Music Theory Commons^™

Japanese Music Theory, Elias N. Nichols

SACAD: Scholarly Activities

This research project explores Japanese music theories. By analyzing the basic components of Japanese music, including historical and modern approaches, this presentation demonstrates the similarities and differences in the formation of music in western thought when compared to the methodology of Japan. This research dives deep into tones, scales, melodic approaches, historical development and the effect on modern compositions today. This project informs the audience on the nuances of Japanese music theories in the hope to dispel stereotypes about music theories from different cultures, apart from western thought.

The Paradox Of Musical Vernaculars, By Marina Ritzarev, Jacob Gran

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Contributors To Issue 7

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

On Music Theory And Making Music More Welcoming For Everyone, By Philip Ewell. Ann Arbor: University Of Michigan Press, 2023 [Review]., George Adams

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Remembering John Rothgeb (1940–2020), Jürgen Thym

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Bach And Mozart And Space And Time, Robert L. Marshall

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Karol Berger’s influential study, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow, argues that

“what matters to Bach . . . is not the linear flow of time from past to future . . . Rather, time is made to follow a circular route or neutralized. . . . Mozart and his contemporaries “straighten[ed] the temporal cycle into an arrow.”

The present essay suggests that, in considering the music of Bach and Mozart we are not dealing with two different concepts of time but rather with two different analogies: one with space, the other with time. It argues that, for Bach, the spatial metaphor …

Thoughts Upon Richard Taruskin’S Yahrzeit, Scott Gleason

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Teaching portions of Richard Taruskin’s The Oxford History of Western Music to non-music majors at Columbia University (in the early 2000s) offered special opportunities and challenges. Taruskin’s musical ethics, central to that book, are clearly embodied in his writings about John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer. The Princeton School of composer-theorists is a litmus test of Taruskin’s thinking: in particular, Taruskin’s emphasis on music criticism can aid in an analysis of Roger Sessions’s 1958 String Quintet. David Lewin’s unpublished 1959 analysis of that same piece (by his teacher) shows a very different approach; Lewin’s analysis is a vivid but rarely …

Orthography, Jeremy Gill

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

The myth of Pope Gregory I taking melodic dictation from a magical singing bird is the imaginative starting point of Western musicʼs love-hate relationship with the music notation systems it later developed. This essay traces that development through Thomas Tallis and J. S. Bach to the dichotomous modern examples of Brian Ferneyhough and Arvo Pärt. In it, I suggest that Western musicʼs eventual development hinged upon that earliest desire to document and codify melodies, answering Gregoryʼs contemporary Isidore of Seville, who lamented that “unless sounds are held by the memory of man, they perish, because they cannot be written down.”

In Praise Of Simplicity: Marie Hinrichs’S Op. 1, Neun Gesänge, Stephen Rodgers

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

In a chapter from German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century (1996), Jürgen Thym describes the historiography of the German Lied as “a hike through the high-peak area of a mountain landscape where the trail along the ridge leads from one glorious peak to the next.” Beneath the high peaks of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Wolf, he notes, are smaller peaks not reachable by trail. Thym clears paths through this unexplored landscape by surveying the Lieder of Carl Loewe, Fanny Hensel, Franz Liszt, Robert Franz, Clara Schumann, and Peter Cornelius. My essay extends one of these paths, exploring the songs of …

William Albright's Whistler (1834-1903): Three Nocturnes: "Why The Hell . . . Should Anyone Listen To This?!", R. Douglas Reed

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

The article explores William Albright's Whistler (1834-1903): Three Nocturnes (1989) through historical context, musical analysis, performance practice, and the composer's essay on the relationship between his composition and Whistler's paintings. Commentary by composer Sydney Hodkinson gives information about the 1960s new music scene in Ann Arbor (the ONCE Group, The Grate Society) composition study with Ross Lee Finney.

Defying The Conventional: Musical Performance, Embodied Cognition, And The Reconfiguration Of Institutional Discourse, Dillon Parmer

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

This essay confronts the dialectic between theory and practice through a comparison of an idea basic to how we understand music (the notion that pitch moves up and down in vertical space) with how pitch is thought of in actual music-making. The comparison leads to both a new conceptual model for thinking about pitch, what might be called Pitch Horizontality, as well as a proposal for how to bring institutional discourse about music into sync, not with how scholars in other disciplines think about their subject matter, but with the thinking that goes on in contexts of real-world artistic production.

Cecil Taylor, 1950–1976: Theory & Practice In His Own Words, Michelle A. Yom

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cecil Taylor (1929–2018) was a poet, composer, pianist, and dancer who is widely regarded as one of the founding figures of Free Jazz. Despite this historical significance, Taylor has not been a subject of substantial archival research. Some scholars have written his name into music scholarship through explicitly or implicitly reiterating the notion of “freedom” that circulated among contemporary jazz critics of the late 1950s and the 1960s. Others have focused on analyzing Taylor’s solo piano music, often reducing Taylor’s musical theories and practices into the formal structures of the music itself. To date, the scholarship has simplified Taylor’s work …

A Digital Audio Workstation-Based Analytical Framework For Contemporary Acoustic Music: Modeling Selected Excerpts By Viet Cuong, Robert Daniel Traugh

