Music Theory Department

2009-10 Colloquium Series

Unless otherwise indicated, talks begin at 3:30 p.m. in Simon Music Center 267, inside the Cook Music Library.

Other future events will be posted soon.

18 November. John Turci-Escobar, (Washington University in St. Louis).  “El Tango, or how Piazzolla read Borges”

Piazzolla’s music was neither conceived nor received as a felicitous intersection of musical cultures but as a violent effort to overturn tradition. It was a music born of tensions, disruptions, and contradictions, rough at the edges, and explosive. It was and is, wrote philosopher Carlos Kuri, a “music at the limits.”  The tensions and anxieties of Piazzolla’s music at the limits rise to the surface in Piazzolla’s setting of a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, El Tango. Identified as a “musical poem,” this composition is the first track of the eponymous 1965 album that documented the intersection between Piazzolla and Borges. For Piazzolla, this association with Argentina’s foremost cultural figure provided an opportunity to legitimize his music, not only as tango, but as the music of contemporary Buenos Aires. Thus, El Tango has an explicit program, Borges’s poem, and an implicit one, Piazzolla’s case for the new tango.

Composing a programmatic tango work is challenging enough. Composing one based on a Borges poem, and that also doubles as a music-historical essay, borders on the impossible. The stock idioms of the tango had limited referential potential. Piazzolla expanded this potential by (1) appropriating idioms from other traditions, (2) juxtaposing foreign and tango idioms, (3) projecting his persona through emblematic usages, and (4) distorting earlier tango styles.

Despite its popularity and influence, Piazzolla’s music has received scant analytical attention. Moreover, scholars have focused on showing how Piazzolla’s music is, indeed, tango. This search for Astor’s “tango roots” emphasizes continuities with preceding practices, and thus, obscures the idiosyncratic in his music, sidelines its “foreign elements,” and most significantly, downplays its tensions, anxieties, and ruptures with tradition. It is these aspects that are the focus of my interpretive approach. It endeavors to make tangible Kuri’s insight that Piazzolla was a composer at the limits.

4 November.  Vasili Byros, "Revisiting Schema Theory: In Memoriam Leonard Meyer"

This paper aims to (re-)consider and (re-)contextualize the place, significance, and potential of schema theory as applied to music of the long eighteenth century, in light of two recent substantial contributions to this area of research: Robert Gjerdingen’s Music in the Galant Style (2007) and my own dissertation (Foundations of Tonality as Situated Cognition, 1730–1830, Yale, 2009). Furthermore, it is my intention to clarify a great deal of misunderstanding that still surrounds the concept of a schema and its theoretical foundations, as displayed by the question and answer session at last year’s “Partimento” panel in Nashville, which perpetuated initial misconceptions first evidenced by reviews of Gjerdingen’s A Classic Turn of Phrase (e.g. Cavett-Dunsby 1990; Lester 1990; Agawu 1991). By introducing and contextualizing a large body of empirical evidence — surrounding Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony and a particular schema I call the
le–sol–fi–sol — in a broad and interdisciplinary cognitive-philosophical framework, my paper will (re-)define what precisely constitutes a schema in musical and more general psychological terms, as well as the motivations, objectives, and, more importantly, the applications of schema theory in music and other disciplines. By that means, I shall consider its close association to the recently-developing discipline of empirical musicology (Clarke and Cook 2004), as well as the newly-constructed “interface” of historically-informed theory and cognition (Gjerdingen 2007; Byros 2009).

21 October.  Mitch Ohriner, "Temporal Segmentation and Prototypical Phrase Categories "

In current cognitive studies of categorization, two models prevail, the classical and the prototypical.  In the classical model, objects enter into categories by meeting necessary and sufficient conditions.  In the prototypical model, category boundaries are not demarcated; rather, categories are differentiated by their prototypical instances and objects are probabilistically assigned to categories according to shared features. A classical model of phrase structure has prevailed, although many phrases do not fit classical categories.

In a prototypical model of phrase structure, the boundaries of phrase category membership would be undefined and individual phrases would be probabilistically assigned to all categories. The proposed method uses variation in tempo in performance to create a temporal segmentation of a piece, and then probabilistically classifies the piece’s phrases in a number of categories according to the variance between an average performance of a phrase and a quadratic interpolation of the timing profile.  Examples are drawn from Chopin’s Mazurkas. 

