Oxford Seminar in Music Theory & Analysis (OSiMTA)

Naomi Waltham-Smith, University of Warwick (23 October 2019)

‘A motley music: the music analyst lends an ear to democracy’ 

British democracy is in crisis. Lord Keen QC has just taken the extraordinary step of having to reassure the Justices that the Prime Minister will take all necessary steps to comply with any declaration the Supreme Court makes. Legal experts, political scientists, and the Twittersphere have been exercising themselves in debating the constitutional stakes of a juncture (and hubris) unprecedented in modern times. More broadly, in recent years scholars across a wide variety of disciplines—historians, political theorists, economists, sociologists, philosophers—have offered various analyses of the resurgence of right-wing populisms, the emergence of leaders brandishing authoritarian personalities, and the collapse in the hegemony of the liberal political-economic consensus. But there is another hypothesis that merits exploration, a diagnosis that music analysts are in a privileged position to test and explain—namely, that the crises of representation we are currently witnessing may be analysed as a generalized crisis of listening.

My admittedly provocative argument has two limbs. First, ever since Plato dismissed the people as a motley rabble in the same breath that he rejected certain rhythmic and melodic modes, music, sound, and listening have repeatedly been present at precisely those moments in the European political philosophical tradition when thinkers have sought to specify the limitations and especially the aporias of democracy. I suggest some explanations for the privileged status of this aural metaphorics and draw a number of conclusions from the historical vicissitudes of the concept of listening for understanding the contemporary situation in which there is paradoxically both a democratic deficit and a panacoustic excess of listening.

Second, the changes in social forms of listening are inseparable from and arguably even symptomatic of transformations in the conditions and practices of musical listening undergone as a result of digital mediations. The consumption of music through streaming services, together with the rise of digital personal assistant, affective listening technologies, and the judicial weaponization of forensic sound analysis, have combined to alter radically our attunement to our environment and to others around us. If our relation to this planet, and to the other human and non-human lives it supports, is a function of listening, who better than music analysts to clarify its intricacies, expose its risks, and advocate for its future possibilities?

Sarah Moynihan, St Anne’s College, Oxford (20 November 2019)

‘Unpicking a static reception: unheard suspensions at the seams of Sibelius’s Swan of Tuonela’ 

Sibelius’s early tone poem, The Swan of Tuonela, has a long-established reception as a sound-sheet devoid of harmonic motion. Yet not only has this interpretation tended to ‘flatten’ features that do not conform to its idealized hearing as a static landscape – a swan gliding in the Finnish river –this particular reading also seems to have repelled rigorous analytical approaches. The work’s few dedicated investigations emphasize its ‘formlessness’ or describe it in terms similar to Glenda Dawn Goss, as an ‘exquisite moment of stasis’. What is more, its popularity and standing as an example of quintessential Sibelian symphonicism, have both supported the commonplace and, at times, exoticizing association of Sibelius’s music with proto-minimalist depictions of Finnish landscapes.

This seminar will reappraise what has, itself, become a static and enduring interpretation of The Swan of Tuonela by revealing that this Sibelian variation form is not, in fact, static. Small disruptive ‘tears’ or ‘slashes’ can be heard in the work’s fabric. At these breaks in the cor anglais’s recurring melody and at the ‘seams’ of the form, ‘timbral outsiders’ – to use John Sheinbaum’s term – call out across a conceptual distance. These Suspensions, in the Adornian sense, establish a dialogue with the cor anglais’s musical material that suggests a double-tonic complex between keys from different tonal systems. The paper will also introduce several new analytical tools to Sibelius’s music in a full voice-leading analysis of the piece, including ‘multivalent’ and ‘sonorous voice-leading’, and ‘timbral uncovering’. By examining a particular quirk in the work’s publication history, the textual transformation its programme, and unexamined markings in Sibelius’s copy of The Kalevala, the seminar will arrive at a new programmatic reading of the Swan of Tuonela that recontextualizes it in the heroic Kalevala-narrative of Sibelius’s suite of tone poems, Lemminkäinen,Op. 22.

Martin Stokes, King’s College, London (29 January 2020)

‘Sentimental gesture and the politics of “shape” in the performances of Abd al-Halim Hafiz’ 

Professor Stokes encourages all those attending the seminar to read a draft version of his paper in advance. The performance in question and an (accurate but not very poetic) translation of the text can be found here: https://lyricstranslate.com/en/qariat-el-fingan-coffee-cup-reader-fortune-teller.html (It includes in brackets the Nizar Qabbani, ‘original’ version of the poem, which is useful.)

Elizabeth Eva Leach, University of Oxford (26 February 2020)

‘Imagining the un-encoded: analysing affect in a twelfth-century love song’ 

This paper is a response to an article I published in Music Analysisin Spring 2019, with the title, ‘Do trouvère melodies mean anything?’ There, I examined three songs by the early trouvère Blondel de Nesle in which the melodies and poetic versification are so highly wrought and patently compositionally structured that the answer to the question was a clear ‘yes’. With the examples considered there, the dice are loaded: given that only pitches and poetic text survive from these songs, when those aspects are clearly a compositional focus, diagnosing meaning in pitch or text structure is relatively easy. In the current paper I will instead consider a different kind of case, a song in which the meanings are not fully—perhaps not even mainly—encoded in the structure of pitches, but might arguably have existed in other aspects of performance that are harder to get at given the nature of the surviving notated trace. The analytical procedure here must therefore be to investigate ways in which the performative aspects of this very generically structured song might have contributed to—might indeed have specifically enabled—its meaningfulness in performance. Because I am therefore talking about the performance of trouvère song, a topic about which we have virtually no secure historical information, the analytical method here is essentially speculative, creative, and imaginative, relying on the musicological and musical imagination of a contemporary medieval musicologist, rather than any medieval information, to offer an analysis of Blondel de Nesle’s Mes cuers me fait conmencier(RS1269).

