Pub Date : 2018-06-07DOI: 10.5040/9781501329234-0014019
David K. Blake
Timbre, the distinctive quality of a particular sound, has become an increasingly critical analytical focus in recent music theory. Yet the sublinguistic nature of timbral cognition and the parameter’s inherent multidimensionality pose significant challenges to description and representation. This chapter examines four main approaches by which theorists have sought to understand timbre and employ it analytically: its ontology as a sonic object; its perception from cognitive, ecological, and social perspectives; its contribution as a salient parameter in musical works; and its spectrographic and discursive representation. Using examples including the Passacaglia from Caroline Shaw’s Partita for 8 Voices and the song “100,000 Fireflies” by the Magnetic Fields, the discussion suggests two precepts for timbral analysis: greater holistic and interdisciplinary attention to timbre’s dual nature as a sonic object and a site of identity politics, and an embrace of the contextual nature of timbral perception and description in proposing analytic schemata.
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Pub Date : 2018-06-07DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190454746.013.29
Marion A. Guck
This paper examines some ways in which analysts create relationships with musical works, based on evidence provided in music-analytical and other writing. The relationships that are considered extend from those of analysts who articulate an entirely aural relationship with the music analyzed, through those who hear movement and action in the sounds, to those who project tension and affect into the music based on an analogy with interpersonal empathy. The qualities and characterizations ascribed, whether movement, tension, or something else, are due to a transformation of the everyday into musically specific events, processes, and interactions. The distinction between kinds of relationship is not sharp since, in actuality, many analysts integrate a mixture of descriptions in analyses in order to reflect what they notice and experience in close and caring relationship with the music analyzed.
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Pub Date : 2015-01-06DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190454746.013.30
Andrew Bowie
Definitions of music are contested, not least because the notion of definition itself is contested. Rather than define music, it can be more productive to trace how the use of the term has shifted historically. However, this approach may fail to explain why it matters whether something is music or not. Music itself can question the exclusive concentration on discursive understanding of the world. The reasons for this relate to differences between seeing music as an object of study and participating in music. Such differences are also apparent in differences between formalist and other approaches, which are reflected in political stances with respect to music. Historical discriminations between music and non-music (for instance, in relation to language) can also illuminate what we think music is. Rather than just being a philosophical mystery, music can bring its own kind of sense to the world.
{"title":"What Is Music, Anyway?","authors":"Andrew Bowie","doi":"10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190454746.013.30","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190454746.013.30","url":null,"abstract":"Definitions of music are contested, not least because the notion of definition itself is contested. Rather than define music, it can be more productive to trace how the use of the term has shifted historically. However, this approach may fail to explain why it matters whether something is music or not. Music itself can question the exclusive concentration on discursive understanding of the world. The reasons for this relate to differences between seeing music as an object of study and participating in music. Such differences are also apparent in differences between formalist and other approaches, which are reflected in political stances with respect to music. Historical discriminations between music and non-music (for instance, in relation to language) can also illuminate what we think music is. Rather than just being a philosophical mystery, music can bring its own kind of sense to the world.","PeriodicalId":177099,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115997286","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-01-06DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190454746.013.12
Dora A. Hanninen
Visual images abound in music theory and analysis. From scores to voice-leading sketches, spectrographs to transformational networks, and through all kinds of other graphics, theorists use images to present and persuade. As music-theoretic discourse becomes increasingly multimodal, the differences between words and images as modes of expression, as well as the nature of the conceptual work that each does in a particular case, become critical concerns. Informed by work in science and technology studies, cartography, information visualization, and visual studies, this chapter establishes a concept of mode and considers some of the various affordances and exigencies of visual images and verbal text. It then draws a conceptual distinction between two functions of visual images in music theoretic-discourse: visualization (to render information that is invisible in visual form; “to show”) and representation (to convey a specific analytic interpretation of what is shown; “to tell”), each illustrated by a series of examples.
{"title":"Images, Visualization, and Representation","authors":"Dora A. Hanninen","doi":"10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190454746.013.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190454746.013.12","url":null,"abstract":"Visual images abound in music theory and analysis. From scores to voice-leading sketches, spectrographs to transformational networks, and through all kinds of other graphics, theorists use images to present and persuade. As music-theoretic discourse becomes increasingly multimodal, the differences between words and images as modes of expression, as well as the nature of the conceptual work that each does in a particular case, become critical concerns. Informed by work in science and technology studies, cartography, information visualization, and visual studies, this chapter establishes a concept of mode and considers some of the various affordances and exigencies of visual images and verbal text. It then draws a conceptual distinction between two functions of visual images in music theoretic-discourse: visualization (to render information that is invisible in visual form; “to show”) and representation (to convey a specific analytic interpretation of what is shown; “to tell”), each illustrated by a series of examples.","PeriodicalId":177099,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory","volume":"163 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116893534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-01-06DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190454746.013.14
A. Rehding
Despite their fundamental importance to music theory, consonance and dissonance are surprisingly slippery concepts. They cannot unequivocally be identified as acoustical, aesthetic, physiological, psychological, or cultural-historical. This chapter examines a wide range of approaches to consonance/dissonance, focusing on four debates: the age-old sensus/ratio discussion, contrapuntal treatises, non-Western evidence from cognitive science, and evolutionary arguments. The discussion includes musical examples by Joseph Haydn, Alban Berg, Tsimane′ singing, and various European compositions from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. It is impossible to fully close the gap between different approaches, in part because different definitions take their starting points in different objects: cognitive approaches work with sounds while music-theoretical traditions work with notes and intervals. But the diversity of approaches opens up new angles on certain conflations that music theory often tolerates—such as the equivocation between successive and simultaneous intervals—to illustrate how the consonance/dissonance pair functions in different contexts.
{"title":"Consonance and Dissonance","authors":"A. Rehding","doi":"10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190454746.013.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190454746.013.14","url":null,"abstract":"Despite their fundamental importance to music theory, consonance and dissonance are surprisingly slippery concepts. They cannot unequivocally be identified as acoustical, aesthetic, physiological, psychological, or cultural-historical. This chapter examines a wide range of approaches to consonance/dissonance, focusing on four debates: the age-old sensus/ratio discussion, contrapuntal treatises, non-Western evidence from cognitive science, and evolutionary arguments. The discussion includes musical examples by Joseph Haydn, Alban Berg, Tsimane′ singing, and various European compositions from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. It is impossible to fully close the gap between different approaches, in part because different definitions take their starting points in different objects: cognitive approaches work with sounds while music-theoretical traditions work with notes and intervals. But the diversity of approaches opens up new angles on certain conflations that music theory often tolerates—such as the equivocation between successive and simultaneous intervals—to illustrate how the consonance/dissonance pair functions in different contexts.","PeriodicalId":177099,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123137340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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