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This book analyses the sonata. Both building on and departing from earlier methods of analysis, it provides an in-depth examination of the sonata genre. After establishing the normative features of the sonata, the authors examine how individual sonatas from Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart both adhere to and deviate from those standards to a variety of effects. Co-authored by a music theorist and a musicologist, the book provides a foundational theory and offers insights on individual works from the Western canon.

This book, written in the form of a series of dialogues between the Schumannian characters Florestan and Eusebius, proposes a theory of metrical conflict that rigorously develops the metaphorical application of the concepts of consonance and dissonance to metrical phenomena. An introductory chapter traces the history of this metaphor from its origins in the early 19th century through to the 20th century. In a series of theoretical chapters, the book then presents detailed descriptions of various types of metrical dissonances (particularly important types are grouping dissonance — based on the association of incongruent metrical layers, and displacement dissonance — based on the non-aligned presentation of congruent layers); a system of labels to characterize specific dissonances; explanations of musical processes that arise from the formation, manipulation, and resolution of these dissonances; and a discussion of the interaction of metrical dissonance with pitch structure, form, and extramusical elements. The emphasis throughout is on the description of the ever-changing metrical states within pieces of music, and on the characterization of the metrical progressions formed by these changing states. The theoretical chapters are interspersed with three intermezzi that adopt a historical or performance-related approach to the topic; these deal, respectively, with influences on Schumann's metrical style; with Schumann's compositional process as it relates to metrical dissonance; and with performance issues arising from metrically dissonant passages. Throughout the book, the theory is applied mainly in the analysis of Robert Schumann's music, but analyses of the music of 18th-century, other 19th-century, and early 20th-century composers are also included.

This book is an attempt to decode, explain, and account for the way that social meaning in music is perceived. It is concerned throughout with the socially constituted values of musical styles, and contains a collection of wide-ranging chapters exploring aspects of sound and meaning, production and status, dissemination and reception, and criticism and aesthetics. Each chapter considers the workings of a particular relationship between ideology and musical style, offering different perspectives on how ideas are communicated through music. The book illustrates how musical styles construct ideas of class, sexuality, and ethnic identity. In doing so, it is concerned to demonstrate how such constructions relate to particular stylistic codes in particular cultural and historical contexts. The book is divided into four parts, covering the areas of gender and sexuality, ideology in relation to popular music, the sacred and profane, and ideology and cultural identity. The subjects debated include erotic representation from Monteverdi to Mae West, the sexual politics of 19th-century musical aesthetics, the Native American in popular music, the sacred and the demonic, Orientalism, and the initial impact of African-American music-making on the European classical tradition. The book's arguments are supported by ninety musical examples taken from such diverse sources as baroque and romantic opera, symphonic music, jazz, and 19th- and 20th-century popular songs.

This book is recognized as the seminal work paving the way for current studies in mathematical and systematic approaches to music analysis. The author, one of the 20th century’s most prominent figures in music theory, pushes the boundaries of the study of pitch-structure beyond its conception as a static system for classifying and inter-relating chords and sets. Known by most music theorists as “GMIT”, the book is by far the most significant contribution to the field of systematic music theory in the last half-century, generating the framework for the “transformational theory” movement. Appearing almost twenty years after GMIT’s initial publication, this Oxford University Press edition features a previously unpublished preface by the author, as well as a foreword by Edward Gollin contextualizing the work’s significance for the current field of music theory.

This book develops a theory of musical meter based on psychological research in temporal perception, cognition, and motor behavior. Meter is regarded as a kind of entrainment, a synchronization of attention and actions to the rhythms of the environment. Drawing on research on the ability to make durational discriminations and categorizations at various tempos, as well as evidence from neurobiology, the “speed limits” for meter are given: the inter-onset interval for metric elements must be greater than 100ms (10 per second) and less than 1.5-2.00 seconds. Care is taken to distinguish rhythms or patterns of duration from meters, the listener/performer's complex patterns of expectation and attention. It is thus shown that metric behaviors are highly tempo-dependent. Ambiguities may arise when a rhythmic pattern may be regarded under more than one meter, and conflicts may arise when a pattern of durations contradicts the ongoing meter. The music-theoretical core of the book is its development of a set of metric well-formedness constraints, which limit the temporal range and organization of patterns of metric entrainment. A consideration of the rhythmic practices of various non-western cultures, including some African and Indian music, leads to an additional well-formedness constraint, that of maximal evenness. This allows for meters that involve uneven (i.e., non-isochronous) beats or beat subdivisions. The book concludes with the many meters hypothesis, which proposes that a large number of expressively timed temporal templates are acquired that are readily used when listening in familiar musical contexts.

