Music Theory Online最新文献

{"title":"Review of Jennifer Iverson, Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde (Oxford University Press, 2019)","authors":"M. Mendez","doi":"10.30535/MTO.26.3.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30535/MTO.26.3.15","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44918,"journal":{"name":"Music Theory Online","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49280939","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Music Theory for the “Weaker Sex”: Oliveria Prescott’s Columns for The Girl’s Own Paper","authors":"Rachel L. Lumsden","doi":"10.30535/MTO.26.3.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30535/MTO.26.3.4","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I examine a cluster of music theory essays by Oliveria Louisa Presco (1842–1917), which were published between 1886 and 1891 in The Girl’s Own Paper (TGOP), the most popular periodical for young women in Victorian England. Although li le known today, Presco sustained a vibrant musical career in London as a composer and teacher, and her articles on music theory regularly appeared in major periodicals such as The Musical World and TGOP. Presco ’s work for TGOP presents a rare opportunity to explore music theory that was not just wri en by a woman, but also intended for a genteel female audience in the Victorian era. Her articles include explanations of fundamental theoretical subjects (cadences, basic harmonic progressions) as well as short analyses of solo piano works by Beethoven and Mendelssohn. But these articles are also noteworthy for their discussions of more advanced theoretical topics (such as chromatic harmony), concepts that might seem surprising for a popular periodical for young ladies. Mainstream journalism is often devalued as a “less serious” form of intellectual discourse, but Presco ’s work complicates stereotypes of ignorant amateur female musicians and the so-called “private” sphere, and it demonstrates how print journalism could serve as a vital public platform for the circulation of music theory among young British women in the Victorian era. DOI: 10.30535/mto.26.3.4 Volume 26, Number 3, September 2020 Copyright © 2020 Society for Music Theory [1.1] If you’ve ever enjoyed the guilty pleasure of flipping through a popular magazine for young women from the 1980s, you’ll recall being bombarded by a bewildering gush of suggestions, guidance, and propaganda about what “womanhood” is supposed to be. Popular magazines like Seventeen or YM offer an unrelenting barrage of content that a empts to shape and influence young women: tips about clothing, makeup, and hair-styling; portraits of famous actors and hit-making musicians; and even advice on urgent day-to-day issues like “how to be the best kisser” or “how to be popular.” As a 1988 tagline from Seventeen claims, its pages are “where the girl ends and the woman begins.” [1.2] To the modern reader, it probably does not come as much of a surprise that these popular magazines do not include in-depth information about music theory and analysis. But young women’s periodicals published a century earlier, in the late nineteenth century, reflect a different perspective that prioritizes music as an important part of young women’s education and development. In the late 1880s, The Girl’s Own Paper (the most popular periodical for young women in England) ran a short series of articles on music theory and analysis by Oliveria Louisa Presco (1842–1917). Presco ’s work for The Girl’s Own Paper is significant for several reasons. As an early historical example of “public” music theory, her articles illustrate one of the primary rewards of public work in the humanities—the chance to ","PeriodicalId":44918,"journal":{"name":"Music Theory Online","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46126115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"(Per)forming Open Form: A Case Study with Earle Brown’s Novara","authors":"Drake Andersen","doi":"10.30535/MTO.26.3.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30535/MTO.26.3.1","url":null,"abstract":"Most accounts of Earle Brown’s open form compositions focus on the notated qualities of individual events in the score. However, the conductor’s role in ensuring continuity and formal coherence within a performance is rarely acknowledged. In this article, I analyze recordings of three performances of Brown conducting his composition Novara (1962), two with the Virtuoso Ensemble in 1966 and one with a group of Dutch musicians in 1974. The conductor’s interventions in each performance embody a range of strategies used to suggest structural function and organize the time of performance. The multiplicity of musical processes in play within—and between—performances in turn suggests a parallel with Jonathan Kramer’s concept of multiply-directed linear time. DOI: 10.30535/mto.26.3.1 Volume 26, Number 3, September 2020 Copyright © 2020 Society for Music Theory","PeriodicalId":44918,"journal":{"name":"Music Theory Online","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46845287","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Concept of Shi: Chinese Aesthetics and Happy Rain on a Spring Night (2004)","authors":"N. Rao","doi":"10.30535/MTO.26.3.