Music Commons^™

Representations Of New York City In Latin Music, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Smt 1997 Plenary Session: Introductory Remarks, Joseph N. Straus

Publications and Research

The Society for Music Theory celebrates its twentieth anniversary amid the growing diversity of our field. Six of our most distinguished members have been asked to talk about what has interested them most in the past ten years, since our tenth-anniversary celebration in 1987 at the Eastman School of Music.

Latin American Classical Composers: A Biographical Dictionary [Book Review], Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Latin American Classical Composers: A Biographical Dictionary takes an approach to the definition and meaning of Latin America that remains faithful to the variety of countries, ethnicities, and languages that constitute the notion of Latin America. The geographical scope of the book extends from Argentina to Mexico; chronologically, it includes composers from the Baroque period to the present (some of the composers who have a place in the dictionary are still in their twenties, e.g., Juan Pablo Simoniello, who was born in 1969). Leaving out performers and terms, the book focuses on composers of the classical tradition (though one can …

Music, Identity, And Images Of India In The Indo-Caribbean Diaspora, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

Examines the role of one set of fragments in the identities of a diasporic population which is at once unique, and uniquely representative.

Babbitt And Stravinsky Under The Serial "Regime", Joseph N. Straus

Publications and Research

It is a great honor and a personal pleasure to participate in this Symposium in honor of Milton Babbitt. Babbitt's work, his "thinking in and thinking about music," have so profoundly shaped my own work and the field in which I work, the field of music theory, that it is hard imagine what either would have been without him. I have a deep and grateful sense of his influence on me.

Babbitt's more general influence, his role in shaping our larger musical culture, is the topic of this article. I want to focus in particular on the 1950s and 1960s …

Flamenco Deep Song [Book Review], Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Timothy Mitchell's Flamenco Deep Song certainly is not a flamenco handbook describing the genres, forms, instruments, and biographies of flamenco music, but a critical study questioning the accounts of flamenco (its histories, one could say) that have been set forward by historians, anthropologists, folklorists, and even flamenco artists themselves.

Don Quixote (1950) [Music Review], Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Far from being a culturally disengaged body of musical works, Roberto Gerhard's music is a rich and complex web of cultural references encompassing history, myth, literature, folklore, and contemporary social issues. Don Quixote (1950) exemplifies Gerhard's mature, fully developed style with this emblematic eclecticism.

Music, The Media, And Communal Relations In North India, Past And Present, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Invention Of "African Rhythm", Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

"African ryhthm" was invented in the 1950s when, thanks to pioneering research by the Reverend A. M. Jones, Alan Merriam, Gilbert Rouget, Erich von Hornbostel, and John Blacking, among others, "African music" was construed as an essentially rhythmic phenomenon. Three decades and a sizable body of empirical research later, it is easy to see that an overriding ideology of difference (between "Africa" and the "West") motivated these early efforts. This essay reinvents "African rhythm" not by denying its own ideological construction but by engaging in an imaginary dialogue with earlier researchers in an effort to concretize that which was missing …

The Tristan Chord In Historical Context: A Response To John Rothgeb, William Rothstein

Publications and Research

John Rothgeb’s analysis of the “Tristan chord” engages a large intertextual network, stretching back to the Baroque and centering on recitative. Examples of a specific figure of recitative, usually associated with the asking of a question, are presented and analyzed. Examples include passages in Wagner's operas before Tristan.

Robert Gerhard I La Seva Obra [Book Review], Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

The music of the Catalan composer Robert Gerhard (Valls, 1896–Cambridge, 1970) has been the object of increasing attention from both audience and critics. With several recent doctoral theses and numerous monographs and articles devoted to him (see, e.g., Jeffrey Miller, "An Analysis of Robert Gerhard's 'Libra'" [Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1987]), Gerhard is becoming one of the most highly venerated Iberian composers and perhaps the most outstanding successor of the lineage begun by Isaac Albeniz, Enrique Granados, and Manuel de Falla. Joaquim Homs's Robert Gerhard i la seva obra, one of the latest contributions to the …

