Performance and Analysis
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8.6: Ben Duinker, “When Hip-Hop Accents Collide (They Create Syncopation)” – discusses the distinctive accent patterns at different levels of a hip-hop track (lyrics, delivery, and accompaniment) and discusses potential meanings of syncopation in this repertoire; suitable for students at all levels learning about rhythm and meter, syncopation, metric dissonance, and text-music relationships
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8.3: Nicholas Shea, “The Feel of the Guitar in Popular Music Performance” – shows how fretboard gestures help to demarcate musical form; provides an analytical framework rooted in popular music performance practice rather than “traditional” music theory
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7.5: Adem Merter Birson, “Understanding Turkish Classical Makam: Identifying Modes Through Characteristic Melodies” – shows how melodic formulas underlie makam melodies, and how these formulas were obscured by the adaptation of the repertoire to Western staff notation
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6.1: Cecilia Oinas, “Sensitivity, Intimacy, and Bodily Interaction in Kurtág’s Four-Handed Piano Works” – explores the intimacy of hands-crossing gestures in four-hand piano music
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6.3: Daniel Ketter, “Discovering Essential Voices in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Solo Instrumental Suite Movements” – cello arrangements used to help students understand the contrapuntal structure of Bach’s solo music; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yguQ1Q3kGB8&list=PLoDoWaIYcEP_bCYiTYBNnFwG2TypHrTDG and discussion in Headlam, “Music Informance: Performance for the Information Age” in the Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory
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5.1–5.3: Joshua Banks Mailman, “Babbitt’s Beguiling Surfaces, Improvised Inside” Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 – discusses Babbitt’s compositional techniques (specifically partial ordering) and connects these techniques to improvisation (including jazz); suitable for students studying 20th-century compositional techniques
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3.1: L. Poundie Burstein with Quynh Nguyen, “Parenthetic Aside in a 1789 Analysis of Mozart’s K. 284” – introduces a historically informed way to understand the two-part exposition (the exposition with the secondary theme) in a Classical sonata form; suitable for upper-level music students and students composing a Classical-style sonata first movement; discusses performance implications of treating the secondary theme as a “middle passage”
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3.3: Stephen Rodgers, “Music, Poetry, and Performance in a Song by Maria Schneider” – introduces how poetic declamation and the sound of recitation might influence compositional decision and the performer’s interpretive choices; suitable for student singers and composers
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1.3: Edward Klorman, “Multiple Agency in Mozart’s Chamber Music” – Professor Edward Klorman emphasizes how historical sources, including musical scores, can draw our attention to the social interplay among individual performers, or “personas enacted by the individual players” (4:38–41), within string quartets. Using an excerpt from the last movement of Mozart’s String Quartet in G Major, K. 387 (1782), as an example, Klorman illustrates his concept of “multiple agency,” a perspective that “celebrates the creative role of performers” and that yields “vivid analytical interpretations that can be masked by conventional, omniscient vantage points” (4:10–28). This video is suitable for students at all levels who would like to learn more about the socio-historical and -cultural dimensions of composition and performance. Basic knowledge of musical form and tonality are welcome but not necessary. For further reading, please see the author’s monograph Mozart’s Music of Friends: Social Interplay in the Chamber Works (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Edward T. Cone’s The Composer’s Voice (University of California Press, 1974).