 This presentation demonstrates a novel method of describing phrase structure prototypically by prioritizing highly correlative average performances as indicative of a collective understanding of a piece.  It is not my intention to minimize the form-generating capabilities of other musical features evident in the score, but rather to emphasize that performers’ temporal segmentation constitutes a kind of analysis of those features.  By lending credence to those analyses in a categorization of phrase structures, this presentation furthers the shift towards performance as both a wellspring of interpretive knowledge and an avenue of empirical inquiry.

14 October.  Prof. Robert Hatten, “Musical Agency as Implied by Gesture and Emotion: Its Consequences for Listeners’ Experiencing of Musical Emotion” 

Agency may be inferred from musical gestures and their expressive meaning; indeed, gesture, emotion, and agency may be understood as mutually implicative. Expressive gestures imply agential embodiment as motivated energetic shaping through time (Hatten 2004). In this paper I explore the emergent identity of an agent in music, from the interlinked perspectives of its inferred actions (as motivating force) and reactions to, or engagement with, other forces or events. This view of agency has consequences for our understanding of musical meaning as experienced by an empathetic (and competent) listener. Emotion can emerge from (1) empathy for the agent with whom/which one identifies, (2) co-experiencing the agents’ implied actions and reactions, and (3) reacting to the agent’s implied actions and reactions. Examples will be drawn from Beethoven.

Tim Best, "A Semiotic Reification of Early Seventeenth-Century Musical Rhetoric"

Joachim Burmeister’s Musica Poetica (1606) is possibly the first systematic attempt to account for musical expression in purely humanistic terms. Reflective of the growing emphasis on objective rationalism in Lutheran Germany, the treatise adapts ancient rhetorical categories to musical form and expression. While many of Burmeister’s definitions are problematic, giving vague descriptions of the musical content exemplifying a given figure, his musical examples are often illuminating. Indeed, the musical examples, mainly taken from Orlando di Lasso’s, Nurenburger Motet Buch (1562-64), seem to provide a more concrete “definition” than the verbal descriptions.

This paper attempts to reify Burmeister’s system of musical rhetoric through the application of Peircian sign typology, ultimately suggesting that the figures be viewed as rhematic-iconic-qualisigns. After providing a general background of Burmeister’s treatise, three rhetorical figures, auxesis, hypotyposis, and aposiopesis, will be examined in detail. The effectiveness of these figures in discussing musical signification will be tested by applying them to examples from the modern repertoire.

23 September. Blair Johnston, The Structure(s) and the Expressive Trajectory of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini

The harmonic vocabulary of Rachmaninoff's late Russian and exile compositions (1909–1940) may be understood as an amalgam of well-defined components drawn from the Western common practice and Russian traditions: expanded functional tonal syntax, "fantastic" equal-interval chromatic structures, and modal structures both familiar (diatonic modes) and unfamiliar (peremennost, nega, "gypsy Phrygian").

I argue that the components have clear rhetorical associations; that components are consistently associated with certain locations in form; and that acknowledging the interactions of components contributes to an understanding of expressive trajectory and large-scale organization, and—especially—to exegesis of climax events in the late Russian and exile works.

Drawing on chromatic and modal theory, theories of tonal tension and climax, and Hepokoski’s deformation-oriented approach to the interpretation of Postromantic form, I present the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini, Op. 43 as a case study. The result: steps toward a more general theory of hyperdissonance in Postromantic music that may aid the interpretation of crunchy harmonic events and formal problems that resist explanation in conventional tonal and Formenlehre terms.

9 September. Julian Hook, "Formal Diatonic Interval Notation"

Two fundamentally different means of describing musical intervals are in common use: diatonic (“major 3rd”) and chromatic (“4 semitones”). The mathematical properties of chromatic interval measurements are straightforward and well-known. The diatonic measurements, despite their familiarity, are more difficult to formalize mathematically, particularly the “quality” descriptors (perfect, major, minor, augmented, diminished). This paper (the product of work carried out jointly with Jack Douthett) will present an elementary formalization of diatonic interval notation. Connections with diatonic set theory will be considered, as will implications for alternative scale systems and tunings.

2008-2009 Colloquium Schedule

2007-2008 Colloquium Schedule