Music Theory and Mainstream Digital Journalism

The tools of music theory and analysis have appeared in articles published in popular press venues for the last decade. Many of these articles, however, are written by non-experts and often stir controversy among academic writers due to assumptions or inaccuracies. Instead of passively arguing about this form of public music theory, this chapter encourages academic theorists to write stories for digital journalism outlets by explaining the role and context of this type of journalism, then outlining the process of pitching, writing, and editing a story. This chapter closes with a discussion of the specific responsibilities of music theorists who write for these venues, and the role of the academic in digital journalism.

A Conversation with Robert Hatten about A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music

From August to October 2020, the Brazilian Society for Music Theory and Analysis (TeMA) held a series of five online meetings, each featuring a well-stablished theorist who presented one of his/her recent publications. Following the guest speaker’s presentation, a discussion session ensued, featuring guests from TeMA. On August 20th, TeMA received Robert Hatten to open the series, who was invited to talk about his most recent book: A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music (2018). Six guests from TeMA joined Hatten for the discussion session: Maria Lúcia Machado Pascoal, Cristina Capparelli Gerling, Flavio Santos Pereira, Diósnio Machado Neto, Guilherme Sauerbronn de Barros, and Paulo de Tarso Salles. Aiming at bringing Hatten’s presentation and the lively ensuing discussion to a wider audience, this essay presents an edited transcription of this meeting.

A History of Motives—Theory and Analysis

Chapter 3 provides a history of the role of motives in Western music theory and analysis. The first section covers 1600–1750 C.E., the last period in which motive remained in its conceptual prehistory. At that time, the preeminent musical structure was the “figure,” a passage of music that conveyed a single character. The second section covers 1750–1890, a period in which the influence of figures waned as authors began theorizing about the smaller musical cells that make melodies logical, pleasant, and memorable. The third section of the survey concentrates on the work of Arnold Schoenberg, the composer-theorist who did the most during that time to popularize motive-based views of music. The fourth section covers 1950 to 2010, a period marked by stark changes in how motive was conceived and handled in analysis. Specifically, motives in the late twentieth century underwent intense fragmentation, a “boiling away” of their elements, often leaving behind only pitch intervals and/or rhythms. The chapter closes with a rumination on past and present conventions of motive and motivic analysis, laying groundwork for the rules and conventions to follow in chapters 4–7, the methodology portion of Musical Motives.

Implicit Counterpoint in Gjerdingen's Schemata

Robert Gjerdingen has claimed that schema finding diverges from contrapuntal pitch reduction, Schenkerian or otherwise. Commentators have criticized his approach (see the reviews by Joel Lester in Journal of Music Theory [1990] and Kofi Agawu in Music Theory Spectrum [1991]) and have discussed intersections between schemata and contrapuntal reduction (see the articles by Folker Froebe and Oliver Schwab-Felisch in Music Theory and Analysis [2014] and by Stefan Rohringer in Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie [2015]). Here I address this conundrum from a different angle: I propose that schema analysis may be approximated by two heuristics, which are closely related to the issue identified in Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff's A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (1983) as finding the head of a time span. By giving the highest priority to tritone resolutions within a metric segment and otherwise realigning consonances with strong beats by removing dissonances, it is possible to approximate the reductive workings of schema analysis. This is demonstrated through a preliminary sample of two hundred tacit reductive decisions from Gjerdingen's Music in the Galant Style. I suggest the possibility that Gjerdingen's locally top-down search for complete patterns interacts with a more bottom-up, implicit reductive process, regardless of the identity of the emergent schema. I also discuss some of the potential implications of the heuristics for theory and analysis as well as for interdisciplinary work on schema finding.

Images, Visualization, and Representation

Visual images abound in music theory and analysis. From scores to voice-leading sketches, spectrographs to transformational networks, and through all kinds of other graphics, theorists use images to present and persuade. As music-theoretic discourse becomes increasingly multimodal, the differences between words and images as modes of expression, as well as the nature of the conceptual work that each does in a particular case, become critical concerns. Informed by work in science and technology studies, cartography, information visualization, and visual studies, this chapter establishes a concept of mode and considers some of the various affordances and exigencies of visual images and verbal text. It then draws a conceptual distinction between two functions of visual images in music theoretic-discourse: visualization (to render information that is invisible in visual form; “to show”) and representation (to convey a specific analytic interpretation of what is shown; “to tell”), each illustrated by a series of examples.

Hollywood Harmony

Film music represents one of the few remaining underexplored frontiers for the field of music theory. Discovering its inner workings from a theoretical perspective is imperative if we wish to understand its tremendous effects on the ears (and eyes) of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Hollywood Harmony applies for the first time the tools of contemporary music theory and analysis to this corpus in a thorough and systematic way. In order to help readers appreciate how film music works, this study enlists a number critical apparatuses, ranging from abstract theoretical description to psychological models and sensitive close reading. It argues that matters of musical structure in film are matters of musical meaning, and pitch relations are inherently expressive, always somehow collaborating with visuals and narrative. One harmonic idiom, pantriadic chromaticism, plays an especially important role in the “Hollywood Sound,” and much of this study is dedicated to understanding its aesthetic and expressive content—of which the elicitation of a feeling of wonder is paramount. For better understanding of this tonal practice on a rigorous level, the transformational tools of neo-Riemannian theory are introduced and applied in an accessible and novel way. Neo-Riemannian theory emphasizes musical change and gesture over fixed objects or structures, and by recognizing the innate spatiality of musical experience in extended-tonal settings, it serves as an excellent lens through which to inspect film music. The works of a diverse assortment of composers are examined, with particular attention given to recent “New Hollywood” scoring practices.

The Musical Language of Rock

A theory of the structure of rock music is presented, addressing aspects such as tonality/key, harmony, rhythm/meter, melody, phrase structure, timbre/instrumentation, form, and emotional expression. The book brings together ideas from the author’s previous articles but also contains substantial new material. Rock is defined broadly (as it often is) to include a wide range of late twentieth-century Anglo-American popular styles, including 1950s rock & roll, Motown, soul, “British invasion” rock, soft rock, heavy metal, disco, new wave, and alternative rock. The study largely employs the informal, intuitive methods of conventional music theory and analysis, but it is also informed by corpus data. An important component of the theory is a representation of pitches—the “line of fifths”—that sheds light on issues such as stylistic distinctions within rock, effects of surprise, and emotion. The theory also entails a model of expression with three dimensions, representing valence, energy, and tension; this proves to be a powerful tool for tracing shifts in expressive effect within songs. The theory features novel approaches to issues such as cadences, melodic-harmonic coordination, the handling of sectional boundaries, and the classification of formal types. The final two chapters present analyses of six songs and a broader consideration of rock in its historical and stylistic context.