The offertory has played a crucial role in recent vigorous debates about the origins of Gregorian chant. Its elaborate solo verses are among the most splendid of chant melodies, yet the verses ceased to be performed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, making them among the least known and studied chants of the repertory. This study draws on the music, lyrics, and liturgical history of the offertory to shed new light on its origins and chronology. The book addresses issues that are at the heart of chant scholarship, such as the relationship between the Gregorian and Old Roman melodies, the nature of oral transmission, the presence of non‐Roman pieces in the Gregorian repertory, and the influence of theoretical thought on the transmission of the melodies. In contrast to the view that the Roman chant versions closely reflect the eighth‐century state of the melodies, this book argues that the prolonged period of oral transmission from the eighth to the eleventh centuries instead enforced a formulaic trend. Demonstrating that certain musical and textual traits of the offertory are distributed in distinct patterns by liturgical season, this study outlines new chronological layers within the repertory and explores the presence and implications of foreign imports into the Roman and Gregorian repertories. Available for the first time as a complete critical edition, ninety‐four Gregorian and Old Roman offertories are presented here in side‐by‐side transcriptions. A companion website provides music examples and essays that elucidate these transcriptions and the variants between manuscripts.

In the late 15th century the newly built Sistine Chapel was home to a vigorous culture of musical composition and performance. Josquin des Prez stood at its center, singing and composing for the pope’s private choir. This book offers a new reading of Josquin’s Roman compositions in light of the repertory he and his fellow papal singers performed from the chapel’s singers’ box. Comprising the single largest surviving corpus of late 15th-century sacred music, these pieces served as a backdrop for elaborately choreographed liturgical ceremonies—a sonic analogue to the frescoes by Botticelli, Perugino, and their contemporaries that adorn the chapel’s walls. Josquin’s Rome uses a comparative approach to uncover this aesthetically and intellectually rich musical tradition. Through multidimensional analyses set forth in lively prose, Jesse Rodin confronts longstanding problems concerning the authenticity and chronology of Josquin’s music while also offering nuanced readings of scandalously understudied works by his contemporaries. He further contextualizes Josquin by locating intersections between his music and the wider soundscape of the Cappella Sistina. Central to Rodin’s argument is the idea that these pieces lived in performance; for this reason Josquin’s Rome is firmly tethered to a series of superb companion recordings by Cut Circle, an ensemble directed by the author.

The question of whether music has meaning has been the subject of sustained debate ever since music became a subject of academic inquiry. Is music a language? Does it communicate specific ideas and emotions? What does music mean, and how does this meaning manifest itself? Working at the nexus of musicology, ethnomusicology, and music philosophy and aesthetics, the book presents a synthetic and innovative approach to musical meaning which argues deftly for the thinking of music as a discourse in itself—composed not only of sequences of gestures, phrases, or progressions, but rather also of the very philosophical and linguistic props that enable the analytical formulations made about music as an object of study. The book provides demonstrations of the pertinence of a semiological approach to understanding the fully-freighted language of Romantic music, stresses the importance of a generative approach to tonal understanding, and provides further insight into the analogy between music and language.

In this work, the author applies the conceptual framework developed in Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations to the varied repertoire of the 20th century. Analyzing the diverse compositions of four canonical composers—Simbolo from Dallapiccola's Quaderno musicale di Annalibera; Stockhausen's Klavierstuck III; Webern's Op. 10, No. 4; and Debussy's Feux d'articifice—the author brings forth structures which he calls “transformational networks” to reveal interesting and suggestive aspects of the music. In this complementary work, the author stimulates thought about the general methodology of musical analysis and issues of large-scale form as they relate to transformational analytic structuring.

This book explores rhythm and meter in the nineteenth‐century German Lied. It illustrates the transformation of poetic meter into musical rhythm and situates songs within larger aesthetic and historical narratives. The Lied, as a genre, is characterized especially by the fusion of poetry and music. Poetic meter itself has expressive qualities, and rhythmic variations contribute further to the modes of signification. These features often carry over into songs, even as they are set in the more strictly determined periodicities of musical meter. A new method of declamatory‐schema analysis is presented to illustrate common possibilities for setting trimeter, tetrameter, and pentameter lines. Degrees of rhythmic regularity and irregularity are also considered. Recent theories of musical meter are reviewed and applied in the analysis and interpretation of song. Topics include the nature of metric entrainment (drawing on music psychology), metric dissonance, hypermeter, and phrase rhythm. The book provides new methodologies for analysis and close readings of individual songs by Fanny Hensel née Mendelssohn, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Hugo Wolf. Whereas songs by Hensel, Schubert, and Schumann may generally be described as musical settings of poetic texts, songs by both Brahms and Wolf function as musical performances of poetic readings. The frequently mentioned differences between Brahms and Wolf are clarified, along with deeper affinities.