Music Theory Online最新文献

{"title":"The Functions of Continuous Processes in Contemporary Electronic Dance Music","authors":"Jeremy W. Smith","doi":"10.30535/mto.27.2.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.27.2.7","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses the functions of continuous processes in contemporary electronic dance music (EDM), providing an analytical framework for discussing their structural and aesthetic roles in this repertoire. Continuous processes are musical gestures with continuous changes to musical parameters, rather than discrete, “step-by-step” ones. Examples include pitch slides (glissandos), crescendos, fade ins, accelerandos, and filter sweeps.\u0000Continuous processes in this repertoire are created with “continuous controllers” such as sliders and knobs, or are programmed into tracks with “automation curves.” Functionally, continuous processes often provide sonic instructions for dancers. They can be used by creators at strategic times to provide ornamentation, orientation (often accompanied by intensification or de-intensification), or disorientation (usually in breakdown sections). This article adds to existing analytical scholarship by drawing attention to the many roles of continuous processes in EDM, and showing how they contribute to the emotional waves experienced when listening to this music.","PeriodicalId":44918,"journal":{"name":"Music Theory Online","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42923274","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":"Melody on the Threshold in Spectral Music","authors":"J. Donaldson","doi":"10.30535/mto.27.2.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.27.2.9","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the expressive and formal role of melody in spectral and “post-spectral” music. I propose that melody can function within a spectral aesthetic, expanding the project of relating unfamiliar musical parameters to “liquidate frozen categories” (Grisey 2008 [1982], 45). Accordingly, I show how melody can shift in and out of focus relative to other musical elements. I adopt Grisey’s use of the terms differential and liminal to describe relationships between two musical elements: differential refers to the process between distinct elements whereas liminal describes moments of ambiguity between two elements. I apply these principles to Grisey’s Prologue (1976), Vivier’s Zipangu (1977), Haas’s de terrae fine (2001), and Saariaho’s Sept Papillons (2000).","PeriodicalId":44918,"journal":{"name":"Music Theory Online","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47851441","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":"Rethinking Aural Skills Instruction through Cognitive Research","authors":"E. Marvin","doi":"10.30535/mto.27.2.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.27.2.4","url":null,"abstract":"This essay responds to three papers appearing in this issue that relate music-cognitive research to aural skills pedagogy. Gary S. Karpinski focuses on tonic inference as support for do-based minor solfège pedagogy. My discussion supports this position, with evidence from key-profile experiments and corpus analyses. Timothy Chenette proposes a perceptually based learning sequence for aural skills instruction. He sketches a model curriculum, to which I propose a staffing solution and offer a research-based challenge: the high-voice superiority principle. Finally, Sarah Gates considers what the cognitive sciences can tell us about auditory imagery. I offer classroom strategies that take advantage of motor-area activation in the brain.","PeriodicalId":44918,"journal":{"name":"Music Theory Online","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43198010","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":"Flexible Ostinati, Groove, and Formal Process in Craig Taborn’s Avenging Angel","authors":"Antares Boyle","doi":"10.30535/mto.27.2.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.27.2.6","url":null,"abstract":"Repetition in the music of pianist/composer Craig Taborn engenders diverse temporal experiences at both local and global scales. At the local level, distinctive repetitions that I term flexible ostinati share significant features with the cyclic materials often observed in groove-based musics: they comprise a repetitive, omnipresent stream within the overall texture, provide a rapid isochronous pulse, and imply higher-level metric levels. However, they differ from strict ostinati or the repetitions that Anne Danielsen (2006) terms “basic groove units” in their flexibility at the rhythmic/metric level of temporal experience. This flexibility manifests in two ways: in the material domain, flexible ostinati are often varied significantly across repetitions, while in the interpretive domain, they simultaneously suggest multiple possibilities for pulse, meter, or cyclic beginning/ending. Following Danielsen, who describes groove as emerging from interactions between sounding rhythm and a reference structure, I examine the potential reference structures (meter and cycle) suggested by Taborn’s flexible ostinati. These structures are never fixed, but instead must be constantly negotiated, resulting in engaging grooves that draw the listener into the music’s