Webmaster: David Loberg Code, School of Music,
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, 49008.
Email: code@wmich.edu
http://www.wmich.edu/mus-theo/mtmw/mtmw99/99_abs_fam.html
Revised: 28.Apr.99
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Leslie David Blasius
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Perhaps the most charged encounter between the "new" musicology and music theory is to be found in Richard Taruskin's work on Stravinsky. Taruskin first endows the notion of "octatonicism" with a nineteenth- century genealogy; then exposes the extent of Stravinsky's appropriation of folk material in the Rite; and finally, in a wonderfully stunning indictment, details the implicit collusion of the theoretical community in Stravinsky's suppression of the evidence of this appropriation (a suppression intended by Stravinsky to conceal a particularly shabby ideology) through its mythic celebration of the Rite a revolutionary act, an utterance sui generis which serves reciprocally to legitimize a formalist abdication of the public responsibilities of scholarship. In his haste to assemble this indictment, though, Taruskin overlooks some of the more compelling implications of his own evidence, and the possibility of a more telling critique. Specifically, he passes too quickly from Stravinsky's ethnography to his ethnology, and while condemning theory's reification of "the music itself" is curiously deaf to the ironies embodied in this phrase. Given the evidence of Stravinsky as transcriber, we must assume that the resistances encountered in representing an oral music--a performance sui juris--in a notation grounded in all manner of theoretical biases could but be compositionally fascinating; and moreover, that these resistances (and the way in which they color the notion of "the music itself") need not lend themselves only to local exploitation but more importantly to a general reconception of the nineteenth-century dialectic of phenomenal and nominal musics.
Eleanor F. Trawick
Ball State University
Although Francis Poulenc is best known today for his lighter
compositions, he remained interested throughout his life in the works of theEuropean avant-garde, met personally with Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern,
and greatly admired their music. In his own later music, especially vocal
works, Poulenc writes extended passages that are only distantly reminiscent of
tonality or that are frankly atonal. Yet he moves with ease between these non-
tonal sections and others with clear key centers and functional harmonic
relations. These pieces challenge the analyst to develop tools to investigate
and explain the integration of tonal and non-tonal materials in a single
composition.
Three features help to account for the coherence of these eclectic works.
Interval-class saturation (with tritones, whole steps, or other intervals)
ensures that even segments with very different harmonic bases will have a
similar sound. Poulenc also employs symmetrical modes or chords; their
symmetry at times renders them static and non-functional, but at other times
their relation to diatonic, functional materials is highlighted. And relations of
literal or abstract inclusion are particularly important in linking conventional
tonal sections and more experimental harmonies.
The intersections of tonal and non-tonal materials in Poulenc's music,
and the concepts proposed for an analysis that will bridge the two, are
suggestive as well for the analysis of similarly eclectic music of Poulenc's
contemporaries.
Friday, 14 May, 10:00 - 11:00 a.m.
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Gregory J. Marion
Penn State University
Assessing the relationship between space and time proves fruitful
when treating Debussy's music, as it affords a means of contextualizing
Debussy's novel orientation toward the interaction of surface, middleground,
and background events-an orientation that differs profoundly from the
assumed norm for tonal pieces; and yet the principle of organizational control
is never lacking in Debussy's music, even if his approach to linearity is
antipodal to that of his predecessors.
With "Du ríve" from Proses lyriques as test site, the study draws upon
diverse theories, including Mikhail Bakhtin's conception of the chronotope
in the novel, Jonathan Kramer's notion of multiply-directed time as an
organizational principle in music, and David Greene's premise thatcompositions reveal distinct orientations toward temporality. Aspects of
these theories help to account for Debussy's particular take on the
compositional relationship between past, present, and future events.
A chief means of conveying continuity at the foreground in Debussy's
music results from the gradual transformation from one event to another;
ironically, however, the procedure precipitates a melding together of present
and future that infuses the moment-to-moment procession of the work with
something of a timeless quality. At deeper levels of the structure, however,
causal mechanisms and freely-taken decisions belie the sense of atemporality
stemming from a surface replete with rapid changes of musical vocabularies.
At levels removed from the surface, then, the concept of linearity is
rearticulated, and as a result, time-to use Kramer's term-becomes multiply-
directed.
Mark Janello
University of Michigan
The author views late works of Morton Feldman through the window of the metaphor 'living on the edge.' Analysis of the 1983 work Clarinet and String Quartet shows how fleeting hints of process, ordering and pattern engage the listener's perception at the threshold of intelligibility, and create a narrow 'zone of possibility' in which much of the activity of the piece takes place. In many ways the music adheres to the dictum formulated by Cage, Feldman, and their associates of the early 1950's: that sounds were to be heard 'as sounds themselves.' However, the author shows how the construction and presentation of material both validates and questions this idea.
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Friday, 14 May, 11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
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David Loberg Code
Western Michigan University
Paul S. Carter
Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati
Steely Dan is the name of a popular recording group whose musical
style is often called jazz-rock fusion. Their music's originality lies largely in
the way harmonies are constructed within what I call the "harmonic strata," a
method of voicing chords in two tiers: a treble register triad or seventh chord
(upper tier) above a bass note (lower tier), where this bass note is different
from the root of the upper-tier triad. These voicings, used in succession, are
specific to the music of Steely Dan. These successions often form larger spans
of music, even entire songs bearing a distinctive sound and functionality of
harmony.
"Polychord" is sometimes used in jazz and pop theory to describe these
two-tiered voicings, but more appropriate is the term "slash chord," which
gets its name from the line drawn between chord symbols (or their roots).
The term slash chord also describes three other harmonic possibilities: 1)
inversions, 2) extended tertian harmonies, and 3) chords with an added bass;
it is these that more often than the others comprise the voicings of Steely
Dan.
Assessing the originality of Steely Dan's music requires that we classify
its individual slash chords according to structure, and that we study themethod by which Steely Dan constructs progressions of slash chords in terms
of the ordering of slash-chord types and of the voice leading among the strata.
The products of these analyses may then be used to demonstrate how slash
chord progressions distinguish the sound and structure of Steely Dan's
harmony, on the level of the phrase, the section, and the song.