Spanish Music In The Twentieth Century [Book Review], Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

North-American audiences, musicians, and musicologists remain unfamiliar with twentieth-century Spanish music. Most concertgoers identify Spanish music with the folkloristic tunes associated with such composers as Isaac Albéniz, thus construing a true "other" facing the Germanic musical tradition. The musicological canon is not only almost closed to non-European musics, but also excludes the music of some countries that since the Industrial Revolution have been deemed "peripheral," forgetting, to be sure, that five and six hundred years ago the actual periphery was all lands north of Paris. Most of us were not surprised to hear in a special session on Hispanic music …

Syncretism And Adaptation In Rasiya, A Braj Folksong Genre, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

Under the impact of the mass media, capitalist socio-economic relations, and other aspects of modernity, many Indian folk music genres have declined visibly and even disappeared, and it may be tempting to conclude that folk music as a whole has suffered in the twentieth century. However, a number of significant folk music genres have not only survived but flourished in the twentieth century, in some cases by virtue of their ability to syncretize elements of other traditions. One such genre is rasiya, which, in its various substyles, is the most popular and widespread folk music genre of the Braj region. …

Puerto Rican Music And Cultural Identity: Creative Appropriation Of Cuban Sources From Danza To Salsa, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Schubert's Sexuality: A Prescription For Analysis?, Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

What can Schubert's sexuality have to do with the analysis of his music? Four years ago, Maynard Solomon told a compelling story about a leading Austro-Germanic composer, one whose works are unlikely to be excluded from the narrowest definitions of the canon of European music since 1700: he was probably homosexual. Since then, Solomon's tentative argument has hardened into "fact" in the popular musicological imagination, not because additional evidence has become available, but because, in a field starved of headlines and scandal, such a revelation promised a much needed change of critical perspective.

Philosophy And The Analysis Of Music: Bridges To Musical Sound, Form, And Reference [Book Review], Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

In recent years there seems to have been a tendency (in theory at least) to view conventional academic disciplines with a certain hostility as intellectual chastisements that, rather than opening our minds to knowledge, merely hinder us. In the humanities especially, interdisciplinary studies have become a trend. Many scholars are tempted to abandon the cozy security of their methodology and embark on other, more adventurous hybrid enterprises. Philosophy and the Analysis of Music, one such enterprise, draws its premises from two apparently different fields, philosophy and musical analysis, in order to arrive at a better understanding of music.

Does Music Theory Need Musicology?, Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

Understood as a search for "the abstract principles embodied in music and the sounds of which it consists," music theory casts a wide net: it calls for a comparative sample and insists on a systematic methodology. As " the scholarly study of music, wherever it is found historically or geographically," musicology casts an even wider net. In practice, however, it has not been possible to transcend historical and geographical boundaries. (How often have you read an article on contemporary rock in JAMS or on Asian music in 19th-Century Music?) Obviously, any attempt to explore the juncture between music theory …

Representing African Music, Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

Of all the currents of change that have swept the humanities during the last half-century, the most far-reaching revolve around language. Philosophy, history, and literary criticism, among other language-based disciplines, have developed what is often presented as a largely unprecedented self-consciousness about representation. The message to scholars in nonlanguage-based disciplines is clear: to be taken seriously, one can no longer view language as a transparent window to an objective reality but must confront the foundational political and ideological baggage of the medium itself, as well as its constant slippage in the hands of the producer.

The "Llibre De Franqueses I Privilegis Del Regne De Mallorca": A Source Of Music Iconography, Antoni Pizà, Ramon Rosselló

Publications and Research

The Arxiu del Regne de Mallorca of Palma de Mallorca, Spain, holds numerous collections of manuscripts that have been assembled at random regardless of their unity in subject or time period. The codices kept at the Arxiu comprise many different types of documents whose provenance and compilation history is yet to be determined. One of the most valuable among these codices is the Llibre de franqueses i privilegis del Regne de Mallorca (Codex 1), also known as Códice de los Reyes.