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30535/MTO.26.3.11","url":null,"abstract":"The article brings a conceptual framework of Chinese aesthetics, music analysis, and theory developed in North America to bear on the analysis of Chen Yi’s chamber ensemble Happy Rain on a Spring Night (2004). As a framework to analyze the work (both the poem by Du Fu and the music composition), it proposes the concept of shi, which can be described as “dynamic configuration” or “the probability and propensity that drive the process.” The end of the article discusses issues related to culturally situated analysis. DOI: 10.30535/mto.26.3.0 Volume 26, Number 3, August 2020 Copyright © 2020 Society for Music Theory","PeriodicalId":44918,"journal":{"name":"Music Theory Online","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49064702","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Retrospective Time and the Subdominant Past","authors":"Kyle Hutchinson","doi":"10.30535/mto.26.2.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.26.2.6","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines analytic possibilities afforded by understanding exceptional uses of the subdominant as a hermeneutic signal of the past tense in contemporary Broadway megamusicals. While an emerging consensus in studies of pop music holds that the subdominant chord can comprise a variety of functions beyond its traditional predominant role, to suggest as much already betrays an approach that is steeped in the long shadow of common-practice tonality and the expectations that it entails. Rather than trying to develop a separate syntax from its common-practice antecedents, it is more fruitful to engage with common-practice perspectives in the analysis of certain styles of pop music. Through analysis of examples from Andrew Lloyd Webber'sSunset Boulevardand Boublil and Schönberg'sMiss Saigon, I argue that cases wherein the subdominant receives an unconventional (over-)emphasis might be better understood through the hermeneutics of tonal temporality, rather than through attempts to codify them as an entirely new syntax.","PeriodicalId":44918,"journal":{"name":"Music Theory Online","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48617690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Orchestral Tissue, Subordinate Arabesques, and Turning Inward in Maurice Ravel’s Boléro","authors":"G. Bhogal","doi":"10.30535/mto.26.2.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.26.2.2","url":null,"abstract":"In response to Maurice Ravel’s puzzling description of Boléro as “orchestral tissue without music,” this article explores how he privileges timbre over techniques traditionally associated with musical development. Even as I acknowledge longstanding perceptions of Boléro as a piece that is characterized by monotony and repetition, I show how Ravel relies on alternating decorative and arabesque melodies to highlight a parallel process of timbral variation. The role played by inward-turning subordinate arabesques is especially expressive given how they establish a timbrally competitive relationship with decorative themes, which escalates towards a moment of melodic disruption and formal collapse. Stylistic connections between Boléro and other contemporaneous works and idioms raise the question of whether, in the absence of music, timbral diversity allows Boléro to function as the orchestration treatise that Ravel failed to complete.","PeriodicalId":44918,"journal":{"name":"Music Theory Online","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43017540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Portmantonality and Babbitt’s Poetics ofDouble Entendre","authors":"Joshua Banks Mailman","doi":"10.30535/mto.26.2.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.26.2.9","url":null,"abstract":"This essay presents a theory of musical and verbal double entendre inspired by and applicable to the late-period music of Milton Babbi . Rather than assuming the appropriateness of any single method (which might tend toward singularity of meaning), a number of approaches are applied to three late works: primarily his Whirled Series (1987), and secondarily his Canonical Form (1983) and Gloss on ’Round Midnight (2001). These are interpreted through various kinds of analysis, not only serial, but also tonal (chordal and voice-leading), associational, pitch-permeational, and form-functional. Connections to Tin-Pan-Alley song lyrics, jazz improvisation, hermeneutics, and Gibsonian affordances are discussed in relation to these musical analyses. All this is done to infer and cultivate connections (represented as a conceptual integration networks) between Babbi ’s extratheoretic verbal expression and extra-dodecaphonic aspects of his music, connections that suggest an underlying poetics (a tacit motivational philosophy implicitly fueling his creativity) that provides pragmatic benefit to the artistic ambitions of diverse personal identities. DOI: 10.30535/mto.26.2.9 Volume 26, Number 2, June 2020 Copyright © 2020 Society for Music Theory","PeriodicalId":44918,"journal":{"name":"Music Theory Online","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42382927","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reimagining Historical Improvisation","authors":"Gilad Rabinovitch","doi":"10.30535/mto.26.2.