temporal matrix. I analyze three pieces from Taborn’s 2011 solo album, Avenging Angel, to demonstrate how, across longer stretches of time, diverse forms grow out of these ostinati: “The Broad Day King” layers a surface-level flexible ostinato against slower background cycles that gradually reveal themselves; “Avenging Angel” is structured by the juxtaposition of two contrasting ostinati; and a brief passage in “Neverland” features an elusive groove that dissolves almost as soon as it materializes.","PeriodicalId":44918,"journal":{"name":"Music Theory Online","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48316837","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":"Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Violin Phase and the Experience of Time, or Why Does Process Music Work?","authors":"Mariusz Kozak","doi":"10.30535/mto.27.2.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.27.2.11","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44918,"journal":{"name":"Music Theory Online","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138494588","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":"Developing Musical Imagery","authors":"Sarah Gates","doi":"10.30535/mto.27.2.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.27.2.3","url":null,"abstract":"Research into the development of musical imagery ability has remained stagnant in both the fields of aural skills pedagogy and cognitive science. This article integrates scholarship from both disciplines to provide a way forward for both the study and practice of imagery development. Analysis of North American pedagogical practices provides a foundation for the types and functions of activities used to affect imagery ability, while newly designed measurement techniques in the cognitive sciences are shown to have promising implications for assessing change in imagery ability over time. Following consideration of insights from both fields, this article consolidates them by developing a model of imagery development. Framed through the lens of expertise acquisition and skilled memory performance, this model has implications for approaches to imagery in the aural skills classroom and for empirical studies of imagery development in music cognition.","PeriodicalId":44918,"journal":{"name":"Music Theory Online","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48184027","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":"Reframing Generated Rhythms and the Metric Matrix as Projections of Higher-Dimensional Lattices in Scott Joplin’s Music","authors":"Joshua W. Hahn","doi":"10.30535/mto.27.2.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.27.2.10","url":null,"abstract":"Generated rhythms and the metric matrix can both be modelled by time-domain equivalents to projections of higher-dimensional lattices. Scott Joplin’s music is a case study for how these structures can illuminate both musical and philosophical aims. Musically, lattice projections show how Joplin creates a sense of multiple beat streams unfolding at once. Philosophically, these structures sonically reinforce a Du Boisian approach to understanding Joplin’s work.","PeriodicalId":44918,"journal":{"name":"Music Theory Online","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49249010","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":"Review of Malawey, Victoria, A Blaze of Light in Every Word: Analyzing the Popular Singing Voice (Oxford University Press, 2020)","authors":"Michèle Duguay","doi":"10.30535/mto.27.2.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.27.2.12","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44918,"journal":{"name":"Music Theory Online","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43992855","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":"Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Schoenberg’s Klavierstück, op. 33a","authors":"Keith Salley","doi":"10.30535/MTO.27.1.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30535/MTO.27.1.8","url":null,"abstract":"This essay considers the sound of Arnold Schoenberg’s Klavierstück, op. 33a, discussing aesthetic effects of combinatoriality and pitch repetition. In taking John Rahn’s general advice regarding listening to Schoenberg “late at night with the lights off,” two compelling parallels with psycholinguistic phenomena emerge—one dealing with semantic satiation, and the other with a related experience called the verbal transformation effect. Volume 27, Number 1, March 2021 Copyright © 2021 Society for Music Theory Schoenberg in the Dark [1.1] John Rahn’s Basic Atonal Theory is wri en in a style that is sadly absent from today’s music theory textbooks. Quirky passages, such as his discussion of “pitches (or grapes, or housemaids),” which touches upon the limitations of referring to pitches as integers (19–20), or his off-handed comparison of pitch-class structure to jellyfish (95) offer humorous counterweights to the rows of mathematical symbols elsewhere in the text that many undergraduate readers would likely have found dispassionate or even impenetrable. Among the book’s more notably outré passages is the following exercise, recommended at the end of chapter one: Listen several times to Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire op. 21. Read