Onset and Contiguity

Onset (metric position) and contiguity (pitch adjacency and time proximity) are two melodic features that contribute to the salience of individual notes (core tones) in a monophonic voice or polyphonic texture. Our approach to reductions prioritizes contextual features like onset and contiguity. By awarding points to notes with such features, our process selects core tones from melodic surfaces to produce a reduction. Through this reduction, a new form of musical pattern discovery is possible that has similarities to Gjerdingen’s (".fn_cite_year($gjerdingen_2007).") galant schemata. Recurring n-grams (scale degree skeletons) are matched in an algorithmic approach that we have tested manually (with a printed score and pen and paper) and implemented computationally (with symbolic data and scripted algorithms in MATLAB). A relatively simple method successfully identifies the location of all statements of the subject in Bach’s Fugue in C Minor (BWV 847) identified by Bruhn (".fn_cite_year($bruhn_1993).") and the location of all instances of the Prinner and Meyer schemata in Mozart’s Sonata in C Major (K. 545/i) identified by Gjerdingen (".fn_cite_year($gjerdingen_2007)."). We also apply the method to an excerpt by Kirnberger analyzed in Rabinovitch (".fn_cite_year($rabinovitch_2019)."). Analysts may use this flexible method for pattern discovery in reduced textures through software freely accessible at https://www.atavizm.org. While our case studies in the present article are from eighteenth-century European music, we believe our approach to reduction and pattern discovery is extensible to a variety of musics.

Corporeal Musical Structure: A Gestural-Kinesthetic Approach to Toru Takemitsu’s Rain Tree Sketch II

The music of Tōru Takemitsu’s Rain Tree Sketch II (1994) entails a procession of discrete gestures that are delineated by moments of repose. The performer’s grasp of the piece lies in its physicality of movement: each gesture and in-between stillness are both heard and felt as an aggregate of velocities, directions, and intentions of the body. Drawing upon Carrie Noland’s concept of “vitality affects,” I take the performative gesture, encompassing both visually accessible movement and inwardly felt kinesthesia, as a starting point for the analysis of Rain Tree Sketch II. Concepts of effort and shape taken from Rudolf Laban’s dance theory provide a framework for creating a new methodology of enhanced trace-forms to analyze gesture and kinesthesia. The analysis of gestures reveals the coexistence of opposite effort qualities and shapes in an expanded corporeal space, resonating with Takemitsu’s ideal of reconciling contradictory sounds, as noted in his collection of essays Confronting Silence (1995). Husserl’s notions of retention and protention, viewed through the lens of embodiment, and Laban’s concepts of effort states and effort recovery are brought to bear on the still moments, showing the piece to have a throbbing, embodied rhythmic structural arc. This new methodology centering on gestural-kinesthetic details provides the tools to articulate structural sensations that are often overlooked but lie at the center of musical experience.

Generic Norms, Irony, and Authenticity in the AABA Songs of the Rolling Stones, 1963–1971

AABA form was in decline in popular music in the 1960s, yet the Rolling Stones made extensive use of it at a crucial point in their career. In this article I examine the relationship between Jagger-Richards AABA songs released between 1963 and 1971 and established AABA norms. I use a corpus of 138 AABA songs (112 by other artists and 26 by Jagger-Richards) to compare the Stones’ approach to elements such as starting and ending bridge harmonies and verse melodic form with existing defaults. The analysis shows that the band’s approach to AABA in this time period bifurcates into two strategies, each associated with a tempo extreme: either (1) using the form ironically to critique wealth and privilege, or (2) employing it in a sincere way that invokes soul and gospel artists and thereby claims authenticity for the band.

Romantic Periods

This article examines the transformation of the period in the early Romantic era. While in Classical periods the end of the antecedent phrase is harmonically closed off from the beginning of the consequent phrase, Romantic periods often join the end of the antecedent to the beginning of the consequent, creating an undivided progression. Voice-leading analyses illustrate three different means of joining the antecedent to the consequent: 1) by overlapping the two phrases, 2) by prolonging and resolving the antecedent’s closing dominant, and 3) by ending the antecedent on a predominant. All three procedures involve converting a dividing dominant into a progressive dominant.

