Abstract This article describes a method for using graph-theoretical trees to model relations between musical motives, turning primarily to Dora Hanninen’s notion of associative lineages, as well as to certain approaches from the field of phylogenetics. Since the fifth of Béla Bartók’s Eight Improvisations on Hungarian Folk Songs (1920) presents a piece-spanning process that, while unidirectional, is also continuously branching, it forms the sole musical example. In addition, the article also examines philosophical dimensions by situating these analytical considerations within Deleuze and Guattari’s tree/rhizome distinction and the more general opposition between the discrete and the continuous.
{"title":"Motivic Trees, Network Analysis, and Bartók’s <i>Eight Improvisations on Hungarian Folk Songs</i>, No. 5","authors":"James N Bennett","doi":"10.1093/mts/mtac015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mtac015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article describes a method for using graph-theoretical trees to model relations between musical motives, turning primarily to Dora Hanninen’s notion of associative lineages, as well as to certain approaches from the field of phylogenetics. Since the fifth of Béla Bartók’s Eight Improvisations on Hungarian Folk Songs (1920) presents a piece-spanning process that, while unidirectional, is also continuously branching, it forms the sole musical example. In addition, the article also examines philosophical dimensions by situating these analytical considerations within Deleuze and Guattari’s tree/rhizome distinction and the more general opposition between the discrete and the continuous.","PeriodicalId":44994,"journal":{"name":"MUSIC THEORY SPECTRUM","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135205840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay offers a sympathetic Marxist commentary on Stephen Lett’s “Making a Home of The Society for Music Theory, Inc.” (2023, forthcoming). I explore questions of colonization and coloniality, which are viewed in literal, rather than metaphorical, terms; provide hypotheses about the political economy of contemporary US-American academic music theory, which seems to be inseparable from conflicts with composition; and meditate on theory’s political futures in both practical and broader utopian-political ways.
{"title":"Abolitionist Music Theory and Marxism: Notes Toward a Reconciliation","authors":"S. Gopinath","doi":"10.1093/mts/mtac017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mtac017","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay offers a sympathetic Marxist commentary on Stephen Lett’s “Making a Home of The Society for Music Theory, Inc.” (2023, forthcoming). I explore questions of colonization and coloniality, which are viewed in literal, rather than metaphorical, terms; provide hypotheses about the political economy of contemporary US-American academic music theory, which seems to be inseparable from conflicts with composition; and meditate on theory’s political futures in both practical and broader utopian-political ways.","PeriodicalId":44994,"journal":{"name":"MUSIC THEORY SPECTRUM","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47916340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay considers the Society for Music Theory’s valuations of research, service, and pedagogy in light of Sara Ahmed’s (2006) reflections on orientation and labor. Ahmed’s description of the philosopher’s writing table turns attention to the domestic labor that creates the conditions for the very work of philosophizing; by bringing this analysis to bear on Stephen Lett’s “Making a Home of The Society for Music Theory, Inc.” (2023, forthcoming), this article brings the following question to the fore: What sorts of labor are “relegated to the background” of the SMT members’ own “writing tables”? This article thus extends Lett’s metaphor of the SMT’s homemaking practices, questions the meaning of service through the lens of pedagogy and research, and highlights the role of academic contingent labor within this network.