Jack Boss, University of Oregon (29 April 2020)

‘Visions of moonlight and global coherence in “Mondestrunken” from Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire’ 

The sixth chapter of my new book, Schoenberg’s Atonal Music, presents Pierrot lunaire as autobiographical.  The collection of 21 melodramas in three parts portrays Schoenberg being led astray into atonality by the moonlight of modernism, suffering the consequences (alienation from his audience, excoriation by the critics), and attempting to return to his older style but falling short.  These different stages of Pierrot/Schoenberg’s journey are depicted in each of the melodramas by “basic (visual) images” drawn from the first two lines of text that then motivate the pitch and rhythmic organization.  In my lecture, I will explain one of these basic images in detail: in “Mondestrunken,” the image of moonlight streaming down toward the composer in waves gives rise to unending chains of tetrachords linked by common pitch classes, that is, weak and strong Rp relations (Allen Forte’s term).  Though other images interrupt the steady streams of descending moonbeams at times, such as expanding and contracting intervallic “bodies” at the beginning of the second stanza, and the image of the unsteady poet at the beginning of the third, the melodrama returns again and again to the descending moonbeams, and in them it finds its coherence.

Chloë Zadeh, University of Manchester (13 May 2020)

‘Femininities in circulation: gender, emotion and North Indian semi-classical music’ 

In this talk, I explore the relationship between music, emotion and the social construction of gender. I do this by analysing how culture-specific models of femininity circulate in and through the music of the North Indian semi-classical vocal genre ṭhumrī. Musicians and listeners typically describe ṭhumrī as a genre that both expresses and elicits feminine forms of emotion. In a context where ideas about femininity are in flux, my research suggests that ṭhumrī serves as a powerful affective resource for musicians and listeners (especially women) to construct and inhabit gendered identities. Moreover, building on Sara Ahmed’s theorisation of “affective economies”, I show how the gendered emotions of ṭhumrī are mobilised to perform social and political work in the context of twenty-first century India. This work addresses the need for research on music, gender and emotion that considers both text and reception, combining music analysis with ethnographic research. Focussing on one performance, I draw on interviews with musicians and listeners to illuminate ways in which ṭhumrī’s (gendered) affective charge emerges from specific features of the musical sound. In doing so, I consider the extent to which Indian classical performers’ ways of understanding and talking about their own performances are themselves a kind of music analysis and I explore some of the implications of this for the broader project of decolonising music analysis. Through this work, I argue there is much to be gained by considering how musical styles and structures are implicated in wider affective economies and that such work can reveal how musical emotions contribute to the reproduction of large-scale structures of power and inequality.

Philip Ewell, Hunter College, New York (21 October 2020)

‘How We Got Here, Where To Now?’ 

The societal tipping point that is so often cited in the United States these days is intimately linked with our past, a troubled and, at times, violent past that has infused virtually everything that we Americans do. This past is now under great scrutiny in music studies, in how we teach music to our students, how we examine music in analysis, and how we choose the music we professional musicians consider worthy of attention. In this talk I consider our past so that we might chart a path for the future. Only through an exhaustive study of the past can we truly understand why the academic study of music is what it is today, a study that remains exclusionist with respect to musics that are not centred around both whiteness and maleness. In coming to terms with this difficult past we together – white, black, and everyone in between – can create a new academic study of music, rich and inclusive, which will be rewarding and emancipating for all.

Barbara Bleij, Amsterdam Conservatorium (18 November 2020)

‘Current trends in jazz theory and analysis: reading Wayne Shorter’ 

In this paper I will present analyses of two compositions by Wayne Shorter. I will start with an overview of the state of affairs in the field of jazz (theory and) analysis. This field is rather dispersed, while subject matters, methods, and results may, in part at least, be determined by the institutional or geographical context in which an analyst operates. I will discuss three categories: chord-scale theory, academic jazz theory, and conservatory-pedagogical theory. These three categories are by no means mutually exclusive, and may intersect to varying degrees depending on the context. Subsequently, I will summarize the most important findings of my study of Shorter’s ‘E.S.P.’, ‘Infant Eyes’, and ‘Virgo’. This part of the paper serves as an introduction to my views on how to address this kind of repertoire. I will argue that a pluralistic approach is necessary in order to try and capture the many facets of these pieces. The paper will conclude with an analysis of ‘Lester Left Town’ (Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers, The Big Beat, 1960) and ‘Harlequin’ (Weather Report, Heavy Weather, 1977). These are two rather different compositions, which invite us to step out of our analytical comfort zone and creatively explore out-of-the-box tools to come closer to these pieces.

J.P.E. Harper-Scott, Royal Holloway, University of London (27 January 2021)

‘Tonality and the capitalist mode of exploitation’ 

Tonal music is a product of human intellectual and artistic labour, dependent on the activity of ideologically interpellated human beings. It therefore imbibes and reflects the relative ideological positioning of the very many human beings who form its laws and customs, as well as its normative and exceptional expressive instances in particular musical works. It might seem trivially true to state that there exists a tight relationship between tonality and the world of late capitalism with which it is coeval. The first part of this paper therefore argues, by considering it alongside a modern analysis of class relations under capitalism, for a more precise articulation of the relation between musical tonality and the historical situation that produced it. Then, in its second part, it demonstrates through a harmonically dualist, Riemannian analysis of a chord in Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata, how some music can seem to negate elements of the currently existing ideology.

