present in certain folk-inspired sections of Gryphon’s music taken from the band’s first four albums (1973–1975) as transcribed by the author. Much of this modal ambiguity can be explained by what Edward Macan refers to as a hybrid mode. This hybrid mode is essentially a major mode that contains a lowered seventh and alternately raised and lowered third and sixth degrees. While several of these alterations are also used in the blues scale (which progressive rock bands frequently drew upon) the hybrid mode more fully describes the alterations taking place. The use of the hybrid mode is also found to be a result of an amalgam of the most commonly used British folksong modalities.

Pentatonic and Modal Systems in Rock Music

Nicole Biamonte, University of Iowa

Harmonic systems comprising only or primarily major triads are readily found in rock music. In his article “Making Sense of Rock’s Tonal Systems” (Music Theory Online 10/4, 2004), Walter Everett identified a common scheme, original to rock music, consisting of a major triad built on each degree of a minor pentatonic scale. This system derives most immediately from the parallel barre chords idiomatic to the guitar, and less directly from the limited possibilities for diatonic tertian harmony inherent in the pentatonic scale, which only allows for two diatonic triads. To Everett’s definition can be added that in practice, the tonic triad may be either major or minor and may be assigned to any degree of the pentatonic scale, resulting in five possible rotations. The most commonly used triadic pentatonic modes are the first (minor pentatonic), third, and fourth rotations, all of which allow for double-plagal progressions, reflecting the subdominant bias of much blues-based rock, as well as subtonic cadences, a standard convention in modal or modally-inflected rock and heavy metal. More rarely, hexatonic or heptatonic scales serve as the basis of major-triad systems. Diatonic modality (either hexatonic or heptatonic) is far more typical, especially the Aeolian, Dorian, and Mixolydian modes, which have long traditions of folk harmonizations and, to a lesser degree, Phrygian in heavy metal. Lydian and Locrian, which do not allow subtonic cadences, are generally employed in purely melodic structures such as unison textures or octave doublings.

2:00–4:00 Sonata Theory

S-based tonic returns: A Schenkerian and Rotational Study

Brian D. Hoffman, University of Cincinnati, College-Conservatory of Music

From a thematic and formal standpoint, the following three sonata types are substantially different: Hepokoski and Darcy’s Type-2 sonatas (i.e., binary sonatas in which the end of the development and return of the P theme are overwritten by a transition and S theme), “reversed recapitulations” (in which the primary theme does not return until after a recapitulatory PAC in tonic), and sonatas with subdominant recapitulations. Although the current literature engages these formal types in terms of the unique analytic challenges they pose, an important feature common to all three types has not been explicitly discussed: in each case, the secondary theme is responsible for re-initiating the tonic key area following developmental material. This similarity raises three important questions: First, regarding these formal types, what unique insights are provided by Schenkerian analysis and Hepokoski and Darcy’s rotational scheme? Second, in what ways do textural and melodic aspects of the secondary theme, itself, affect the analyst’s interpretation of the structural return to tonic? And third, how might a listening strategy be profitably informed by a combination of Schenkerian and rotational insights, instead of bearing the influence of just one or the other? In this essay I address these questions through a series of analyses by myself and others that illustrate both local and larger-scale structural concerns. While the formal types discussed in this paper are placed in separate categories by Hepokoski and Darcy, they can be alternately grouped from a Schenkerian point of view.