Two "Mistakes" In Stravinsky's Lntroitus, Joseph N. Straus

Publications and Research

During the 1950s and 60s, Stravinsky learned, mastered, and significantly transformed a musical language that was, for him, entirely new—the language of twelve-tone serialism. As the abundant compositional sketches from this period in the Paul Sacher Foundation make clear, this process was not always an easy one for Stravinsky. Indeed, the sketches show him groping for solutions to basic compositional problems, including particularly the problem of creating meaningful vertical harmonies from the essentially linear nature of the twelve-tone system.

The Cassette Industry And Popular Music In North India, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

Since the early 1970s the advent of cassette technology has had a profound effect on music industries worldwide. This influence has been particularly marked in the developing world, where cassettes have largely replaced vinyl records and have extended their impact into regions, classes and genres previously uninfluenced by the mass media. Cassettes have served to decentralise and democratise both production and consumption, thereby counterbalancing the previous tendency toward oligopolisation of international commercial recording industries.

While the cassette boom started later in India than in areas such as the Middle East and Indonesia, its influence since the early 1980s has been …

The "Anxiety Of Influence" In Twentieth-Century Music, Joseph N. Straus

Publications and Research

The musical world of this century has been dominated, to an extraordinary and unprecedented degree, by the music of the past. Performers play music primarily by long-deceased canonical composers, composers learn their craft by studying the master-works of the past, including the distant past, and scholars devote themselves to studying increasingly ancient musical monuments. The past has never been so powerfully present as in this century. In this historical situation, composers have felt an understandably deep ambivalence toward the masterworks of the past. On the hand, those masterworks inspire admiration, even reverence. At the same time, they also inspire the …

The Progress Of A Motive In Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, Joseph N. Straus

Publications and Research

The progress of this passage from sketch to final version follows what for Stravinsky is a reasonably common pattern in the composition of The Rake's Progress. The initial sketches tend to be rhythmically square and harmonically rudimentary. They often have the appearance of a simple, classical prototype. As musical ideas are brought to a more final state, the sketches often become increasingly free rhythmically and increasingly remote from classical tonal norms harmonically. A significant aspect of Stravinsky's compositional process in The Rake's Progress, as documented by the sketches, involves the explicit transformation of relatively traditional tonal prototypes. In …

A Primer For Atonal Set Theory, Joseph N. Straus

Publications and Research

Atonal set theory has a bad reputation. Like Schenkerian analysis in its earlier days, set theory has had an air of the secret society about it, with admission granted only to those who possess the magic password, a forbidding technical vocabulary bristling with expressions like "6- Z44" and "interval vector." It has thus often appeared to the uninitiated as the sterile application of arcane, mathematical concepts to inaudible and uninteresting musical relationships. This situation has created understandable frustration among musicians, and the frustration has grown as discussions of twentieth-century music in the professional theoretical literature have come to be expressed …

Legitimate And Illegitimate Variation In Raga Interpretations, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Variation Procedures In Northern Ewe Song, V. Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

The major organizational principle of Northern Ewe song is one shared by numerous African, Oriental, and European musical traditions: a small number of models (variously described as "basic shapes," "archetypes," "background structures," "basic designs," "core patterns," "deep structures") is transformed in a wide variety of ways during performance. Variation takes place on different hierarchic levels both within and between songs and includes practically all of a song's dimensions (rhythm, interval, register, contour, harmony, and so on). This principle, although widely demonstrated in the literature on African song (see, among others, Jones 1976; Kauffman 1984; Schmidt 1984; and Erlmann 1985), is …

Musical Inspiration As Seen Through The Artist's Eyes, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

The role of inspiration in the creation of a musical work has been a matter for conjecture and research by musicians and psychologists. But the realm of inspiration belongs to the creators themselves, who supply mythology, religion, and science to account for the source of an artwork. Throughout history, painters, too, have given their version of musical inspiration and the process of the creation of the work of art. What is musical inspiration? Where does it come from? What are its effects? The following essay explores some painters' responses by surveying some representative works of art.

Thumrī From 1770 To 1870, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

1920 To The Present: The Mature Bol Banāo Thumrī, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Literary Aspect Of Thumrī Compositions, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.