Introduction to Critical Modesty

The Introduction examines Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go to explore how the modest and minor mode of thinking practiced in it might be broadened to an emerging set of contemporary fiction, criticism, and theory. Drawing on the work of philosophical pragmatism, the Introduction argues that modesty as a temperament in novels entails the principle that fiction holds no special position outside the world from which to speak about it, and therefore, it frames novelistic expression as a process of thinking. Crucially, recognizing the novel as a process of thinking with the world requires a reciprocal critical modesty in which we understand critical work as something that happens in collaboration with the novel rather than to it. Critical modesty is not a theory or method to be applied but a temperament sourced from the ways texts model their own relations. Thus, the Introduction offers an account of the book’s key terms that follow from the ways that novelists and critics practice critical modesty.

Metacognition and Crossmodal Correspondences Between Auditory Attributes and Saltiness in a Large Sample Study

Mounting evidence demonstrates that people make surprisingly consistent associations between auditory attributes and a number of the commonly-agreed basic tastes. However, the sonic representation of (association with) saltiness has remained rather elusive. In the present study, a crowd-sourced online study ( participants) was conducted to determine the acoustical/musical attributes that best match saltiness, as well as participants’ confidence levels in their choices. Based on previous literature on crossmodal correspondences involving saltiness, thirteen attributes were selected to cover a variety of temporal, tactile, and emotional associations. The results revealed that saltiness was associated most strongly with a long decay time, high auditory roughness, and a regular rhythm. In terms of emotional associations, saltiness was matched with negative valence, high arousal, and minor mode. Moreover, significantly higher average confidence ratings were observed for those saltiness-matching choices for which there was majority agreement, suggesting that individuals were more confident about their own judgments when it matched with the group response, therefore providing support for the so-called ‘consensuality principle’. Taken together, these results help to uncover the complex interplay of mechanisms behind seemingly surprising crossmodal correspondences between sound attributes and taste.

Statistical Analysis for Assessing the Built Environment Walkability of an Urban Area

In the past era, in the transport planning process walkability was at the least priority as it was considered as a minor mode of transport. Though, it has its importance towards social life, economy, empirical quality and health. Consequently, the focus of the researchers across the world is now on walkability analysis. Therefore, to assess the walkability of an urban transport network in India, 15 different locations (i.e. institutional, educational, commercial, terminals and residential) were selected from three different cities. In the present study, different statistical techniques (i.e. factor analysis stepwise regression method) were used to identify a suitable number of data set based on their correlation analysis. Thereafter, land use-based and combined models were developed with the help of a questionnaire survey. Finally, different clustering analysis technique was used to assess the walkability thresholds which will make the job easier for sidewalk planners (i.e. in walkability analysis).

Stolen Youth

In 1847 Atwill of New York published “The Lament of the Blind Orphan Girl.” Composed by William Bradbury, the song is written for voice and piano in a lilting 3/8 meter. Mary, the song’s protagonist, sings of “the silvery moon” and “bright chain of stars” over diatonic harmonies. A dramatic shift to the minor mode supports the climax: “Oh, when shall I see them? I’m blind, oh, I’m blind.” Mary explains that she and her brother have also lost their parents. On the sheet music cover a wreath of flowers encircles an image of a young white woman kneeling beneath a tree, alone at a grave. The title page notes: “As sung with distinguished applause by Abby Hutchinson.” Orphan songs pervade nineteenth-century pop repertory. Scholars have analyzed Latvian, Hmong, Danish, and German orphan songs, but US orphan songs have generated little more than passing references. Other examples include: “The Orphan Nosegay Girl” with words by Mrs. Susanna Rowson from 1805; “The Colored Orphan Boy,” composed by C. D. Abbott and sung by S. C. Campbell of the Campbell Minstrels from 1852; and “The Orphan Ballad Singers Ballad” by Henry Russell from 1866. Orphans were not just a topic; in the latter half of the nineteenth century, actual parentless youth featured in bands such as the Hebrew Orphan Asylum Band of New York City. This paper connects the stolen childhoods in orphan songs to those of enslaved youth. If free children were aware of slavery and the movement to abolish it as historian Wilma King has shown, what did it mean for Abby Hutchinson, who started performing abolitionist songs with her brothers at age twelve, to sing as the sentimental stock character of the orphan? Songs like the one above may have been a way that young abolitionists empathized with enslaved youths robbed of their youths.

Beethoven, String Quartet in E Minor, op. 59 no. 2/i (Allegro)

Chapter 9 combines features of chapters 7 and 8—Beethoven’s middle-period music as intensely hyperdramatized narrative and the conventions and implications of the minor-mode sonata—by closely examining the first movement of the second of his “Razumovsky” Quartets, op. 59 no. 2. The analysis of Beethoven’s quartet movement also throws into high relief that composer’s different concerns and style from those found in Haydn’s quartets (chapter 6). An initial backdrop sets Beethoven’s op. 59 into its historical context, again stressing the new demands placed by such music on both performers and listeners, and once more reminding the reader that Beethoven often approached and treated the classical “default” procedures of the preceding century with distortions or unusual harmonic swerves for effects both eccentric and dramatic. The chapter also considers some of the problems involved with cadential identification: what counts, for instance, as a “structural cadence,” and how might a decision along these lines affect our larger reading to the piece? In play, as always in Beethoven’s minor-mode sonatas, is the charged, dark-and-light tension between the negatively valenced minor and the ongoing struggle to escape from that minor into a contrasting major.