Schubert’s Expansive Sonata Forms: The Trio in E-flat, Op. 100 as Case Study

Timothy Best, Indiana University

Schubert’s three-key expositions are enormous regions of tonal and thematic tension. In Elements of Sonata Theory, Hepokoski and Darcy propose the Trimodular Block (TMB), a type of S area complication and “strategy for enriching and extending mid-expositional space,” as a precedent for such expositions (2006:170–177). In this paper I will examine the first movement of Schubert’s Trio in E-flat major, op. 100, a work of Eroica-like proportions with a secondary zone of 141 bars. Using the general principles of the TMB to examine the harmonic and cadential structure of the movement, my analysis will problematize central issues of the model and propose some extensions to its principles, which can account for repeated and pronounced points of non-tonic articulation involving both deferment and arrival. At the crux of the TMB concept is the occurrence of two medial caesuras (MC), implying two separate launches of pre-EEC themes. In op. 100, this results in an enormous expansion of the S area. The story of this expansion is one of attempting to find a sense of balance and closure on the dominant after the harmonic digression after MC1. My multi-modular analysis will attempt to explain the organization of the exposition’s subsequent closural efforts and interpret their effect on the movement as a whole. This will illuminate strategies of continuity and closure common to the expanded sonata-form works of Schubert and other nineteenth-century composers, offering new possibilities for interpreting the various trajectories, which contribute to the dramatic tension of these works.

Sonata Form and Tonal Structure in the First Movement of Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony

David A. Byrne, University of Cincinnati, College-Conservatory of Music

Opinions on the relationship between form and content in the symphonies of Anton Bruckner have varied widely. Most notably, Bruckner’s student Heinrich Schenker believed that for his teacher, “the art of prolongation was no longer attainable.” Nonetheless, I contend that as Bruckner’s first movements consistently display the generic features of sonata form, the Schenkerian model provides a valid and useful basis for studying the relationship between thematic and tonal structure in those movements. From this perspective, this paper will examine the first movement of the Fifth Symphony, of which there are few detailed studies in the published literature. Though the movement’s thematic surface is at times discontinuous, a Schenkerian view of its linear trajectory can explain its unorthodox but ultimately logical and coherent tonal scheme. The analysis will focus on a small number of crucial issues: the replication of a foreground motive from the introduction at various structural levels, including the background; the unusual key and disconnected nature of the exposition’s second theme; the ramifications of the exposition’s delay of the structural dominant; the non-tonic recapitulation of Themes II and III; the achievement of the final tonic in the coda. A Schenkerian view of the movement confirms several of Warren Darcy’s concepts of Brucknerian sonata form: rotation, tonal alienation, the non-resolving recapitulation, and the coda as telos. I hope to demonstrate how different analytical approaches—in this case, Schenker and sonata theory—can complement and largely corroborate each other, providing a multifaceted view of a majestic and comparatively little-known movement.

Testing the Limits of Sonata Theory: Poulenc’s Sonata for Horn,

Trumpet and Trombone (1922)

Kevin Swinden, Wilfrid Laurier University

In this paper, I build a case to understand the first movement of Poulenc’s Sonata for Horn, Trumpet and Trombone, if not in sonata form then at least in dialogue with it—a finding other commentators have been unwilling to consider. The methodology embraces Hepokoski and Darcy’s rhetorical understanding of the Sonata as presented in Elements of Sonata Theory and uses Schenkerian methods to support and explain the tonal process. In sympathy with Elements, I construct a hermeneutic reading of a generic human action to accompany the dramatic form and place this against the backdrop of Jean Cocteau’s guiding principles for Les Six—the collective in its short-lived heyday in 1922 with Poulenc as one of its most ardent champions. I conclude that anxiety over the moniker “sonata form” should neither control nor inhibit our thinking about music of this sort; that it is far more interesting and compelling to consider how the movement engages and comments upon the conventions of sonata form rather than to worry about a definitive classification.

3:00–4:00 Opera

Reflexive Narrative and Social Commentary in Lukas Foss’s Introductions and Good-Byes