Catherine A. Bradley, University of Oslo (24 February 2021)

‘Fragments from a medieval motet manuscript in Stockholm: perspectives for theory and analysis’ 

This paper presents and analyses previously unstudied fragments from a medieval motet book, probably produced in France around 1300 and now preserved in the Riksarkivet in Stockholm. The fragments contain traces of eight compositions, five of which are unknown from any other surviving sources. One of these unique motets—Dies ista celebris/Hec est Dies triumphalis/MANERE, which is almost complete—notates portions of its underlying plainchant tenor quotation in red ink. I suggest, not only that this motet may represent the earliest extant instance of red notation, but also that red ink is employed here to indicate octave transposition. This is a usage described in the fourteenth-century Ars vetus et nova treatise of Philippe de Vitry but of which no examples have hitherto been known in practice. The Stockholm fragments raise questions about the analytical challenges and possibilities of evidence that is—quite literally—fragmentary, and they underline a significant cross-fertilization between practices of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century motet composition, practices often studied in isolation.

This paper seeks to show that the Stockholm fragments came from a type of motet collection, whose contents and transmission is not directly comparable with any other known thirteenth- or fourteenth-century source. It makes the case for an apparent gap in evidence for motet composition and circulation at the turn of the thirteenth century into the fourteenth, exploring the possible explanations for and ramifications of a lacuna in surviving sources around 1300 and proffering new insights into what has been lost.

Nicola Dibben, University of Sheffield (5 May 2021)

‘Analysing musical new multimedia: music in mobile apps and extended reality’ 

This paper investigates an emerging new musical multimedia form—interactive musical/sonic art experiences in audio augmented reality. It is common to think of augmented reality as visual, in which imagery is overlaid onto a scene viewed through a screen. However, it can also take aural form—audio augmented reality— in which (spatialised) headphone sound is integrated with (or more commonly) overlays audio from the physical environment surrounding the listener. Previous research has focused on the technical challenges and realisation of sound spatialisation, interactivity, and storytelling in extended reality formats. It has less frequently addressed what audio augmented reality means for musicking (presentational and participatory) and musical aesthetics. In this paper I identify distinct approaches to music in audio augmented reality, and use this to contextualise analyses of specific musical examples, including Moonmoons AR app(Anna Meredith, 2019) and Bloom: Open Space Hololens installation (Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers, 2018). I use these to highlight specific material, aesthetic and phenomenological characteristics of and possibilities for audio augmented reality music, including compositional and listener agency and interactivity, visualisation of sound, the open-work and ludification. In doing so I reflect on what the important music-analytic questions might be about these media and what kinds of theory and analytical methods might be needed to better understand them.

David Bretherton, University of Southampton (19 May 2021)

‘Queering and cripping Schubert’s Atlas’ 

As a gay graduate student in the 2000s, whose thesis was on Franz Schubert’s songs, learning of the furore surrounding Maynard Solomon’s (1989) and Susan McClary’s (1992; 1994) suggestion that the composer may have been homosexual made quite an impression. Their suggestion also appeared to provide a potential interpretative explanation for some of the odd structural features I was discovering in Schubert’s ‘Der Atlas’ at the time. Such a gay reading of the song is consistent with the approach McClary took in ‘Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert’s Music’ (1992; 1994), and also with Sara Ahmed’s notion in Queer Phenomenology (2006) that, put simply, queer people’s orientations and experiences render them sensitive to things that straight people, with their heteronormative orientation and experiences, are not. In truth, though, I was never entirely convinced by my gay reading of ‘Der Atlas’, for reasons I will set out. More recently, as someone with unseen disabilities, I also see the song’s depiction of bodily strain, constraint and despair through the lens of disability. In my OSiMTA seminar I will explore how one might interpret the song, by first offering a technical analysis and straight readings, before queering and cripping these readings, reflecting on my own positionality, and (time permitting) speculating on the relevance or otherwise of this type of work.

Season 4 Theme: Rhythm—Metre—Temporality

Richard Cohn, Yale University (20 October 2022)
‘Slow pulses: do they exist? Are they aesthetically relevant? Can we feel them in the gut?’

Music psychologists have found robust evidence that isochronous segments slower than two seconds are processed differently from metric pulses, leading many music theorists to the view that they are aspects of a distinct system associated with phrase structure and form.  However, composers sometimes treat slow isochronous segments as if they were metric, subjecting them to large-scale hemiolas. Moreover, the large-scale ‘hemiola-like things’ often interact, either directly or by association, with small-scale hemiolas that are uncontroversially metric, suggesting that the composes are conceiving of them as if they were part of a single system of relations. I examine two examples, from Franck's Les Djinns, and from the Scherzo of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. A weak conclusion is that, even if slow and fast isochronies are sequestered into two distinct systems, it is in our interest as listeners, performers and analysts to pretend (imagine) that they are fused into a single system, as these composers evidently did. (This follows from the assumption that artists are licensed to imagine structures that are beyond human capacities – what might it be like to fly like a bird? – and that listeners and analysts are licensed to accompany artists on the journey). More strongly, I offer several different inductive and deductive perspectives that will make analysts, etc., more comfortable with the proposition that slow pulses ‘actually are’ aspects of a metric system, in certain contexts. 

Peter Elsdon, University of Hull (18 November 2021)
‘“Finding one”: conceptualising metre in contemporary jazz’

Recent scholarship on metre by Mariusz Kozak (forthcoming) and Matthew Hudson (2019) has focussed attention on metre as a form of ‘culturally situated bodily inquiry’ (Kozak). Drawing on Kozak’s work on the backbeat in progressive metal, I look at the way that the ‘one’ in contemporary jazz is a means by which musicians and listeners explore the kinaesthetic aspects of metre. This leads me to draw on Butler’s formulation of metre as ‘something that we do’ (2014: 196) in exploring some diverse forms of practice in contemporary jazz.

