Volume 10 (2024)
“Japanese Tetrachordal Theory in Settings Old and New”
Liam Hynes-Tawa (Harvard University)
Volume 10.6 (November 2024)
Most systems of music theory in wide use today are built on the idea of the octave as the most fundamental frame for pitch—notes an octave apart are said to be equivalent, and scales fill up the range of an octave. But some music came out of cultural spheres that did not think in terms of octave-framing. This video introduces the theory of three-note “tetrachords” used by ethnomusicologist Koizumi Fumio for the analysis of Japanese folk music, and demonstrates how this framework can be useful not only for Japanese folk music, but also for more recent music that is, while heavily Western and octave-framed in some ways, also informed by Japanese folk music. I argue through this analysis that those aspects are difficult to elucidate without a theory like Koizumi’s that is made outside of the octave frame.
Keywords: scale, Japan, folk music, video game music, octave, tetrachord, musical meaning, Cultural Exchange, Cultural Appropriation, and Exoticism, history of music theory, melody and motive
“Whole-Tone Collections and Temporal Dislocation in Film Music”
Zachary Cairns (University of Missouri - St. Louis)
Volume 10.5 (September 2024)
Film composers have often drawn on the whole-tone collection to accompany dream sequences, partly because the intervals the collection contains provide a sense of stillness that seems well suited to depicting altered states of consciousness. But composers also use whole-tone collections as agents of temporal dislocation. Temporal dislocation refers to the experience of an intertwining of past, present, and future. There are three primary categories of temporal dislocation: narrative dislocation, where the film’s narrative removes itself from predominant temporal mode of storytelling; character dislocation, where a character experiences an event that challenges their chronological understanding of past, present, and/or future; and audience dislocation, where the film challenges the audience’s chronological understanding of past, present, and/or future. This video demonstrates these types of temporal dislocation through examples from Jaws (1975), Back to the Future II (1989), and Star Wars: Episode IV (1977). None of these films use a primarily whole-tone language, but they all turn to whole-tone collections for these specific moments.
Keywords: film music John Williams, Alan Silvestri, Whole-Tone Collection, Temporality, musical meaning
“Simultaneous Distinct Headbanging Patterns in Heavy Metal”
Guy Capuzzo (University of North Carolina at Greensboro)
Volume 10.4 (July 2024)
Heavy metal fans and performers headbang for many reasons, one of which involves entrainment and musical meter. Our impulse to entrain to meter, and to other people’s periodic movements, is so strong that one rarely sees headbangers moving their bodies in different ways at the same time. So how might we make sense of such moments involving performers?
This video-essay studies performances by the bands Meshuggah and Animals as Leaders to gain purchase on this question. In Meshuggah’s “Perpetual Black Second,” the band members choreograph a struggle between freedom and control that is central to the heavy metal aesthetic. In the same band’s “Rational Gaze,” the vocalist’s headbanging pattern, which moves at a different speed than the pattern of the remaining band members, represents the element of power fundamental to the heavy metal value system. Finally, in Animals as Leaders’ “Wave of Babies,” the relation of an asymmetrical guitar riff to an isochronous stream of cymbal attacks encourages one performer to entrain to the onbeat pulses and another performer to the offbeat ones.
Keywords: Heavy Metal headbanging, entrainment, rhythm, meter, Meshuggah, Animals as Leaders, melody
“Directionality in Twelve-Tone Composition”
Christoph Neidhöfer (McGill University)
Volume 10.3 (May 2024)
The equal representation of the twelve pitch classes in the twelve-tone row poses a particular challenge: how can a twelve-tone composition convey a sense of direction while constantly cycling through the aggregate, which, unlike diatonic and most other modes, has no intrinsic pitch-class hierarchy, since all pitch classes relate to each other in exactly the same way? This video illuminates how twelve-tone composer Julius Schloss (1902–1972) developed strategies to create directionality, that is, a clear sense in the harmonic, melodic, and phrase-structural organization of the music of moving from one place to another, thereby counteracting the “static” tendency of the twelve-tone method (Adorno [1949] 2006) with its commitment to the pitch-class equilibrium in the row.
Keywords: Twelve-tone music, serialism, directionality, form, Julius Schloss
“Dual Leading-Tone Loops in Recent Television Dramas”
Brad Osborn (University of Kansas)
Volume 10.2 (March 2024)
In this video I highlight a trend in recent television dramas in which characters’ conflicting emotions are scored using short chord loops that contain leading tones for major and relative minor keys simultaneously. These harmonic structures, which I dub dual leading-tone loops, present an eight-pitch-class palette (e.g. ABCDEFGG#) over a looping progression, and thus exert a strong tonal pull toward both a major key and its relative minor in short succession. Dual leading-tone loops are a particular subset of what scholars have identified as a “double tonic complex,” but in this case the two paired keys shuttle back and forth over a matter of seconds.
Keywords: film music, popular music, tonality, chord loops, musical meaning
“The Best Laid Plans . . . and Others: An 18th-Century Compositional Outline”
L. Poundie Burstein (Hunter College, CUNY) with Quynh Nguyen (Hunter College, CUNY) and Jennifer Roderer (Hunter College, CUNY/The Metropolitan Opera)
Volume 10.1 (January 2024)
A standard strategy for music analysis is to reduce out the less essential elements of a composition so as to arrive at a type of musical outline of the work. Both the benefits and problems with such an approach are highlighted in one of the first analyses along these lines, an examination by Heinrich Christoph Koch (1787) of the aria “Ein Gebet” from Carl Heinrich Graun’s oratorio Der Tod Jesu.
Keywords: music analysis, history of music theory, Galant music, analytic models, musical form, autographs and archival documents