Elizabeth Lena Smith, Indianapolis, IN

Many traditional analytical methods readily explicate opera’s musical aspect, but fail to incorporate it with the text and drama. Lukas Foss’s (b. 1922) Introductions and Good-Byes provides a unique opportunity for integrated analysis as it is interpreted as an operatic commentary on society’s elite within the social systems of the mid-twentieth century. More than an account of a specific cocktail party, a critical approach to reflexivity casts this opera as an examination of the formal etiquette within the elite social setting. Foss draws the musical constructions of the opera from a reflexive narrative model. Taking the basic dramatic structure of Gian Carlo Menotti’s libretto, a crescendo and decrescendo, Foss adapts this configuration into a double neighbor model represented both melodically and harmonically. Repetitions of this narrative pattern occur at the foreground, middleground, and background levels of the musical structure shaping the formal design, tonal areas (including transpositions), and melodic contours. Through Foss and Menotti’s artistic ingenuity, music and text come together in a formal plan that creates a cohesive and dynamic operatic performance, with critical commentary on the underlying themes of social etiquette and elitism—the basis, of which, is little more than a list of names.

The Gesamtkunstwerk Redefined: Mapping Audio and Visual Media in

Schoenberg’s Die glückliche Hand

Sarah Louden, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Past analyses that consider the synthesis of stage media in Schoenberg’s opera Die glückliche Hand have tended to compare the relationships between media to Wagner’s 1840s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk. In my paper, I submit that this comparison is not entirely appropriate. Wagner’s notion of the “total work of art” suggested a complete duplication or parallelism between media. However, I argue that what is most revolutionary about Schoenberg’s opera is not the duplication, but rather the complex polyphony that exists between and within the elements of stage media. This paper will explore Schoenberg’s notion of “making music with the media of stage” and demonstrate how the composer used these inter-media relationships to emphasize narrative drama and structure within his opera. This will be accomplished in the paper first by developing a methodology that relates elements and changes in stage media within a single system based upon function and context. This system will then be applied to the “color crescendo” excerpt in the third scene of Die glückliche Hand as a demonstration of one way in which this nineteenth-century concept was transformed into something entirely more intricate and powerful in Schoenberg’s 1913 opera.

4:15–5:15 Aural-Skills Pedagogy

The Use of Caplin/Schoenberg Thematic Prototypes as Vehicles for a Stylistically Sound Study of Melody in an Aural Skills Curriculum

Michael Oravitz, Ball State University

This presentation illustrates various benefits of employing Arnold Schoenberg’s specific notions of “period” and “sentence” thematic structures in melodic dictation activities within an aural-skills curriculum. Use of Schoenberg’s models for Classical themes within aural-skills curricula is by no means novel. Deborah Rifkin and Diane Urista have suggested real-time composition activity aural-skills “games” around these models, specifically around the sentence structure. William Marvin incorporates study of these models in his Eastman aural-skills curriculum. I have infused them extensively into my aural-skills curriculum at Ball State.

William Caplin’s moderately recent (1998) text Classical Form has done much to clarify Schoenberg’s seminal ideas on thematic structure. Noteworthy is Caplin’s clarification of Schoenberg’s phrase-component lexicon by the consistent use of the terms “basic idea” and “contrasting idea” to describe smaller two-bar intra-phrase components within the larger prototypical four-bar phrase structures.

These two-bar components—which assemble in variant ways to form or partially form either periods, sentences or hybrids of the two—are infused with motivic, harmonic and linear conventions that may be effectively internalized by the student in a melodic-dictation/melody-study context. These conventions may also be conjoined with a study of the components’ melodic-structure “schemata” (especially in sentence structures), loosely in the spirit of Robert Gjerdingen. In so doing, an ideal study/dictation-activity emerges that fosters, within the student, a stylistic, grammatical intimacy with the inner workings of motivic/thematic structures and phrase designs while also creating an environment where the student learns to hear linear, harmonic and cadential facets of the melodies at hand.

Sight Singing Anthology as Database:

Developing a Trait-Based Search Tool for Aural Skills Instruction

Gary S. Karpinski, University of Massachusetts Amherst & Richard Kram, Tyco Telecommunications

This paper examines the development of software that treats a newly-published sight-singing anthology as a database from which instructors can select excerpts based on dozens of pedagogically significant criteria. The impetus for this project came from the observation that many aural-skills instructors search various sight-singing books looking for excerpts to meet their curricula by leafing through these volumes and visually scrutinizing the pages. For example, one curriculum might begin with stepwise materials while introducing both major and minor modes and both simple and compound meters during the first few class meetings, whereas another curriculum might remain restricted to the major mode and simple meters for weeks but introduce skips to scale-degrees 1, 3, and 5 during the first day. As curricula progress, many more such criteria come into play, including clef, key signature, tonic, mode, melodic shape, range, scale degrees, harmony, meter, and rhythm. Performing manual searches to meet these needs is inefficient and often frustrating.