Danuta Mirka, Northwestern University (26 January 2022)
‘Harmonic schemata and hypermetre’

The concept of hypermetre implies that perception of metre extends upon metrical levels not reflected in notation.  This concept is thus predicated on similarities between metre and hypermetre, yet perception of hypermetre is conditioned by several factors not involved in perception of metre proper. According to Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, metre above the bar level is increasingly supplanted by grouping which, at higher levels, is equivalent to phrase structure. The eminent roles played by phrase structure and harmonic rhythm in perception of hypermetre were dubbed by William Rothstein, respectively, the ‘rule of congruence’ and the ‘rule of harmonic rhythm’. The ‘rule of texture’ was added by Eric McKee and the ‘rule of parallelism’ reformulated by David Temperley. I will posit another preference factor for hypermetre: the hypermetrical profile of harmonic schemata. By contrast to other preference factors, which work ‘bottom-up’ and cue single events as strong, this factor allows for ‘top-down’ processing of hypermetre by mapping the hypermetrical profile of a given schema upon a span of time including several events which can be either strong or weak. I will concentrate on the cadential schema and illustrate its effect upon hypermetre with examples from Haydn’s and Mozart’s string quartets.

Anna Zayaruznaya, Yale University (23 February 2022)
‘Philippe de Vitry’s rhythms’

The fourteenth-century French ars nova has often been described as liberating composers from the final vestiges of modal rhythm by providing them with a notational system capable of expressing a vastly expanded range of durations with relatively little ambiguity. A certain amount of technological determinism is built into this account, insofar as it implies that musicians were being limited by the strictures of the notational system they employed, and that when the system expanded this caused them to be, in turn, more expansive in their creativity. While it cannot be denied that the affordances of notational systems have an impact on the music these systems encode, the implied relationship between a limiting theory and a constrained practice does not adequately account for the situation that can be gleaned from either the theoretical or the practical sources. Attention to the rhythmic usage of Philippe de Vitry across his long compositional career suggests that Vitry was by no means interested in writing every possible rhythm. Instead we observe a surprising level of continuity across the ars vetus/ars nova divide and a slowly expanding palette of rhythms across the decades between c. 1320 and 1360. What might be termed Vitry’s rhythmic conservatism stands in productive tension with his reputation as a pioneering ars nova theorist. This case study serves to nuance our understanding of the dynamic relationship between notation, rhythm and style in this era – and presumably in others.

Isabel Mundry, Zurich University of the Arts/University of Music and Performing Arts Munich (27 April 2022)
‘Issues of temporality in current compositional practice’

The musical thinking that shaped me is based on a linear and processual model of time. However, for some years now I have been increasingly interested in other forms, stimulated above all by my interest in oral cultures. There, time forms are oriented both forwards and backwards. What is remembered is evoked and unfolds in the presence new articulations that can later be remembered again. The music that emerges is as much a trace as a progression. Using examples from my recent works, I will explain how I search for comparable forms and how they give rise to compositional and aesthetic reflections.

Lindelwa Dalamba, University of the Witwatersrand (18 May 2022)

‘Iintaka Neentonga (birds and sticks) – or, how South African jazz musicians "talk" music theory’

In his introduction to the World of Music’s special issue on South African jazz (2016), Nishlyn Ramanna identifies two main streams of research on the country’s jazz. The first is indebted to social history (this speaker’s intellectual home); the second to ‘close musical analyses of particular styles, compositions and recorded improvisations’ (2016: 7). These streams have rarely met, and their separation is not unrelated to the country’s separatist – apartheid – past. Post-apartheid, South African jazz studies has seen growing scholarly contributions from young black researchers who are primarily performers, and whose interests are close musical analysis and transcription. This is a development that should be met with caution, for at least two reasons. First, uncritical adoption of so-called western musical vocabularies may lead to a degree of conflict between what is heard and what may make sense on paper. Second, it may lead to the erasure of this music’s formative contexts: what languages did these musicians use to make sense of jazz? Revisiting how black South African jazz musicians ‘talked’ music theory reminds us of the polyglot urban spaces they inhabited, despite the white government’s displeasure. It also enables us to consider further the process of American jazz’s adoption in apartheid South Africa. In this paper, I trace the history of this process to the colonial encounter, and discuss briefly how mission-educated black choral composers negotiated these dynamics. I then focus on the archival manuscript (in particular its marginalia and paratexts) of the composer Todd Matshikiza’s King Kong: An African Jazz Opera (1959). This, then, is a story of black South African jazz musicians who described rests as ‘birds’ and staff notation as ‘sticks’ on the page, and for whom free jazz’s improvisational flourishes were the ‘chicken run’. Building on Ramanna, I insist that the streams should meet: the inscription of South African jazz must not be at the cost of its socio-historical complexity. 

Season 5 Theme: Borrowing—Appropriation—Intertextuality

George Haggett, University of Oxford (19 October 2022)

'The endless knot: medievalist motets in Harrison Birtwistle’s Gawain (1991)'

In her rehearsal diary from the first production of Harrison Birtwistle and David Harsent’s Gawain, Rhian Samuel describes the composer drawing a line on the back of an envelope. She recounts his insistence that the entire opera was built from ‘one line’ decorated by ‘several simultaneous lines’, in ‘a kind of organum’. (Samuel 2008, 173) The term ‘organum’ encapsulates diverse and centuries-spanning medieval techniques for harmonising chant; Birtwistle found it fascinating, and heterophonic methods analogous to it permeate his output. (Hall 1984, 18-23)

In this paper, I explore how such a compositional medievalism might function in Birtwistle’s operatic adaptation of the fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I focus on the tableau at the end of Act One, in which Gawain is ritually armed for his perilous quest. Underscored by sung polyphonic Marian motets, the seasons turn from Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn to Winter again. In the final section, Gawain is presented with a shield bearing the emblem of star-shaped pentacle, or ‘endless knot’. 

The pentangle serves as a complex symbol for Arthurian paradigms of courtly love, blurring secular modes of virtue and desire with Christian and Pagan imagery. In my analysis, I suggest that the ‘endless knot’ can express the ambiguities of narrative time in tandem with the ‘one line’ of Birtwistle’s modernist organum. Traceable as one unbroken path, the pentangle’s five symmetrical points gather the past, present and future into a unified and potently symbolic process.