The Logic of Six-Based Minor for Harmonic Analyses of Popular Music

Harmonic analyses of popular music typically take the minor tonic to be Roman numeral “one.” By nature, this “one-based” approach requires a new numbering scheme when songs shift between relative key centers. Recent scholarship has argued, however, that popular music often involves ambiguity between relative tonalities, as exemplified in the “Axis” progression, if not sometimes a tonal fusion of two relative keys. I thus argue for the utility of a “six-based” approach to the minor tonic, where the minor tonic is taken to be scale-degree 6. This six-based approach, common among practitioners of popular music as seen in the Nashville number system, avoids the forced choice of a single tonic, and it thus offers a consistent way to track chord function and behavior across shifts between relative key centers. After considering these shifts in a diatonic context on the levels of both phrase and song form, I posit that popular music involves three possible tonalities, together which form a “triple-tonic complex” akin to Stephenson’s three harmonic palettes: a major system, a parallel-minor system, and a relative-minor system. I conclude by considering how chromatic chords common in a major key, such as II and ".fn_flat('')."VII, correspond to their counterparts in the relative minor, IV and ".fn_flat('')."II, thereby collapsing the landscape of diatonic modes into three modal complexes. Overall, the paper serves to reveal the logic of six-based minor—why it is useful, what issues it resolves, and what insights it can afford us about harmonic syntax in popular music.

Brahmsian Articulation

The analysis of the structural repercussions of musicians’ strategies has traditionally focused on their handling of timing and dynamics, not only because of the correlation found in performances between hierarchical phrase structure and coordinated decreases in both parameters—usually referred to as phrase arching (".fn_cite($gabrielsson_1988).") or phrase-final lengthening (".fn_cite($todd_1985).

Rebonds: Structural Affordances, Negotiation, and Creation

This paper presents a comparative recording analysis of the seminal work for solo percussion Rebonds (Iannis Xenakis, 1989), in order to demonstrate how performances of a musical work can reveal—or even create—aspects of musical structure that score-centered analysis cannot illuminate. In doing so I engage with the following questions. What does a pluralistic, dynamic conception of structure look like for Rebonds? How do interpretive decisions recast performers as agents of musical structure? When performances diverge from the score in the omission of notes, the softening of accents, the insertion of dramatic tempo changes, or the altering of entire passages, do conventions that arise out of those performance practices become part of the structural fabric of the work? Are these conventions thus part of the Rebonds “text”?

Performing Analysis, Performing Metal

Light shows at contemporary rock concerts generally create an immersive, multi-sensory experience. In their most sophisticated forms, however, they provide a visual analysis of the music as it unfolds. This paper presents a case study of what I call the analytical light show, by examining how the intricate light shows of extreme metal band Meshuggah contribute an interpretive layer that not only promotes multi-sensory engagement, but also actively guides listeners through songs’ formal structures. Meshuggah’s light shows, created by lighting designer Edvard Hansson, are exhaustively synchronized to the rhythmic patterns of the guitars and drums. Meticulous use of color, brightness, directionality, placement pattern, and beam movement provide additional information about gesture, articulation, and pitch. These analytical light shows provide a three-dimensional visual score that dramatizes rhythms while guiding listeners through each riff. Through this lighting, spatial and bodily metaphors of musical movement—high and low, moving and holding still—are transmuted into visual representation. By presenting analysis and performance simultaneously and as each other, Meshuggah combines technical virtuosity with rock authenticity, and provides another example of what I have called “coercive synesthesia” (Lucas 2014), as the lighting becomes an inextricable part of the musical experience. Beyond the confines of metal culture, I study the analytical light show as an expression of vernacular musical analysis that combines specific analytical and technical expertise with the intuitive, embodied knowledge that experienced music listeners possess.