We detail the conception and implementation of new software that automates and systematizes this search process, allowing instructors to pinpoint excerpts from music literature that meet many specific criteria. In this way, an anthology of over 1,200 excerpts from music literature becomes a repository from which teachers can extract appropriate musical passages to illustrate specific musical features, drill particular musical skills, and serve as level-appropriate material for singing at sight. We describe the pedagogical principles that guided the design of this software, and we explain the software engineering used to create it.

4:15–5:15 RENAISSANCE MUSIC

Reverse-Engineering the Monody: Madrigal Recomposition as Music Analysis

Christopher Brody, Yale University

Inspired by Monteverdi’s dual-version “Lamento d’Arianna,” which exists as both monody (the piece’s original version) and five-voice madrigal with continuo (from his Sesto libro de madrigali of 1614), this paper—part analytical study, part methodological experiment—investigates the conceptual and structural connections between the genres of monody and madrigal in early 17th-century Italy. While examples of the reworking of solo monodies into polyphonic madrigals are extant, this paper investigates some aspects of well-formedness in the monody genre by conjecturally reversing the process: “tracing a path” through polyphonic madrigals to find cadential voice-leading suitable for a solo monody within the multi-voice structure. Analyses of works in both genres by Monteverdi, Sigismondo D’India, and Giulio Caccini/Pietro Maria Marsolo aid in the formulation of some preference rules for doing so. The main musical example under discussion is my own reconstruction of a hypothetical monody expressing a structural melodic line for Monteverdi’s well-known five-voice madrigal “Cruda Amarilli” (from the Quinto libro de madrigali, 1605). Insofar as this recomposition succeeds as a piece of music in the monody genre, it tends to emphasize the connections between monody and madrigal. Conversely, in its shortcomings as a plausible early 17th–century monody, it points toward the disjuncture between the two genres and toward some conclusions about musical features unique to each.

A Preliminary Inquiry into Sixteenth-Century “Modality” in Selected Works by Josquin Kyle Adams, Indiana University

This paper will begin with the assumption that there are certain musical features that lend coherence to sixteenth-century works and distinguish those works from both earlier and later styles of music, and the assertion that “modal” can be a useful term to describe music with those features. I will review the attempts that other scholars have made to define “modality” in earlier music and propose a different approach aimed at determining the structure underlying works that could legitimately be termed “modal.”

My approach will consist of the creation of an “imaginary cantus firmus,” a hypothetical bass line whose tones provide consonant support for all of the tones in a polyphonic complex for the longest possible time span. Following an outline of the criteria for determining the imaginary cantus firmus, I will analyze selected works of Josquin to show how the cantus firmus reflects certain essential characteristics of the work’s mode. I will also propose that the imaginary cantus firmus can illuminate some of the characteristics unique to many sixteenth-century works.

Saturday, May 17

9:00–10:00 Text-Music Relations

Ravel’s “Song Without Words”: Basque Poetry and the Idea of Memory in the Piano Trio Sigrun B. Heinzelmann, Oberlin College Conservatory

Previous authors have ascribed the “Basque flavor” of Ravel’s Piano Trio to the zortziko rhythms in the first and fourth movements. However, the first movement’s primary theme is also indebted to the zortziko as a sung poetic form, following the syllabic and verse structure of the zortziko txikia: seven notes per measure correspond to seven syllables per line, and eight measures of the repeated theme correspond to eight lines of the poetic form. This may explain why Ravel expanded the more typical 5/8 zortziko meter to 8/8 (3+2+3). The theme also shares melodic features with 19th-century zortziko txikia tunes (stepwise motion and the Dorian mode found in the Lapurdi province near Saint-Jean-de-Luz where Ravel composed the Trio).