Hall, Michael, 1984. Harrison Birtwistle (Contemporary Composers). London: Robson Books

Samuel, Rhian, 2008. ‘Birtwistle’s Gawain: an essay and a diary’. Cambridge Opera Journal, 4/2, 163–78

Frankie Perry, Independent Scholar (16 November 2022)

'Analysing arrangement: four versions of Mahler’s early songs'

Mahler’s three volumes of Lieder und Gesänge (1880-1889) comprise the only large collection of songs that the composer did not orchestrate himself: from 1892 onwards, the large majority of his songs were written in at least two performing versions, including for voice-piano and voice-orchestra; and while he returned to orchestrate the earlier Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, only a single sketch fragment evidences any intention to similarly return to the Lieder und Gesänge. Given the considerable popularity of Mahler’s orchestral songs since the mid twentieth century, the ‘metamorphoses’ of certain Lieder und Gesänge within Mahler’s symphonic oeuvre, and the sharp rise of song arrangements on the concert stage in the past several decades, it is unsurprising that several later composers and arrangers have produced orchestral versions of the Lieder und Gesänge. This paper explores the reception and arrangement history of the songs through a comparative analysis of four sets of orchestrations, focusing in particular on potential models used by arrangers for their versions, and their varying interactions with ideas of Mahler’s ‘early’ song-writing style.

I turn first to versions of the songs by Colin Matthews and David Matthews (1964/2016) and by Detlev Glanert (2014-15), which I suggest belong to a phenomenon of ‘historically informed arrangement’ – both seem to aim, in different ways, to realise how Mahler might have orchestrated the songs himself. I then consider these versions alongside those by Luciano Berio (1986-7) and Eberhard Kloke (2011), both of which I suggest also belong under the ‘historically informed’ umbrella but which use their ‘historical information’ as means for subversion and play. I also introduce texture graphs of the orchestrations, designed to comparatively visualise different approaches and detect emerging patterns, and incorporate an evaluation of some of the prospects and limitations of this analytical method.

Joe Bennett, Berklee College of Music, Boston (18 January 2023)

'Forensic musicology in commercial popular music: ontologies and epistemologies'

Forensic musicology is the practice of analysing music to investigate whether a song is copied from a previous song. It is used in music copyright infringement disputes to establish the extent of plagiarism, and in film, radio and TV to ensure that new music is not too derivative of older music. Two main methods are used – musical comparison with prior art research, and audio sample authentication. In this session, Professor Bennett will provide an overview of the field, with live demonstrations of the techniques that Forensic Musicologists use to answer the often difficult and contentious question ‘how similar is too similar?’. The session will include examples from copyright infringement lawsuits in the United States, including the notable ‘Blurred Lines’ and ‘Stairway To Heaven’ cases of recent years.

Justin Williams, University of Bristol (18 February 2022, cancelled)

'Stylistic adaptation in the music of Stevie Wonder and Return to Forever'

The 1970s was a rich period not only for the music industry, but also for the intertextual compositional practices of several musical cultures. Today’s seminar centres on a concept I have been developing, drawn from Soviet composer Alfred Schnittke’s writings on ‘stylistic adaptation’ (1973). Using examples from Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life (1976) and Return to Forever’s Romantic Warrior (1976), I seek to demonstrate how stylistic adaptation works, and how it differs from other forms of musical borrowing. Such a perspective will shed light on polystylism in 1970s popular and art music worlds, and how jazz fusion or progressive styles also complicated the race-based genre system based in the United States.

Kofi Agawu, Graduate Center, City University of New York (3 May 2023)

'African art music and the challenge of postcolonial composition'

Africa’s art music tradition is not as widely known as it might be. For many people, African music typically indexes ‘traditional’ music of ostensibly ancient origins or varieties of modern ‘popular’ music. And yet, since the middle of the nineteenth century, Black Africans have routinely composed and performed for non-participating audiences such items as art songs, choral anthems, piano pieces, folk operas, and music for large and small ensembles. How might we explain the invisibility of this tradition in the competing discourses of music studies today?        

Drawing from a larger study in progress, I propose in this talk to lay bare some of art music’s enabling conditions, starting with its birth out of the twin forces of missionisation and colonisation. Then, dwelling on a handful of West African examples, I acknowledge the appropriation of European forms, genres and tonal systems but argue that African art music evinces a distinct profile based on historically new patterns of co-presence among a work’s parameters.

In making a case for African art music, I will touch on contemporary debates about hybridity, essentialism and decolonisation, hoping not merely to disturb cosmopolitan views about art music from the South but to point the way towards a critical practice attuned to the specificities of the post-colony.

Jennifer Walshe, University of Oxford, CJ Carr, StabilityAI/Dadbots & Christine McLeavey, OpenAI (17 May 2023)

'AI, neural networks and style appropriation'

Borrowing, appropriation and intertextuality are particularly interesting concepts to explore given the recent acceleration in art and music produced using Machine Learning. Every network which is used to create art or music functions only because it is trained on a dataset of pre-existing work. Some of these datasets may be relatively modest – Dadabots’ Relentless Doppelgänger was trained on the music of technical death metal band Archspire. Others are huge – StabilityAI’s Stable Diffusion was trained on LAION 2B-en dataset, which contains over 2 billion text-image pairs. What does ‘style’ mean in this context? How is it expressed? And who owns it?

Season 6 Theme: Sound—Timbre—Silence

Robert Laidlow, Jesus College, Oxford (24 October 2023)

‘Spectra and structures: navigating compositional latent spaces in chamber and orchestral music’

‘Sound-timbre-silence’ provides an apt jumping off point for talking both about my approach to composition and a broader analytical approach to puzzling out contemporary music. Increasingly, I have deployed these three musical elements not in isolation to one another, but as aspects of a larger, multi-dimensional musical shape. This talk will dive into this approach, building on analysis of new music from the UK and abroad to situate this practice within wider trends in contemporary composition, including algorithmic music, spectralism, (meta)modernism and structuralism. Musical discussion will focus on the recent pieces Gravity, for string quartet, Silicon, for orchestra and electronics, and Warp for piano and orchestra. 