{"title":"Orienting to Pedagogical Service","authors":"Catrina S Kim","doi":"10.1093/mts/mtac019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mtac019","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay considers the Society for Music Theory’s valuations of research, service, and pedagogy in light of Sara Ahmed’s (2006) reflections on orientation and labor. Ahmed’s description of the philosopher’s writing table turns attention to the domestic labor that creates the conditions for the very work of philosophizing; by bringing this analysis to bear on Stephen Lett’s “Making a Home of The Society for Music Theory, Inc.” (2023, forthcoming), this article brings the following question to the fore: What sorts of labor are “relegated to the background” of the SMT members’ own “writing tables”? This article thus extends Lett’s metaphor of the SMT’s homemaking practices, questions the meaning of service through the lens of pedagogy and research, and highlights the role of academic contingent labor within this network.","PeriodicalId":44994,"journal":{"name":"MUSIC THEORY SPECTRUM","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47469580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay explores concepts related to the materiality of sound and considers the aesthetics of contemporary Chinese music (and of other Asian heritages) through this lens. In compositions such as Guo Wenjing’s chamber work She Huo, musical expression is prominently shaped by sonic ideas rooted in socio-historical and cultural contexts, and associated with materials of substance and matter. Analysis of such works requires reconceptualizing the modes of analysis and listening practice. Through a focus on materiality, I argue, we gain insight about the music in ways unattainable from established, ingrained modes of musical analysis. Examples explored include the significance of onomatopoeic words for the notation of percussion music in Peking opera; the concept of sawari in Japanese instrumental music, as discussed by Tōru Takemitsu; and Isang Yun’s notion of Hauptton. Music’s materiality comprises many dimensions, the consideration of which is of great importance as we seek to broaden the canon.
{"title":"Materiality of Sonic Imagery: On Analysis of Contemporary Chinese Compositions","authors":"N. Rao","doi":"10.1093/mts/mtac025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mtac025","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay explores concepts related to the materiality of sound and considers the aesthetics of contemporary Chinese music (and of other Asian heritages) through this lens. In compositions such as Guo Wenjing’s chamber work She Huo, musical expression is prominently shaped by sonic ideas rooted in socio-historical and cultural contexts, and associated with materials of substance and matter. Analysis of such works requires reconceptualizing the modes of analysis and listening practice. Through a focus on materiality, I argue, we gain insight about the music in ways unattainable from established, ingrained modes of musical analysis. Examples explored include the significance of onomatopoeic words for the notation of percussion music in Peking opera; the concept of sawari in Japanese instrumental music, as discussed by Tōru Takemitsu; and Isang Yun’s notion of Hauptton. Music’s materiality comprises many dimensions, the consideration of which is of great importance as we seek to broaden the canon.","PeriodicalId":44994,"journal":{"name":"MUSIC THEORY SPECTRUM","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45196832","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
An important question in Stephen Lett’s provocative article is K’eguro Macharia’s, “Who is gathered by your invitation?” (2021). Lett outlines how the founders of the Society for Music Theory staked out territory for the discipline to establish theorists as separate from composers, musicologists, and pedagogues, and how they assessed who was to be invited by determining what theory as a discipline was and what it was to be. He then discusses how others have been (and still are) invited or excluded based on principles present since the founding of the society and offers suggestions for how to make SMT as an institution more welcoming by using the ideas of homemaking and world-building. My response addresses two topics: first, that the narrow view of the discipline of music theory present at its inception created an anti-pedagogy bias that exists to this day; and second, that this narrow view is perpetuated by graduate programs, which can and should be changed in order to achieve the goal of diversification of the discipline and its members.
{"title":"Who Does the Society for Music Theory Gather?","authors":"Leigh VanHandel","doi":"10.1093/mts/mtac028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mtac028","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 An important question in Stephen Lett’s provocative article is K’eguro Macharia’s, “Who is gathered by your invitation?” (2021). Lett outlines how the founders of the Society for Music Theory staked out territory for the discipline to establish theorists as separate from composers, musicologists, and pedagogues, and how they assessed who was to be invited by determining what theory as a discipline was and what it was to be. He then discusses how others have been (and still are) invited or excluded based on principles present since the founding of the society and offers suggestions for how to make SMT as an institution more welcoming by using the ideas of homemaking and world-building. My response addresses two topics: first, that the narrow view of the discipline of music theory present at its inception created an anti-pedagogy bias that exists to this day; and second, that this narrow view is perpetuated by graduate programs, which can and should be changed in order to achieve the goal of diversification of the discipline and its members.","PeriodicalId":44994,"journal":{"name":"MUSIC THEORY SPECTRUM","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44546808","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay examines Stephen Lett’s (2023) critique of North American music theory in general, and of the Society for Music Theory in particular, from the point of view of the binary inclusion/exclusion. Drawing on my own experience, I acknowledge that in many respects his critique of the Society for Music Theory (SMT), from its very inception, as creating an exclusionary, “stratified” space, is on target. Yet I contest his reading of the history and current functioning of the Society and of the broader discipline as a wholesale enterprise of coloniality. Although he insists that this metaphor, as applied to the SMT, is not to be read as involving the type of violence inflicted by colonial powers on native peoples, his consistent, governing language of displacement, pushing out, building fences, and defending territory, belies this denial, and produces a narrative that often suggests a level of hostility incompatible with both history and current experience.