A Sonata Theory Handbook

A Sonata Theory Handbook is a step-by-step, seminar-like introduction to Sonata Theory, a new approach to the study and interpretation of sonata form. The book updates and advances the outline of the method first presented in Hepokoski and Darcy’s 2006 Elements of Sonata Theory. It blends explanations of the theory’s general principles—dialogic form, expositional action zones, trajectories toward generically normative cadences, rotation theory, the five sonata types, the special case of the minor-mode sonata, and more—with illustrations of them in practice through close, extended analyses of eight individual movements by Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms. Central to the method is the merging of historically informed, technical analysis with the concerns of hermeneutic interpretation. The book features an inclusive engagement with recent developments in form theory, schema theory, and other related studies since 2006, including some of the language and insights of cognitive research into music perception and the more generalized concerns of conceptual metaphor theory. It ultimately builds to reflections on sonata form in the romantic era: the flexible applicability of Sonata Theory to mid- and late-nineteenth-century works.

Beethoven, Symphony No. 2 in D, op. 36/i (Adagio molto–Allegro con brio)

This chapter moves on from Mozart and Haydn to consider an early-nineteenth-century movement from Beethoven, the initial movement of his Symphony No. 2, written at the onset of what he considered to be an aesthetic “new path” of composition (and which we tend to regard as the onset of his “middle period”). While the parallels between this movement and that of Haydn’s Symphony No. 100 (chapter 5) are clear—a major-to-minor “fall” in the introduction, themes with “military” connotations, a drive toward a triumphant conclusion, and the like—the differences between the two are equally instructive. With Beethoven we are thrown into a more turbulent musical world, where the classical norms of late-eighteenth-century sonata practice are exaggerated, hyper-dramatized, and sometimes overridden (with “deformations”). The older “default” norms of sonata practice begin to be regularly challenged, and with them arises a new, proto-romantic sense of “listening” and “understanding.” Once past the initial historical backdrop and reframing of Sonata Theory for the onset of a new century, the close reading of the movement that takes up the most of the chapter argues that a central issue in the movement is that of major-minor conflict, where the introduction’s “fall” into minor is not overcome until the climactic post-sonata coda. In part this also prepares the reader for the extended discussions of the minor-mode sonata in the ensuing chapter.

The Minor-Mode Sonata

Minor-mode sonatas constitute a special case within classical—and later—sonata practice. In part this is because of the special affective quality historically assigned to the minor mode, along with many of the characteristic moods and colors associated with it. This chapter elaborates the “extra burden” of sonata forms in the minor mode, which often entails its drive—often thwarted—to be converted into the major, a drama that rose to central importance only in the last two or three decades of the eighteenth century, with Haydn playing a large role in it. Supplementing and updating the consideration of minor-mode sonatas in Elements of Sonata Theory, this chapter also incorporates new information gleaned from Riley’s and Graves’s separate studies of eighteenth-century minor-mode practice. Issues covered include the affective range of the minor mode; standardized minor-mode styles and “topics”; characteristic intervallic figures (like the “pathotype” figure); the aspiration and techniques of “escape into the major,” whether locally or permanently; the eighteenth-century convention of the “mediant tutti”; and the evolving concept of “tragic plot/comic plot,” relating to whether the sonata will end in minor or overcome that minor by a modal reversal into the major.

Schubert, String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor, D. 810/i (Allegro)

This is the first of three longer, more extended chapters (10, 11, and 12) devoted to special questions with regard to the applicability of Sonata Theory to post-Beethovenian composers and into the romantic era. The problem begins in earnest with the sonata forms of Schubert, which have been discussed by many recent analysts, resulting in a cascade of recent studies, articles, and books cycling around the same analytical issues and seeking to come to terms with Schubert’s difference from the sonata practice of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, with their more purposeful drives toward tonal resolution and cadential completion. This chapter responds to much of this scholarship in order to show that while Schubert often delays, occludes, or obstructs his pathways to certain action-zone goals—sometimes by “three-key expositions” and their local and later implications—those zones are still discernible, even while the vectors toward them are often more slack in their realization. This adaptation of Sonata Theory to a freer, “romantic” realization of the sonata is pursued through a close, phrase-by-phrase analysis of the first movement of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet, read as a fatalistic, existential narrative of the imminence of death, a feature (as discussed in the historical backdrop) that resonates with aspects of Schubert’s own life after 1823. As such the chapter, a follow-up to chapter 9, also provides a second illustration of minor-mode-sonata issues laid out in chapter 8.

Harmonic organisation conveys both universal and culture-specific cues for emotional expression in music

Previous research conducted on the cross-cultural perception of music and its emotional content has established that emotions can be communicated across cultures at least on a rudimentary level. Here, we report a cross-cultural study with participants originating from two tribes in northwest Pakistan (Khow and Kalash) and the United Kingdom, with both groups being naïve to the music of the other respective culture. We explored how participants assessed emotional connotations of various Western and non-Western harmonisation styles, and whether cultural familiarity with a harmonic idiom such as major and minor mode would consistently relate to emotion communication. The results indicate that Western concepts of harmony are not relevant for participants unexposed to Western music when other emotional cues (tempo, pitch height, articulation, timbre) are kept relatively constant. At the same time, harmonic style alone has the ability to colour the emotional expression in music if it taps the appropriate cultural connotations. The preference for one harmonisation style over another, including the major-happy/minor-sad distinction, is influenced by culture. Finally, our findings suggest that although differences emerge across different harmonisation styles, acoustic roughness influences the expression of emotion in similar ways across cultures; preference for consonance however seems to be dependent on cultural familiarity.