Megan Lavengood, George Mason University (21 November 2023)

‘Layers of meaning: teaching instrumentation and texture’

Music schools across the English-speaking world are reconsidering the traditional undergraduate music theory curriculum and devising ways to be more broadly inclusive of different types of musics and students. Emphasizing the analysis of timbre, instrumentation and texture is one way of progressing towards this goal: they are inherent properties of all sound and thus can be studied in all music, and they do not rely on the complex systems of pitch that underlie most music-theoretical topics (and privilege students with access to classical training). In this seminar, I discuss the analysis of instrumentational layers in popular music as an accessible topic that gets undergraduate students thinking analytically about texture. I will summarize the concept of functional layers in pop music in a way that is accessible for undergraduate students. While Allan Moore’s (2012) original definitions of functional layers rely on the norms of rock music, my expansions of his theory help open the concept up to a broader swath of popular music not limited to the traditional canon of (usually white male) rock artists. For a practical way to implement this in the classroom, I will demonstrate a web app in development on which I have collaborated – titled Auralayer – that students can use to create layer graphs to illustrate their analyses. Auralayer graphs can be used by instructors to assess a student’s understanding of timbre/instrumentation analysis in a way familiar to music theory classrooms: using a visual that represents the concepts outside time. This makes assessing these analyses akin to assessing analyses of form, for example.

Gurminder Kaur Bhogal, Wellesley College (23 January 2024)

‘Sikh music theory: struck material sounds, unstruck corporeal timbres and resonating silence’

Sikh music theory holds at its core an oppositional relationship between the struck sounds that are created through playing musical instruments and a variety of unstruck timbres that vibrate effortlessly within the body. These manifestations of sound co-exist through one other and resonate within a larger matrix of a reverberant silence. This seminar explores how listeners attend to these different sonic expressions through their minds, bodies and consciousness within the practice of Sikh devotional music (kirtan). I broaden and engage with Euro-American ideas about the musical work, musical ontology, auditory attention, and corporeal vibration.

Marina Sudo, KU Leuven (20 February 2024)

‘The sound-noise continuum in contemporary music: listening, mapping and interpretation’

In the arena of contemporary music analysis, a disproportionate focus on a composer’s notation may lead to theoretical discussions that have little relationship with a work’s perceived sonic result. As a complementary approach to score-based analysis, in this seminar I will propose a theoretical framework for aural analysis of music post-1950, focusing especially on compositions that feature complex textures and elusive timbres. I will first highlight the relationship between the three states of sound that are most salient to analytical listening: 1) timbre (spectral colour); 2) gesture-structure (Gestalt); and 3) texture (sonic fabric and stratification). I will then demonstrate how this approach can be adopted in different analytical contexts, including in different genres of acoustic instrumental music, electroacoustic/mixed music and electronic music.

Emma Dillon, King’s College London (30 April 2024)

‘Between silence and sound: finding voices for French songs, 1100–1300’

My paper explores a familiar silence in music history: the seeming limit of notated sources of medieval music as records of sound. It takes as case study songs from the early medieval repertory of French chanson (trouvère song) dating c. 1150-1220. As a foil to the sparse information for sound captured in notated songbooks, I explore alternative routes into the soundworlds – or timbres – of the songs. My talk maps an interdisciplinary methodology for re-sounding trouvère songs, embracing diverse materialities, literary environments and soundscapes shaped by and informing the experience of trouvère songs, contexts that ultimately invite more expansive categories of song and sound. In keeping with OSiMTA’s theme, I will reflect on recent deliberation in the field of music theory, analysis and pedagogy, opening discussion on how the approach proposed could inform the study and teaching of medieval songs and poetry within music studies and potentially also in other fields of medieval history and literary studies.

Robert Hasegawa, McGill University (14 May 2024)

‘Timbre and orchestration in two works by Rebecca Saunders for soloist and ensemble’

Rebecca Saunders (b. 1967) is a central figure in contemporary timbre-based composition. Her music incorporates a rich sonic palette of extended techniques and unusual instrumental sounds. While Saunders describes her compositional approach as intuitive, she cautions that this does not imply a lack of rigor: rather, “intuition is based upon thorough research and experience.” This paper seeks to establish new analytical approaches that can address the subtleties and sophistication of Saunders’s timbral and orchestrational techniques. Drawing on a wide range of methodologies—including Dora Hanninen’s distinction between segmentation and association, Judith Lochhead’s call for a more phenomenological approach to analysis, Lasse Thoresen’s aural sonology, Stephen McAdams’s taxonomy of orchestral grouping effects, and Saunders’s own analyses—I examine the composer’s approach to timbre and orchestration in two works for soloist and ensemble: Fury II (2009), a concerto for double bass and mixed quintet, and Skin (2016) for soprano and thirteen instruments.

New Voices in Music Analysis

Curated and chaired by early-career scholars

Directions in Topic Theory

19 November 2024

Curated and chaired by Dr James Donaldson (Magdalen College, Oxford)

'Towards a phraseology of musical topics', Olga Sánchez-Kisielewska (University of Chicago)

Scholars have argued that topics have ‘no syntax’ (Agawu 1991) and that their relation to formal function is ‘fragile’ (Caplin 2005). Even the description of this symposium aligns topics with ‘musical surface’ as opposed to ‘musical structure and process’. This paper will reconsider the relation between topics and form by focusing on frequent pairings of styles found in similar formal contexts – with the hymn topic c. 1800 as a case study. I understand these musical processes as syntagmas (sequences of signs that together create meaning), a term from semiotics frequently applied to media studies.