{"title":"O Give Me a Home","authors":"Patrick McCreless","doi":"10.1093/mts/mtac024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mtac024","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay examines Stephen Lett’s (2023) critique of North American music theory in general, and of the Society for Music Theory in particular, from the point of view of the binary inclusion/exclusion. Drawing on my own experience, I acknowledge that in many respects his critique of the Society for Music Theory (SMT), from its very inception, as creating an exclusionary, “stratified” space, is on target. Yet I contest his reading of the history and current functioning of the Society and of the broader discipline as a wholesale enterprise of coloniality. Although he insists that this metaphor, as applied to the SMT, is not to be read as involving the type of violence inflicted by colonial powers on native peoples, his consistent, governing language of displacement, pushing out, building fences, and defending territory, belies this denial, and produces a narrative that often suggests a level of hostility incompatible with both history and current experience.","PeriodicalId":44994,"journal":{"name":"MUSIC THEORY SPECTRUM","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42167910","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Continuing Stephen Lett’s (2023) argument that pedagogy was undervalued by SMT at its inception, this essay considers the signs and implications of continued marginalization of teaching. While position statements can influence the atmosphere of a society, they are peripheral to its operations, which determine who is included or excluded. SMT could help expand the pipeline for women and minoritized groups and identities by formulating and reinforcing ethical guidelines, not just at SMT events but in the music theory profession as a whole. A set of questions is provided for assessing the potential for harmful behaviors in institutional gatekeeping, from teaching to graduate admissions and programs, faculty searches, and tenure and promotion. Deeper engagement by SMT and its membership—through the formation of guidelines for searches and tenure processes, the formation of an ethics committee tasked with review and adjudication, and mentorship for job candidates and junior faculty—should help to broaden the demographics.
{"title":"How SMT Could Become More Welcoming","authors":"Noriko Manabe","doi":"10.1093/mts/mtac023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mtac023","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Continuing Stephen Lett’s (2023) argument that pedagogy was undervalued by SMT at its inception, this essay considers the signs and implications of continued marginalization of teaching. While position statements can influence the atmosphere of a society, they are peripheral to its operations, which determine who is included or excluded. SMT could help expand the pipeline for women and minoritized groups and identities by formulating and reinforcing ethical guidelines, not just at SMT events but in the music theory profession as a whole. A set of questions is provided for assessing the potential for harmful behaviors in institutional gatekeeping, from teaching to graduate admissions and programs, faculty searches, and tenure and promotion. Deeper engagement by SMT and its membership—through the formation of guidelines for searches and tenure processes, the formation of an ethics committee tasked with review and adjudication, and mentorship for job candidates and junior faculty—should help to broaden the demographics.","PeriodicalId":44994,"journal":{"name":"MUSIC THEORY SPECTRUM","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47573675","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
My response to Stephen Lett initially takes a “glass half full” perspective on the current state of the Society for Music Theory, showing that in the early years of the Society there were substantive activities through what would become the Committee on the Status of Women (CSW) to diversify membership and work against biases. I provide a historical accounting of these activities from 1985 to 1995, documenting the many frictions within the operations of the Society. My response concludes with a “glass half empty” observation that more needs to be done and makes a radical suggestion for a Society for the Study of Music.
