Description: Over the past 30 years, musicologists have produced a remarkable new body of research literature focusing on the lives and careers of women composers in their socio-historical contexts. But detailed analysis and discussion of the works created by these composers are still extremely rare. This is particularly true in the domain of music theory, where scholarly work continues to focus almost exclusively on male composers. Moreover, while the number of performances, broadcasts, and recordings of music by women has unquestionably grown, these works remain significantly underrepresented in comparison to music by male composers. Addressing these deficits is not simply a matter of rectifying a scholarly gender imbalance: the lack of knowledge surrounding the music of female composers means that scholars, performers, and the general public remain unfamiliar with a large body of exciting repertoire.
Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers: Concert Music, 1960-2000 is the first to appear in a groundbreaking four-volume series devoted to compositions by women across Western art music history. Each chapter opens with a brief biographical sketch of the composer before presenting an in-depth critical-analytic exploration of a single representative composition, linking analytical observations with questions of meaning and sociohistorical context. Chapters are grouped thematically by analytical approach into three sections, each of which places the analytical methods used in the essays that follow into the context of late twentieth-century ideas and trends. Featuring rich analyses and critical discussions, many by leading music theorists in the field, this collection brings to the fore repertoire from a range of important composers, thereby enabling further exploration by scholars, teachers, performers, and listeners.
Abstract:This article adapts Classical notions of formal function for the purpose of proposing a listener-centered theory of phrase formation in post-tonal repertoires. It contends that formal function is an emergent property of music through which a listener actively shapes musical organization in time. The result of this approach is a view of musical form in which the listener and composer mutually construct the significant formal units of a musical work through their interactions, a perspective particularly well adapted to the challenges presented by post-tonal music. In order to show how phrase structure in post-tonal music emerges through these formal affordances, the article analyzes in detail several passages from Edgard Varèse’s Density 21.5, Luigi Dallapiccola’s Dialoghi, and Anton Webern’s Three Little Pieces Op. 11, No. 1. The theory of phrase presented here encourages an understanding of phrase as fundamentally relational and constantly mutable.
Publication details: Martin Bresnicks Piano Compositions: An Analysis and Performance Guide, MTNA e – Journal, Cincinnati Vol. 14, Iss. 4, (Apr 2023): 37.
Excerpt of abstract: This document is intended to be a practical tool for those interested in performing, researching and developing a deeper understanding of Martin Bresnick’s keyboard music. As one of György Ligeti’s pupils, the practice of micropolyphony is prevalent in his music, and influences from Schumann, Bach, Beethoven, Webern and others are discussed. The document presents brief biographies of Bresnick and his wife, the pianist Lisa Moore, and contextualizes each piano composition.
TRANSFORMATION presents three interactive piano + multimedia works written in collaboration with Megumi Masaki that reimagine the piano and pianist’s artistic expression through new technologies, and transform the listener’s concert to an immersive, theatrical, and cinematic experience. These works explore new models of interaction between sound, image, text and movement to augment the piano and its surrounding space as a visual as well as musical instrument. This album also includes a documentary film about the inspiration and collaborative journey between Megumi Masaki, T. Patrick Carrabré, Keith Hamel and Bob Pritchard. TRANSFORMATION hopes to engage a wide audience in impactful and transformational experiences that motivate dialogue and action.
Description: In the charged religious context of post-Reformation Germany, debate ensued about the power of weather bells to disperse the thunderstorms traditionally thought to be the work of demons and witches . Catholics and Protestants alike inherited medieval notions of demonic agency in the atmosphere, but they differed on the appropriate remedy . Protestant critics ridiculed the consecration of bells as a corruption of baptism and rejected their sonic agency as a violation of God’s providence, retaining weather bells as a compulsion to the collective prayer that alone could assuage God’s wrath . Defenders of Catholic practice, however, rehearsed medieval arguments for bell apotropaism and insisted on their efficacy against storms, appealing variously to their consecration or to the prayer they compelled . If published Catholic opinion shifted markedly against apotropaic sound in the Enlightenment, local populations continued to hear weather bells in traditional ways, and to posit bells as powerful deterrents against demonic listeners
Abstract: In this article, I argue that deafness is not a deficit for musical experience; rather, it is a source of musical ability. I do so by summarizing some of the different techniques used by Deaf musicians who create music in a signed language. I focus on how signing musicians use different types of movement to create rhythm, and use the movement of their bodies through space to create a sense of melody. Rhythm in signed music is created in a visual-tactile medium, rather than a sonic one. Specifically, it is created through movement of the hands, body, face, and head. Melody in signed music involves the directed, purposeful movement of the body through the signing space, which uses movements and holds to create dynamic, kinetic lines. I explore these concepts using examples from signed rap music by the artist Sean Forbes, and an asl cover of Carrie Underwood’s song Blown Away by Rosa Lee Timm.
From publisher: Finding the Beatexplores humankind’s ability, propensity, and enjoyment in finding the beat in live and recorded experiences of music-making through the lens of entrainment, the human capacity to perceive a beat and to synchronize to it. Anyone who has attended a concert, gone to a club, or watched a sporting event has witnessed and/or participated in tapping, clapping, or dancing along with a piece, song, or chant. It doesn’t matter who or where you are in the world-as humans we spend a lot of time taking pleasure in matching our bodily movements with a perceived beat.
Publication details: In Italian Opera in Vormärz Vienna: Bartolomeo Merelli, Gaetano Donizetti, and Habsburg Cultural Politics in the mid-1830s: Re-Imagining Italianità, ed. by Axel Körner and Paulo Kühl, 96–112. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