The hymn topic appears in three common syntagmas in instrumental music, each operating at a different structural level. The first, which I dub the ‘solemn-to-lyrical’, is typical of slow movements that begin as hymns but inevitably dissolve into a more effusive singing style. This intensification of expression tends to occur in a two-stage, nested process: within the phrase and between phrases. The second strategy places the hymn topic after tempesta in sonata developments or secondary themes. This musical storm clearing migrates from opera and pastoral symphonies into non- programmatic works, endowing the remission of turbulence with spiritual associations. The third strategy is specific to a group of two-tempo finales by Paul Wranitzky and Jan Dussek, in which a hymnic adagio reappears in the middle of a fast movement. I interpret this design as a musical metaphor for Schiller’s cyclical journey of human growth.

Although the frequency and consistency of these topical sequences does not raise to level of grammar, it does provide an expressive phrasicon of conventional strategies that determine the succession of topics and their formal locations. These syntagmas provide a path to emancipate topics from their role as ‘ancillary compositional devices’ (Allanbrook 2014), challenging old dichotomies between structure and expression or syntax and semantics.

‘TMI: topic theory for the information age’, James Donaldson (Magdalen College, Oxford)

Applying topic theory to music of recent decades faces a problem. The sheer number of possible topics – from the winter topic (Lavengood 2023) to space rock (Echard 2017) to tonality itself (Johnson 2017) – creates an information overload, at risk of rendering the insights of the topic-theoretical apparatus increasingly obsolete. This problem is not unique to topic theory; specifically, it parallels the proliferation of music genres, exemplified by Spotify’s genre lists numbering in the thousands. Genre theory, developed with reference to the study of literature, film and popular music, has faced these issues head-on. This paper argues that topic theory can benefit from genre theory’s insights. Building on this work – and Mirka’s definition of a topic as ‘musical styles and genres taken out of their proper context and used in another one’ (Mirka 2014, 2) – this paper argues for adapting a relational approach to genre to musical topics, emphasising the instability of and relations between genres (Derrida 1979, Frow 2006).

I use a case study of the first movement of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 12 (1968) to demonstrate this in practice. I read the generic distant between the serialism topic and a group of familiar eighteenth-century topics onto the form of the movement. Initially, the serialism topic appears alone. Gradually, however, the twelve-tone material transforms the traditional tonal versions of the waltz and learned style into their Schoenbergian (i.e., twelve-tone) subtopics. From this topic-theory led analysis, I suggest that, rather than viewing Shostakovich’s use of twelve-tone rows as somehow second-rate to examples from the West, viewing the serial rows as topics suggests a more distanced treatment of serial music, contributing more to musical meaning rather than as generating harmony and ultimately providing a different perspective on the role of twelve-tone music in 1960s Soviet composition.

‘“This sounds familiar...”: a model for tropes in video games’, Ben Major (RHUL)

Video games are both connected to, and distinct from, other forms of media. Like all media, video games also create, iterate, and develop tropes, in which music and sound are particularly important. Scholars have begun using topic theory as a foundation to discuss musical tropes in games but are hampered by using inconsistent terminology. This paper presents a definition and a model for understanding tropes unique to games.           

To propose a unified definition of video game tropes, this paper synthesises prior research in topic theory (Monelle 2006; Agawu 2009; Allanbrook 2014; Hatten 2014) as the basis for an analytical model. I also delve into game studies (Perron 2014), and game music research (Atkinson 2019; Yee 2020; Bradford 2020; Lind 2023) to examine how tropes and their interrelated terms have been used in current game scholarship. I then define video game tropes as being ludo-narrative and present a model for identifying these tropes and their sounds as they are found in games. The proposed model identifies three game elements – sonic, ludic and narrative – as well as three elemental levels –unit, topic and process – to account for the myriad formulations and functions of tropes in games.

With a basis in topic theory, this research seeks to clear up the terminological confusion about the term trope in video game discourse. It also assists in the analysis and categorisation of tropes as encountered in games. By using the proposed ludo-narrative trope model, researchers can identify game-specific tropes and isolate their constituent elements. This leads to increased understanding of the effective building blocks of the shared lexicon between developers and players. Ultimately, this expanded topic theory approach reveals a fundamental aspect of the communicative and aesthetic dimension of games: how meaning is conveyed to gamers.

New Voices in Musico-Poetics

11 March 2025

Curated and chaired by Chloe Green (University College, Oxford)

'Transforming Early Greek Lyrics', Michael Parsons (composer)

Michael Parsons was a classical scholar at St. John's College Oxford (1957-61), and went on to study composition at the Royal College of Music in the 1960s. After thirty years of involvement in experimental and avant-garde music, he rediscovered his earlier interest in Ancient Greek literature, with settings of choruses from Greek tragedy and lyrics by Sappho, Alkman, Bacchylides, Pindar and others. The music of these settings, although closely related to the metrical and accentuation patterns of the original texts, is not intended to imitate or restore characteristics of Ancient Greek music. It aims rather to transpose the lyrics into a different context and to suggest their continuing interest and relevance. The lyrics are reinterpreted in the light of the polyphonic and harmonic resources of European music since the Renaissance. Michael Parsons will discuss his approach to Ancient Greek texts, with reference to the changed context in which they are represented.

'Musico-Poetics in Cross-Cultural Perspective: The 'China-Europe-Japan’ Triangle'', John Lam 

Around 1900, European chinoiserie and japonisme manifested in both literary and musical endeavours. Translation, adaptation and interpretation of East-Asian poetry paralleled incorporation and transformation of what European composers perceived as sounds of the faraway lands. These two experiments intersected in a new repertoire of songs, contributing to the cultural dimension of musico-poetics. Uncovering modernist approaches to pitch organisation, specifically (an)hemitonic pentatonicism, in selected songs, this talk presents preliminary findings of an ongoing project on musical modernity across the ‘China-Europe-Japan’ triangle. Contrary to prevailing tendencies to ‘provincialise’ Europe by downplaying or even evading Eurocentric viewpoints, the triangular conceptual model decentres European schools of thought by rendering Europe neither as a starting point nor a destination, but as one of the many ‘stations’ of cultural flow and an unique angle into intra-Asian spheres of knowledge co-production.