As the Basque topos invokes an idealized heritage (Ravel’s mother was Basque), my hermeneutic interpretation centers upon the idea of memory. Playing with historical models, Ravel’s double-rotational sonata form turns the harmonic conventions of a classical minor-mode sonata model upside down—the exposition’s secondary theme sounds in the tonic key, the movement’s ESC and coda in the relative major. While in the classical paradigm the relative major at the end of the exposition looks forward to a parallel-major ending, the Trio’s double-tonic complex (a/C) looks back: when the coda recalls the zortziko in C major, it sounds from afar (lontain). The first movement’s tonal and thematic implications for the Trio’s four-movement cycle point to d’Indy’s concept of the sonate cyclique.

Hungarian Text-Setting in the Choral Music of Bartók and Kodály

Sara Bakker, Indiana University

As friends, composers and fellow folksong collectors, Béla Bartók and Zoltan Kodály dominated the New Music scene in Hungary in the first half of the twentieth century, together leaving a legacy of notable orchestral, chamber, and solo pieces. In their choral music, both also addressed the special challenges of setting Hungarian text to music. How does the beginning-accented character of Hungarian words translate to melody? How should the extended duration of certain vowels and consonant combinations be set to music? Are the special intonational patterns for long words and questions mimicked in melodic writing?

This paper compares instances of syntactic text setting in two-part songs for children by each composer, concentrating on the relationship between Hungarian speech patterns and the composers’ use of pitch and rhythm to approximate them. I draw from Bartók’s Twenty-seven Two- and Three-Part Choruses (1937) and Kodály’s Angel Garden (1937), both of which are original settings of folk texts. For each aspect of text setting, I propose a Most Natural Setting (MNS)—a musical approximation of a word or phrase’s spoken counterpart—and compare it to the text’s actual setting, noting its Degree of Compliance (DC). I conclude by investigating the aesthetic underpinnings of melody imitating vocal intonation and discuss some of the documented goals each composer had in setting text.

10:15–12:15 Perception, Phenomenology, Philosophy

Auditory Stream Segregation and Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B-flat, D. 960

Ben Duane, Northwestern University

Auditory stream segregation is the perceptual grouping of sounds; that is, when we hear mixtures of sounds, our auditory systems segregate the sounds into their own auditory streams. Several authors have studied the role of stream segregation in music perception—e.g., McAdams and Bregman (1979), Wright and Bregman (1987), Huron (1991). These studies, however, limit themselves to either discussion of general compositional principles or statistical analysis of large musical corpora, and thus do not engage music on a measure-by-measure level. The present paper attempts to fill that gap by analyzing how stream segregation might affect one’s perception of the first movement of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B-flat, D. 960.

The paper has two main parts. In part 1, an analytic method is presented. The method originates from Bregman’s (1990) theory that the auditory system accomplishes stream segregation by using multiple heuristics in tandem, each of which attends to a different type of acoustic cue. Based on previous research, six of these heuristics are formalized and their effect on music perception is explained. The analytic method consists in comparing these heuristics to a piece (as it is notated).

In part 2, this method is used to analyze the first movement of Schubert’s Piano Sonata. It is shown that changes in texture—as documented by the six heuristics—parallel other musical gestures. These include: a hypermetric realignment, a difference between two modulations from a local I to its “ßvi,” and, the formal landmarks that signal the beginning of the exposition’s third theme.

Analytical Issues in Hugo Riemann’s System der musikalischen Rhythmik und Metrik Foregrounded by Brahms’s Intermezzo op. 116, no. 4 in E major

Jim Bungert, University of Wisconsin–Madison

In his System der musikalischen Rhythmik und Metrik (1903), Hugo Riemann posits a form of rhythmic analysis in which an idealized conceptual eight-bar phrase, that contains alternation between heavy and light beats, is adapted to tonal musical phrases. Via extensions, elisions, and other maneuvers, Riemann’s System is capable of taxonomically accounting for the vast majority of musical (symmetrical and problematic asymmetrical) phrases in the tonal repertoire, most illustrative examples of which stem from the First Viennese School and the decades flanking it.

