Motion Expressions in Music Criticism

Music is commonly and conventionally described in terms of motion: melodies fall and rise, and motifs may follow a harmonic path. The thesis explores the motivation of musical motion expressions in terms of conceptual metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson 1999). Specifically, it analyses whether musical motion expressions are based on the time is motion metaphor (Johnson & Larson 2003, Cox 2016). Furthermore, the thesis investigates whether musical motion expressions are perceived as low in metaphoricity because of their conventionality in music criticism, and because of a more general association of music with motion, given that people often literally move when they make music and when they listen to music.

Alternative Paths, Phrase Expansion, and the Music of Felix Mendelssohn

William Rothstein’s seminal work on phrase rhythm has been foundational for scholars who study phrase expansion using Schenkerian principles, such as David Beach, Charles Burkhart, Joseph Kraus, and Samuel Ng. Other scholars consider phrase expansion from the perspective of William Caplin’s form-functional theory, such as Janet Schmalfeldt and Steven Vande Moortele. Both groups tend to emphasize structural concerns. Recent theories of musical meaning, however, challenge analysts to consider phrase expansions through an expressive lens. This article engages with that challenge using the metaphor of musical motion, a concept that is informally present in numerous analytical writings but was formalized in work on conceptual metaphors by Steve Larson and Mark Johnson. In particular, we introduce a category of expansion techniques called “alternative paths” in which a phrase deviates from its expected course toward a goal via the addition of new material. By defining how the new material is initiated and concluded, alternative paths provide a more nuanced view of passages that might otherwise be described by the more generic terms “parenthesis,” “interpolation,” or “purple patch.” We use Felix Mendelssohn’s works to demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our approach, though the theory of alternative paths is by no means limited to that repertoire.

On Narrativity and Narrative Flavor in Jazz Improvisation

This essay investigates an established question in the philosophy of music: whether, and in what respect, music may express narratives. However, this essay departs in two essential respects from traditional treatments of the question. First, the jazz tradition instead of European art music is used as the primary source material. Second, instead of merely posing the question of whether music can harbor a narrative, this essay is oriented by what it argues is a common experience of “narrative flavor” in music – the feeling of having heard a story in non-representational sound. The essay seeks to account for the experiential givenness of “narrative flavor” with the assistance of contemporary philosophical work on narrative and musicological work on improvisation and musical motion. Working with a minimalist definition of narrative that requires (1) the representation of two or more events that are (2) temporally ordered and (3) causally connected, music is found to be able to satisfy the second and third conditions. However, the questionable representation capacities of music lead to the conclusion that music cannot, in the strict sense, harbor a narrative. The experience of narrative flavor is explained with reference to J. David Velleman’s concept of emotional cadence, Brian Harker’s work on structural coherence in improvisation, and Patrick Shove and Bruno Repp’s work on the perception of musical motion. These sources are utilized to demonstrate that improvisations can be structured so as to give the listener the impression of having heard a story by initiating and carrying out an emotional cadence.

Judith Weir's Instrumental Music as Description

This study explores Judith Weir's abstract descriptive technique in her instrumental music, Distance and Enchantment (1988) for piano quartet and Musicians Wrestle Everywhere for ten instruments (1994). Folksongs and a location used and described in the music, respectively, are interpreted and "produced" through musical characters and mood. In most cases musical characters and gestures have a tendency to associate musical motion to arouse images. The decisions, ideas and styles in these compositions may be applied to works in other genres and her later works, as well.

Teleological strategies of nontonal music: The case of Milan Mihajlović

Two basic strategies enable non-tonal music to be goal-oriented. One is to establish a referential sonority that would serve as the goal of musical motion. While both this sonority and the processes that steer the music flow towards it may be created contextually, in many compositions the referential role is performed by chords that approximate the harmonic series. The other strategy establishes as the goal the exhaustion of a given set of entities: most commonly the use of all pitch classes of the chromatic collection, but also other elements, such as all intervals, all possible transpositions of the given tone collection etc. Both strategies are well instantiated in the composition Eine kleine Trauermusik by Milan Mihajlović. There is also a teleological aspect of this composition that transcends pure musical analysis and is explicable in terms of music as a metaphorical representation of life processes.