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) has made sound recording, manipulation, MIDI sequencing, and digital live performance accessible to nearly anyone with a computer and an interest in digital music-making. A DAW’s functionality is modeled on decades of development in analog modular electronic instrument design and sound recording techniques. Theorist and composer Jonathan D. Kramer, through his work in the 1980’s, referred to the invention of sound recording as a catalyst of a temporal discontinuity experienced by Western-trained musicians. Since that time, these same sound recording techniques have become increasingly prevalent in modern society. This document proposes a DAW-based analytical framework …

Chaotic Complexity: Order And Chaos In Works Of Cage, Xenakis And Boulez, Levi Graham

Music Theses

My thesis explores specific applications of chaos theory in contemporary twentieth-century music and analyzes the relationship between order and chaos in their creation. I will do this by referencing the levels of chaos presented by Katherine Hayles and categorized by Judith Lochhead. These levels of chaos include “Expressive Chaos,” “Denotative Chaos,” and “Ontological Chaos,” which provide a framework for grouping expressions of chaos in music.  I will analyze works of John Cage, Iannis Xenakis and Pierre Boulez through the lens of these types of chaos, with a particular focus on “Ontological Chaos,” which describes chaos as both dependent on and …

Hear & Now: Culturally Responsive Music Education Through Digital Audio Workstations & Musique Concrète, Benjamin T. Connolly

Pitzer Senior Theses

Hear & Now: Culturally Responsive Music Education Through Digital Audio Workstations & Musique Concrète is a two-part ethnomusicological study of how the capacities and affordability of modern electronic instruments could be utilized within school curricula as an affordable alternative to traditional music classes. I explore the musique concrète movement from mid-20th century France, aiming my examination towards the movement’s emphasis on the materiality of sound production and utilization of modern technology during the composition process. From there, the paper transitions into a study on the affordances of contemporary music technologies through a series of interviews with electronic composers, tracing the …

Hegemonic Microtonality: Decolonizing The Soundscape Of Music Theory Pedagogy, Ash K. Wetty

Honors Theses

This thesis examines how Western music theory pedagogy—long organized around tonal and twelve-tone equal-temperament frameworks—structures both what is taught and how students are trained to listen. Through a literature review tracing the historical construction of tonal universality in undergraduate curricula, the project argues that dominant models of music theory reproduce broader epistemic hierarchies inherited from Western conservatory traditions. Situating these histories within my own experience as a student navigating institutional listening norms, the thesis combines critical self-reflection with ethnographic research conducted across five liberal arts institutions, including the CBB consortium and JanPlan research at Wesleyan University and Amherst College. Rather …

Analytical Commentary And Performer's Guide To Carlos R. Martinez's Four Pieces For Trombone, Bailey Jean Hardy-Price

Theses and Dissertations--Music

Musicians with hearing loss are documented in prominent figures, such as Ludwig van Beethoven. In the age of developing medical technology, hearing aids can turn the course for many musicians. Music can serve as an audio medium for this journey.

Carlos R. Martinez (b. 1978) is an active composer and pianist commissioned to create a piece that explores the journey of hearing loss in a musician. Martinez’s Four Pieces for Trombone and Piano illustrate a musician’s discovery of their hearing loss, its consequences, and joy in implementing the use of a hearing aid. The detailed discussion of the composer and …

Interpretable Repertoire Search For Computer Supported Aural Skills Teaching: A Searchable Sia Based Digital Companion, Peter G. Fielding

Bailey School of Music Faculty Publications

Aural skills teaching depends heavily on repertoire selection, yet many large print and heritage song collections remain difficult to search in pedagogically meaningful ways. Teachers may need melodies with limited pitch collections for early solfège, modal examples for comparative listening, or repertory with controlled chromatic complexity, but such features are rarely indexed in printed sources. This paper proposes a computer-supported response to that problem: a searchable, rights-aware digital companion built around tonic-centered successive interval arrays (SIAs). SIAs provide an interpretable representation of pitch space by encoding the cyclic step pattern among the pitch classes present in a melody after tonic …

Shadows And Stars: How To Bring Student Compositions To Life, Dylan K. Ahrens

SPARK Symposium Presentations

Student composer Dylan Ahrens will present a session titled 'Shadows and Stars: a Symphony for Band,' premiered by the Belmont University Wind Ensemble on April 17, 2026. The composer will provide an analysis of the piece, discuss compositional processes, and outline the experience of learning to conduct one's own work with a collegiate ensemble. This presentation will include audio and video sample of rehearsal and performance, as well as images from the score.

Structuring The Musical Year: Dance, Topic, And Semiosis In Eighteenth-Century Calendar Music, Braden Shaw

Theses and Dissertations--Music

In this thesis, I apply a multifaceted analytical approach to examine a niche category of music called calendar music. In chapter one, I discuss Gregor Joseph Werner’s composition, the New and Very Curious Musical Calendar, and specifically address the minuets found within this work. Werner composes irregular measure groupings in his binary minuets and did so to represent the number of hours in day and night. This irregularity of measure groupings might superficially suggest that Werner’s pieces are stylized minuets only, unintended to accompany physical dancing and far removed from any actual choreographic influence of embodied performance. Werner, …