But an examination of Brahms’s Intermezzo, op. 116, no. 4 in E major roils up several analytical issues within Riemann’s System. While not explicitly stated by Riemann himself, perceiving the alternation between light and heavy musical events implies, perhaps requires, a certain phenomenological retention. In other words, light events are only heard as light once the heavy events answer them. The opening gesture of this relatively new piece, along with other ambiguous portions of the Intermezzo, highlights a fairly obvious distinction inherent within the very notion of retention: retrospective interpretation, and retrospective reinterpretation. In the former, one does not immediately interpret the event—there is “not enough” information. In the latter, one interprets the event as it occurs, but changes their interpretation upon gaining subsequent musical information.

Much of this Intermezzo falls rather “uninterestingly” under particular Riemannian measure numbers, but by reflecting on possible interpretations of the less-compliant portions of Brahms’s piece, we gain critical insight into Riemann’s flexible and sensitive analytical system.

Music Analysis and Drastic Experience

Steven Rings, University of Chicago

In her much-discussed article “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Carolyn Abbate argues that music scholars should turn away from hermeneutics and analysis, which she classifies as “gnostic” forms of knowledge (after Jankélévitch), and focus instead on the “drastic” immediacies of music as experienced in performance. Theorists might wonder, however, about the privative “or” of Abbate’s title, for we often say that music analysis directly affects musical experience. Such claims suggest that, however gnostic it may appear on paper, analysis has a decidedly drastic aim in lived practice.

This paper probes that idea, exploring the relationship between gnostic reflection about music and our drastic experience of that music. A spoken talk is well suited to such a study, as it allows us to test the effect of discursive ideas in the music’s sonic presence. As test cases, we will focus on two familiar songs: Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” and—in honor of the conference’s popular music focus—Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” The discussion of “Gretchen” focuses on the opening phrase, a passage that responds well to reader-response methodologies borrowed from Stanley Fish. The discussion of “Like a Rolling Stone” explores interactions among details of prosody, phonetics, syntax, harmony, rhythm, and melody. We will test what happens to these fine-grained analytical observations in the face of a live performance of the Schubert and a video of Dylan’s show-closing performance of “Like a Rolling Stone” in Manchester on May 17, 1966, one of the most storied, and explosive, drastic moments in the history of rock and roll.

The Limits of Extremism: From a Subjective to Objective Ontology of the Musical Work

Emily J. Adamowicz, University of Western Ontario

In an extended discussion of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in his 1843 treatise Either/Or, Søren Kierkegaard becomes the first nineteenth-century aesthetician to posit the musical work. In so doing, he unknowingly creates a conflict between the contemporary conception of music as pure, unmediated subjectivity and the ontologically determined work-concept. Outlining the treatment of music in Kierkegaard’s aesthetic theory against the backdrop of his contemporaries reveals the ramifications of positing a determinate work in the absence of tools for describing specific musical materials. In this paper, I explore the limitations of the nineteenth-century subjective ontology to establish a precedent for the objective ontology that has come to dominate analytic theory since the later twentieth century. Difficulty has arisen from attempts to integrate aesthetic subjectivity into an ontology that cannot support associations of aesthetic meaning with musical structures. It is the contention of this paper that a paradigm shift is necessary for analytic theory to remain relevant in the face of problematic works that have surfaced in recent decades. One possible solution lies in the critical approach of British musicologist Alastair Williams who, following Adorno, conceives of the musical work as subjectivity mediated by construction. At the forefront of Williams’s aesthetic methodology is the need for music criticism to move beyond material functionalism in favor of “investigating the latent hermeneutic potential of material.” Employing this principle as a basis, I present an emerging trend in analytic theory to establish the meaning of musical structures through a combination of historiography and contextual analysis.

