Journal Article Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration. By Naomi Waltham-Smith Get access Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration. By Naomi Waltham-Smith. Critical Conjunctures in Music and Sound Series. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, xi + 264 pages. Tomas McAuley Tomas McAuley tomas.mcauley@ucd.ie Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Music Theory Spectrum, Volume 42, Issue 1, Spring 2020, Pages 158–163, https://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mtz027 Published: 05 February 2020

Abstract It is well known that the music-theoretical ideas of Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764) were disseminated throughout much of Europe in large part by the summary editions issued by the mathematician and philosopher Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717–83) and certain German, English, and Italian translations that followed. Little is known, however, about how Rameau’s revolutionary and controversial theories appeared in Spain, and even less about how they were received and interpreted. In response, we offer a contextual analysis of the effects that these ideas had on both forward-looking intellectuals as well as on conservative professional musicians grounded in music of the past.

Previous scholarship on the mashup genre has primarily focused on exploring the connections between a mashup’s original source materials and their implied meanings. Less analytical attention, however, has been placed on theorizing the shifts in dominance by one work over another that can unfold over the course of the mashup. By combining the concepts of musical work identity and contrast value into a model of quote/host interactions, I develop a four-category spectrum of quotation types and their implied hierarchical relationships that define specific compositional strategies used in a mashup. I then employ this model to analyze the shifting quotation dynamics in Leonid Desyatnikov’s arrangement of Piazzolla’s Las cuatro estaciones porteñas, a cross-stylistic mashup of Piazzolla’s original work with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

Journal Article Subjects and Phrase Boundaries in Two Keyboard Fugues by J. S. Bach Get access John S Reef John S Reef Email: reef.john@gmail.com Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Music Theory Spectrum, Volume 41, Issue 1, Spring 2019, Pages 48–73, https://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mty029 Published: 08 January 2019

Journal Article Contributors Get access Music Theory Spectrum, Volume 40, Issue 2, Fall 2018, Pages 371–372, https://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mty030 Published: 08 November 2018

This paper updates and supplements the published research on Meshuggah, in particular a seminal 2007 article by Jonathan Pieslak. Just as Meshuggah’s music deviates from certain stylistic traits of heavy metal at the macro level, so too do the technical features of their rhythmic approach deviate from certain music-theoretical yardsticks at the micro level. Analytic vignettes drawn from six songs explore the many forms that “rhythmic deviance” takes in this music.

The epic 1975 Pink Floyd song “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” was written, in part, as a requiem for the band’s former leader, Syd Barrett, who suffered a mental breakdown. This article suggests that the musical structure of “Shine On” corresponds to the popular model of the five stages of grief: shock, yearning, anger, depression, and acceptance. Portraying the bereavement process of a band that had never recovered from the traumatic loss, this emotional arc imbues the piece with a powerful, genuine framework that demonstrates the band’s propensity for evoking emotions through lyrics, composition, and meticulous arrangement and production.

The disciplines of music theory and musicology have long given highest status to the score as the site of meaning, an approach that has seen performance as a form of mediation between composer and listener. But innovative research over the last few decades—in embodiment,1 cognition,2 agency,3 performance and recordings studies,4 and performance-centered approaches to structure formation5—has encouraged music scholars to take their own embodiments, as well as specific performances or recordings, more seriously in music analysis and criticism. Arnie Cox’s work, aimed primarily at listeners, contributes to this change in approach. His new book builds on his earlier established “mimetic hypothesis,”6 and draws on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory.7 It is an exploration of how we feel, experience, and conceptualize music. Cox draws attention to musical concepts that are entrenched in our discourses, but that are, objectively speaking, inaudible: pitch height, musical motion, musical tension, striving melodies, leaps, and so forth. Such properties of musical meaning, while often attributed to “the music,” are shown to emerge through listeners’ embodied participations or co-performances. Drawing on linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy, Cox’s multifaceted theory takes into account different types of music, different peoples’ experiences, and different musical contexts.

There can be little doubt that Seth Monahan’s Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas is the most important book-length analytical study of Mahler’s music in English. That might as well be faint praise: it is also one of surprisingly few books of its kind. As the author emphasizes in his introduction, serious analytical work on Mahler still is something of a rarity, and some of the best of that work comes from outside the discipline of music theory.1 One of the many merits of this monograph, therefore, is that it firmly (and finally!) embeds Mahler in the highly sophisticated discourse of modern North American music theory—more specifically the wave of theoretical and analytical work on musical form that is now commonly referred to as the “new Formenlehre.” Against the mainstream of Mahler studies, Monahan convincingly argues that sonata form is not an ossified remnant of the symphonic tradition that the composer nolens volens inherited, but an essential component of his art, at least up to Symphony No. 6. This does not mean that the music’s technical aspect is Monahan’s sole interest: through the analysis of musical form, he strives for a higher level of hermeneusis; “form itself,” he writes, “can be a vital source of meaning” (5). Nor would it be correct to assume that the hermeneusis is any more the outcome of the analysis than that it is the driving force behind it: one of the book’s distinctive characteristics is that both aspects are closely intertwined.