{"title":"Undisciplined","authors":"Judy Lochhead","doi":"10.1093/mts/mtac022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mtac022","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 My response to Stephen Lett initially takes a “glass half full” perspective on the current state of the Society for Music Theory, showing that in the early years of the Society there were substantive activities through what would become the Committee on the Status of Women (CSW) to diversify membership and work against biases. I provide a historical accounting of these activities from 1985 to 1995, documenting the many frictions within the operations of the Society. My response concludes with a “glass half empty” observation that more needs to be done and makes a radical suggestion for a Society for the Study of Music.","PeriodicalId":44994,"journal":{"name":"MUSIC THEORY SPECTRUM","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46422978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This response to Stephen Lett’s article draws parallels between the institutional histories of the Society for Music Theory (SMT) and the Barbershop Harmony Society (BHS). While both societies have struggled with racial diversity and inclusion, the structural racism that has pervaded the BHS since the civil rights era offers a potent and eerily familiar example of how seemingly innocuous, apolitical institutions can be sites of exclusion and inequity that plague the United States at large. Echoing Lett’s sentiments, I urge my fellow SMT members to recognize the inherently political nature of our craft as we reassess and rebuild our Society’s culture in this period of reckoning.
{"title":"Barbershop’s Cautionary Tale for Academic Music Theory: A Response to Stephen Lett","authors":"Clifton Boyd","doi":"10.1093/mts/mtac016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mtac016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This response to Stephen Lett’s article draws parallels between the institutional histories of the Society for Music Theory (SMT) and the Barbershop Harmony Society (BHS). While both societies have struggled with racial diversity and inclusion, the structural racism that has pervaded the BHS since the civil rights era offers a potent and eerily familiar example of how seemingly innocuous, apolitical institutions can be sites of exclusion and inequity that plague the United States at large. Echoing Lett’s sentiments, I urge my fellow SMT members to recognize the inherently political nature of our craft as we reassess and rebuild our Society’s culture in this period of reckoning.","PeriodicalId":44994,"journal":{"name":"MUSIC THEORY SPECTRUM","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135206788","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In his extraordinarily ambitious Enacting Musical Time, Mariusz Kozak aims to weave many complex threads into a cohesive account of how the subject of the book’s title operates. As was the case for many before him, time for Kozak is first of all not a noun but a verb—temporalizing—and is fundamentally situated, enacted, and interactional. Specifically, musical time—“the form of the listener’s interaction with music” (4)—is a co-constitutive relationship between what he calls the “skillful bodily activity” of a perceiver and worldly-situated stimuli (that is, sounds in an environment that is apprehended as musical) that “solicit certain actions” from the perceiver, who in turn “reconfigures the environment by virtue of those solicited actions” (11). I will come back to this below, but as a spoiler, I will suggest that what Kozak is theorizing in this book is actually not time at all, but the experience of time, which is very different, and which might amount to a “human, all-too-human” understanding of time that casts phenomenological questions as ontological ones. But first, how does Kozak set about to accomplish his project?
{"title":"Enacting Musical Time: The Bodily Experience of New Music. By Mariusz Kozak","authors":"Chris Stover","doi":"10.1093/mts/mtac030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mtac030","url":null,"abstract":"In his extraordinarily ambitious Enacting Musical Time, Mariusz Kozak aims to weave many complex threads into a cohesive account of how the subject of the book’s title operates. As was the case for many before him, time for Kozak is first of all not a noun but a verb—temporalizing—and is fundamentally situated, enacted, and interactional. Specifically, musical time—“the form of the listener’s interaction with music” (4)—is a co-constitutive relationship between what he calls the “skillful bodily activity” of a perceiver and worldly-situated stimuli (that is, sounds in an environment that is apprehended as musical) that “solicit certain actions” from the perceiver, who in turn “reconfigures the environment by virtue of those solicited actions” (11). I will come back to this below, but as a spoiler, I will suggest that what Kozak is theorizing in this book is actually not time at all, but the experience of time, which is very different, and which might amount to a “human, all-too-human” understanding of time that casts phenomenological questions as ontological ones. But first, how does Kozak set about to accomplish his project?","PeriodicalId":44994,"journal":{"name":"MUSIC THEORY SPECTRUM","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136042645","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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