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.26.2.11","url":null,"abstract":"Reimagining historical improvisation is a speculative pursuit: like any other aspect of historical performance practice, historical improvisations by living musicians create modern sounds (Taruskin 1995). However, historical notations, treatises, and accounts of performances provide substantial clues for reconstructing historical practices of improvisation (Gjerdingen 2007a; Levin 2009; Sanguinetti 2012; Guido 2017). Gjerdingen (2007a) highlights the role of phrase schemata in eighteenth-century music learning and creativity in composition, improvisation, or anywhere in between. Levin’s live improvisation in the style of Mozart at Cambridge University on October 29, 2012, captured on YouTube, serves as an analytical case study for the significance of conventional schemata in the musicianship of a living, elite-expert historical improviser. I reflect on Levin’s manipulations of schemata, allusions to the original pieces requested by the audience, as well as on interconnections between the various parts of his fantasy. Music analysis thus becomes here a reflection on improvisatory technique. The analysis also outlines the challenging listening horizons for audience members with significant experience in the style. Finally, our age of digital reproduction allows us to turn this ephemeral act of musical communication into an object for speculation, creating analytical “suggestions” for readers (Temperley 1999) or a listening guide for a historically-informed fantasy.","PeriodicalId":44918,"journal":{"name":"Music Theory Online","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47546617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Recapitulatory Compressions in Some Texted and Instrumental Works by Schubert","authors":"J. Guez","doi":"10.30535/mto.26.2.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.26.2.5","url":null,"abstract":"The thematic organization of musical reprises and recapitulations has not received as much attention as that of expositions. One reason for this is the assumption that recapitulations are simply retracings of thematic paths already plotted in the exposition, with their tonal profiles adjusted to remain in the tonic. The present article seeks to complexify this view by devoting analytic and interpretive attention to a handful of refrains, reprises, and recapitulations that feature deletions of some of their referential thematic material. My primary claims are, first, that such recapitulatory compressions afford feelings of temporal and perspectival distortion (such as “too soon” or “too close” or “too large”) to listeners and to virtual protagonists, and second, that they work in concert with aspects of the presented content of the movements at hand—text, topic, mode, and so on—to project complex and multifaceted musical narratives. Examples come from poetry, song, and instrumental music and include Goethe's “Erster Verlust” and Schubert's setting of it (D. 226); Müller's “Täuschung” and “Die Nebensonnen” and Schubert's settings of them (D. 911); and Schubert's Allegro in A minor for Four hands, “Lebensstürme,” D. 947.","PeriodicalId":44918,"journal":{"name":"Music Theory Online","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43427714","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Consonance, Dissonance, and Formal Proportions in Two Works by Sofia Gubaidulina","authors":"Noah Kahrs","doi":"10.30535/mto.26.2.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.26.2.7","url":null,"abstract":"Consonance and dissonance are frequently invoked in discussions of Gubaidulina’s music, particularly in terms of the composer’s intentional contrasts between timbres and her golden section-oriented formal planning. In this paper, I use the notion of dissonance to mediate between several competing theories of Gubaidulina’s music and theories of timbre more broadly. Certain passages in her Meditation on the Bach Chorale “Vor deinen Thron tret’ ich hiermit” (1993) are identified as dissonant based on her compositional theories and on sketch material from the Paul Sacher Stiftung, and on further examples drawn from her Am Rande des Abgrunds (2002). Broadly speaking, “dissonant” sounds are closer to white noise than “consonant” sounds, aligning with empirical studies of dissonance perception as well as with spectralist compositional theories. However, Gubaidulina’s music uses this extended notion of dissonance particularly musically; dissonances have specific structural roles in a work and resolve to consonances.","PeriodicalId":44918,"journal":{"name":"Music Theory Online","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46636462","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}