the text (in translation if necessary) and follow the score. Then listen to it again, preferably late at night with all the lights off. (If you enjoy listening this way, try also Schoenberg’s Serenade op. 24 and his third String Quartet op. 30.) (1980, 18) [1.2] Many passages in Rahn’s book are wri en from a listener’s perspective, addressing the sounds of things, their a ractiveness, and discussing the options one has of making sense of those sounds as either listeners or composers. But today, do we still recommend that students listen to atonal music (freely unordered or serial) in the dark? Presumably, Rahn recommends this because such a se ing would allow more acute hearing. Too often we fail to allow time for such pleasures, for our students or for ourselves. The sounds of atonal pieces can seem only supplementary to the relationships we typically teach about them, as an understanding of those concepts comes more easily from intensive scrutiny of scores. Unfortunately, an analysis that is not informed at all by aural understanding will inevitably amount to a mere description of a score. So, when we do simply listen to Arnold Schoenberg’s works (or to the works of other Second-Viennese composers) a entively and without score in hand, we may remind ourselves of their musicality—that is, privileging aural impressions over purely intellectual understandings—regardless of the segmentations and equivalencies with which so many analyses of Schoenberg’s works seem to be concerned. This musicality, which displays cohesion, a range of contrasts across various parameters, and even humor at times, seems less apparent when we listen with our eyes glued to a score. What time then, is left for the contemplation of sound itself? Notwithsta","PeriodicalId":44918,"journal":{"name":"Music Theory Online","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41457408","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":"Transcending Time (Feels)","authors":"Jose M. Garza","doi":"10.30535/MTO.27.1.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30535/MTO.27.1.3","url":null,"abstract":"Over the past fifteen years, much of the music-theoretical scholarship on heavy metal has addressed metric processes (Lucas 2019, Capuzzo 2018, Hannan 2018, Lucas 2018, Lennard 2016, Smialek 2008, Pieslak 2007) and the use of the voice (Smialek 2017, Young 2018). A significant portion of the literature deals with the band Meshuggah, but the music of countless artists sca ered across manifold subgenres remains unexplored. Widening the focus on such a large repertoire not only helps remedy this issue, but serves to inform one recent music-theoretical topic that relies on a broad stylistic understanding: time feels. To date, scholars have mainly limited the discussion of time feels to the kick and snare drums (e.g., de Clercq 2016), and indeed, these instruments ultimately determine a feel. I argue, however, that different uses of guitar, bass, and cymbals can reinforce, clarify, or contradict the feel laid down by the kick and snare. In this article, I describe several categories of guitar and bass riff types and timekeeping cymbals. I then discuss how their associations with certain time-feel contexts inform further analyses. To this end, I draw from postmillennial metal music in various subgenres including black metal, death metal, doom metal, grindcore, metalcore, progressive metal, sludge metal, and thrash metal. Volume 27, Number 1, March 2021 Copyright © 2021 Society for Music Theory [1] The body of music-theoretical scholarship on post-millennial metal music has grown significantly in the past fifteen years. Much of this work addresses metric processes (Lucas 2019, Capuzzo 2018, Hannan 2018, Lucas 2018, Lennard 2016, Smialek 2008, Pieslak 2007) and the use of the voice (Smialek 2017, Young 2018), especially in music by the band Meshuggah. Since heavy metal’s inception in the late 1960s (Walser 1993, 3), however, countless other artists have given life to a dizzying number of subgenres that cater to (or subvert) listener demand. Even after trimming down metal’s decades-long history to works produced since 2000, one faces a substantial body of work. [2] In the years leading up to the new millennium, Converge, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Shai Hulud, and others set the stage for artists who played metalcore, a subgenre that combined elements of hardcore punk and Swedish melodic death metal. The ensuing “New Wave of American Heavy Metal” comprised acts that at times broke into the mainstream (Wiederhorn and Turman 2013, 559; O’Neill 2017, 251), among them Avenged Sevenfold and Grammy-nominated bands Killswitch Engage (Recording Academy 2020) and August Burns Red (Rolli 2017). [3] Back in the underground, newcomers added to the ranks in droves while veterans continued to thrive. Black metal artists Dea eaven, Myrkur, and Watain joined well-established bands Enslaved and Immortal in making music filled with occult imagery and characterized by “raw emotion” (Christe 2003, 109), “shrieking” vocals (Conning 2018, 171), and lo-fi production (Phillips an","PeriodicalId":44918,"journal":{"name":"Music Theory Online","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47425324","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}