2:00-4:00 Irony and Metaphor

A Disconcerting Striving for Cheerfulness: Ambiguities, Failures, and Cover-ups in Shostakovich’s Sixth Quartet, mvt. 1

Denise Elshoff, The Ohio State University

Despite its cheerful exterior and Classical features, Sarah Reichardt (2003) and Judith Kuhn (2005) have demonstrated that Shostakovich’s Sixth Quartet is riddled with conflicts that ultimately prove irreconcilable. My analysis is concerned primarily with how the first movement acquires and escapes these conflicts and with the structural purposes and ramifications of tonal, formal, and cadential problems. I argue that the movement exploits common-practice tonal procedures to build harmonic and formal expectations, only to deny these expectations to clarify its contextual design and for the sake of comic irony. Deceptively simple, the movement asks to be heard in three perspectives: as bright and tuneful; as filled with structural failures and uncertainties; and as coherently organized by motivic networks. Although these interpretations are incompatible and thus cannot be heard at once, the ambiguous nature of the music allows us to freely choose and rotate between dissimilar, yet equally viable, interpretive modes.

Franz Schubert & the Etherealized Mechanical

Michael Vidmar-McEwen, Indiana University

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

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

Existential Irony in La Pasión según San Marcos by Osvaldo Golijov

Javier Clavere, College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati

In 2000 Helmuth Rilling, artistic director of the Bachakademie Stuttgart, commissioned the Passion 2000. The project was to be a commemorative homage of the 250th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach’s death, by commissioning four musical settings of the Passion narrative. Osvaldo Golijov received the commission of the narrative of the Gospel of Mark, drawing its sources from the corpus of Latin American popular music. An analysis under the scope of musical semiotics reveals incongruity between the text and its musical representation. This incongruity gives rise to ironic and satiric ethos, providing the foundation for my analysis of parody and existential irony in musical expression.

Three movements will be under analytical scrutiny. First, a popular Afro-Cuban Son Montuno, Judas y El Cordero Pascual. The movement encapsulates Judas Iscariot’s treason scene at the Last Supper. The analysis will compare and contrast the many levels of ambiguities between the popular Cuban genre, Son Montuno, and the narrative scene. The second movement in the analysis is Eucaristía and Demos Gracias al Señor. This stylization and allusion to Gregorian chant proceeds into the third movement, a theme and variation set to a popular protest song’s theme Todavia Cantamos, composed and performed by Victor Heredia during the 80s in Argentina.

Guitar Solo as Trope in Sonic Youth’s “Pacific Coast Highway”

David Heetderks, University of Michigan

Alternative bands from the 1980s often viewed previous incarnations of rock as raw fodder to be re-created and juxtaposed. This presentation will use the theory of tropes, described by Robert Hatten, to describe how these stylistic reformulations suggest musical meaning. Tropes occur when a passage severely violates stylistic expectation, cueing listeners to synthesize an emergent meaning through either combination or negation of its associated musical concepts. These two processes have a verbal analogy in metaphor and irony.

In their album Sister, from 1987, Sonic Youth turned to more traditional song structures in comparison with their earlier work. This provided a vocabulary of stylistic and formal expectations that could be suggested, thwarted, and re-integrated. The song “Pacific Coast Highway,” in which text and musical setting contradict each other, provides a case study.

Much of Sonic Youth’s work alternately depicts and inverts female gender roles constructed by popular culture and advertising. This wider context provides a guiding framework for interpreting the text, in which a female appropriates the voice of a male predator to mock him. The irony is inflated in the extended guitar solo, which thwarts melodic catharsis, suggesting a denial of transcendence and critical view of sexual desire.

This presentation suggests ways in which cryptic lyrical content can nonetheless take formidable expressive power through its musical setting. It will also lead to a deeper appreciation of a highly creative band that had a far-reaching influence in the following decade.