‘A Larger Context for Ockeghem’s "Petite Camusette"’, Jane Alden (Wesleyan University)

In the world of Old French fabliaux, a trouvère or chanteur shares etymological roots with a vagabond or brothel keeper. Such slippery meaning is significant for those whose art relies on musical wit. Charles Muscatine discerns “a stratum of sensibility” in fabliaux that permeates other strata of medieval society. This is the context in which I investigate S’elle m’amera/Petite camusette, a combinative chanson by the fifteenth-century French court composer and treasurer Johannes Ockeghem. The top voice, in rondeau form, declaims the standard courtly literary trope of unrequited love, while the lower three voices address “Little snub-nose” directly, recalling the moment of (euphemistic) death.  

Whereas most composers of combinative chansons differentiate between the “courtly” and “popular” styles, Ockeghem’s top voice, singing the rondeau text, resembles and anticipates the “chanson rustique.” What seems hitherto not to have been noticed is that the rondel’s central lines reference Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de Robin et Marion. Is this the mythological knight intruding upon the amorous pastoral couple? It depends how we interpret the “petite camusette,” little snubnose.

In this presentation, I situate Ockeghem’s poetic othering within an extensive literary and musical lineage. Ambiguous where we might expect clarity, Ockeghem traverses poetic registers in ways that defy our musical expectations.

‘Reimagining topic theory with reference to electronic dance music in the social media era’, Edward K. Spencer (Utrecht University)

(no abstract)

Scenes from Childhood:Music Theory and Analysis, Education and Play

3 June 2025

Curated and chaired by Dr Giles Masters (Magdalen College, Oxford)

Respondent: Esther Cavett (Somerville College, Oxford)

'Childing at the Piano’, Timothy Coombes (St Hugh's College, Oxford)

This short talk introduces some obvious and less obvious ways in which the mainstream disciplinary practice of music theory/analysis assists the musicological study of childhood. For example, I consider how Adeline Mueller’s adaptation of theoretical approaches to eighteenth-century music (such as the rubric of ‘sociability’, and performer-oriented analyses) treats children’s keyboard music as something approaching a ‘scriptive thing’—Robin Bernstein’s term for the archival objects with which historians of childhood often grapple. What the score scripts, in this understanding, is a performance of childhood. I also consider whether recent conceptions of childhood in historical childhood studies—as a marginalized identity, as well as a performance—might slot into music-theoretical approaches developed in the context of other identity categories.

‘Playful Aesthetics in the Music of Benjamin Britten’, Marinu Leccia (CNSMD Lyon)

There is a great contrast between musicological studies of the works of Benjamin Britten which focus on unquestionably serious themes of pacifism, innocence corrupted, and sexuality, and the playful aspect of Britten’s character which emerges from biographical studies. This paper argues that the playful aspect of Britten’s music is crucial to understanding the composer and his aesthetics. Initially, I demonstrate how play and games drive his writing and style, using concepts of ‘motivic toying’, overcoming self-imposed obstacles, child art, or didactic music exercises. Consequently, I explore the semiotic implications of that play, especially in relation to the double-sided and paradoxical aspect of play (fun and serious, meaningless and meaningful, unstable and ruled, etc.). Focusing on excerpts from The Turn of the Screw and Death in Venice, I argue for a resituating of Britten’s modernism in the context of twentieth-century engagement with childhood and play.

‘Heterotopias of Juxtaposition: Spaces for Creative Play within a “Knowledge-Rich” Music Theory Curriculum’, Elizabeth MacGregor (Somerville College, Oxford)

Over the past decade, increasing numbers of schools in England have been following the lead of the acclaimed Michaela Community School in advocating ‘knowledge-rich’, theory-driven curricula. Yet within such settings, the music classroom is conspicuously distinctive—a place in which pupil-centred creative play often takes precedence over teacher-led direct instruction. The music classroom therefore challenges utopian, knowledge-rich ideologies and has the potential to act as a counter-site—or, in Foucauldian terms, a ‘heterotopia’—in which wider institutional values are re-presented and inverted. In this paper I draw on Foucault’s ‘heterotopias of juxtaposition’ to frame the music classroom at Sycamore Close Academy (pseudonym), a secondary school styled after the Michaela Community School. Using accounts from my recent ethnographic fieldwork at the school, I explore how juxtapositions of continuity and change and imitation and imagination emerge within the theory-driven music curriculum, fashioning new possibilities for creative play to contest utopian, knowledge-rich constructs.

‘Some Notes on Literacy, Aurality, and Social Justice in Community Music and Outreach’, Javier Rivas (KCL)

In recent years, there have been numerous attempts to broaden understandings of music ‘literacy’—traditionally defined as the ability to read and write Western Classical music. These efforts have led to a ‘clash of allegiances’ between different articulations of social justice in music education (McQueen 2020, Spruce 2024). Music theory is often at the centre of this clash, seen as either a potential barrier to inclusion and access that needs to be collectively reframed or a specialist knowledge worth preserving.

This paper will consider these discussions through the case of the King’s Music Academy, a community music school and outreach project aimed at widening access to music education for primary school pupils in Southwark, London. The Academy offers a unique perspective to examine the conjuncture of different positions on social justice in music outreach: it embraces an informal, collaborative, and ‘rhizomatic’ educational ethos (Rivas and Cavett 2025), while simultaneously striving to raise pupils’ aspirations to pursue GCSE, BTEC, A level, and higher education. Through this forum, I will explore the purpose and meaning of ‘music theory’ and ‘literacy’ in the Academy, examining how traditional literacy intersects with other forms of musical knowledge, including aural and somatic knowledge.