Music Theory Colloquium Series

If harmonies are indeed reflexes from the unconscious, as posited by Ernst Kurth, a compelling question emerges: How do music theories, products of our conscious intellect, interact with and interpret the expressive, often subconscious sonic experience of listening to music? While Kurth’s theories are frequently discussed, mainly for their contributions to music theory, psychology, and philosophy, their practical use in music analysis remains less explored. Notable scholars like Patrick McCreless, Lee Rothfarb (1988, 1991), and Daphne Tan (2013) have provided pivotal translations and interpretations of Kurth’s seminal works. However, Kurth’s writings, while original and perceptive, do not offer a definitive system for practical analysis. Building on these insights, this project articulates a structured analytical framework inspired by Kurth. This framework incorporates his concepts into a practical system balancing musical sensitivity and systematic rigor.

In Kurth’s theories, music is categorized into “inner” and “outer” content. Outer content is defined by tangible, quantifiable elements such as counterpoint, rhythm, and harmonic function. In contrast, inner content delves into musical energetics and subjective experiences, with harmony often portrayed through tonal coloration like shading and brightening. My methodology employs an illustrative system to effectively highlight these aspects in tandem. To demonstrate the practical application of this approach, I conduct a case study on Chopin’s E♭ minor Étude Op. 10 No. 6, E major Prelude Op. 28 No. 9, and Liszt’s D♭ major Consolation No. 3. By employing a Kurth-inspired analysis and comparing it with Schenkerian interpretations, I aim to deepen our understanding of Chopin and Liszt’s musical landscapes, showcasing how a Kurthian approach explores emotional and sensory musical dimensions.

This paper explores the effects of streaming and datafied listening as they extend beyond streaming platforms. One case study concerns the afterlives of the data that platforms collect on users, once these exit platforms via their strategic partnerships with a wide variety of businesses, including data brokers, ridesharing services, insurance companies, financial firms, as well as other platforms. The second concerns the affective and energetic flows that streaming catalyzes, as these feed into broader processes of social reproduction. Taken together, these two examples of streaming’s distant, dispersed effects highlight the need to avoid limiting critical discussion of music’s entanglements with capitalism to just music, or just the music industry. Rather, music’s platformization sheds light on the many ways it is increasingly caught up in wider socioeconomic processes that extend beyond the conventional boundaries of the culture industries.

This paper examines the recent growth of music as an asset class and its implications for both music culture and music theory. After enumerating some of the distinctive features of the asset as a specific economic form, I turn to arguments advanced by scholars and cultural critics concerning assetization’s effects on music, in particular the way it incentivizes the reuse of old properties over the production of new works. While concerns like these are not entirely misplaced, I argue that investors’ need to maintain—or, better still, inflate—the value of the music assets they hold means that the latter are continually subject to strategies of remixing, repurposing, and recontextualization. To illustrate these dynamics I analyze the use of Blondie’s 1979 hit “Dreaming” in the trailer for the upcoming film Anora. Of particular note is the way the song is reformatted to fit a number of distinct generic frames, bolstering its potential use, exchange, and/or asset values in the process. Then, in the conclusion, I consider some ways we might go about putting musical form in closer dialogue with matters of economic form, and some reasons why it might be worthwhile to do so.

Billie Holiday’s vocal style is instantly recognizable, but has resisted close analysis. Few transcriptions of her singing have been published, and none adequately represents the experience of hearing her. I argue that Holiday’s singing is essentially impossible to transcribe using conventional musical and rhythmic notation. Her singing simply exceeds the descriptive capabilities of that system.

An analytically more fruitful approach is to use spectrograms and statistical software to analyze Holiday’s recordings. While this approach is by no means novel, prior analyses have lacked rigor and the methods have not been clearly described. I begin with a brief survey of recent work in the area, by Hähnel and others. I then outline a reproducible workflow for the analysis of recordings such as Holiday’s; my workflow uses track separation software, Sonic Visualiser, IPA for markup of the sung text, and the R programming language to analyze and plot data. As my principal example I use the master take of Holiday’s 1941 studio recording of “All of Me” with Lester Young. To my knowledge, this is the only recording by Holiday to have been the subject of multiple attempts at transcription in conventional notation, all of which are too imprecise and impressionistic for rigorous analysis.

I show that Holiday rarely sang sustained “notes,” instead singing continuously moving “vocal gestures” that took the pitches of the surrounding tonal framework as inflection points in gestural curves. Holiday made use of a consistent but flexible and superbly controlled vocabulary of such gestures, and I offer a provisional typology of these, tracing their antecedents in singers of the preceding generation, such as Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, and Sophie Tucker. I also give a fine-grained analysis of Holiday’s timing relative to the background beat of the band, showing with novel data visualizations her extraordinary finesse in using delay, anticipation, elongation, and compression for expressive and dramatic effect. I close by proposing that Holiday’s singing may be best understood not as deviations from a tonal and rhythmic “grid,” but rather as a sonic dance within a communal space created by the band.

Drawing on fieldwork with borderlands Mexican American country fans, this talk contributes to current reassessments of country music history and belonging. The fans described country as uniquely relatable to their lives, feelings, and “Mexican values” (family, faith, hard work). They heard country music as American, and Mexican; patriotic country songs inspired bicultural pride in their U.S. and Mexican identities simultaneously. And they drew links between country music’s Southwestern influences and the Southwest’s Mexican origins. Pointing to these and other connections, my interlocutors attested not that country music offers belonging, but that it belongs to Mexican Americans.

This multimedia presentation considers how queer influences have shaped country music over its 100-year history as a commercial genre. I construct a timeline of queer milestones ranging from parody and closeting to open LGBTQ representation. And I identify six realms of queer influence on country music and culture and discuss these with reference to relevant artists, creators, and musical examples.

Beneath the surface-level performance of feminism, autonomy, and empowerment in Reggaetón lies a perpetuation of misogynistic stereotypes that hyper-sexualize women and offer little in terms of agency (Díaz Ferndández, 2021). In fact, Reggaetón artists engage in performative inclusion by adapting their products to current social norms without altering their music or lyrics, profiting off the sexualization of women (Meave Ávila, 2023). Karol G and Young Miko appear to empower narratives of sexual freedom for women, with their musical performances acting as feminist commentary on the limits of women in the genre. While scholars have explored how Bad Bunny purplewashes his music (Hoban, 2021; Robles Murillo, 2021), there’s been limited analysis of female artists regarding this topic. In this paper, I analyze how women are represented or sexualized in lyrics, visual cues, and vocal timbre to explore the nuances between feminism, sexuality, socio-cultural power dynamics, and purplewashing in a genre that is incredibly popular and influential today. As Mulvey (1973) points out, women’s appearances in film are heavily coded with eroticism and their bodies serve the purpose of engaging the heterosexual male gaze, all of which are heavily influenced by a society that values patriarchal power. Similarly, in order for women to be successful in male-dominated fields they must adhere to a male-dominated agenda (Davies, 2001). This paper acts as critical commentary on commodification of women’s bodies, exploring the notion that “sex sells.” Using a decolonial lens, I shed light on how colonial values of capitalism, sexuality, and women inflluence current artists in the genre. This highlights the gendered political climate of Reggaetón, emphasizing the dichotomy between sex-positive self empowerment and purplewashing for financial gain in a capitalist market.

One might expect scientific investigations of music cognition to produce explanations independent of their cultural and historical situation. Alternatively, scientific work may be contingent: the situation of the music scientist influences their work. In this paper, I consider two interrelated types of this influence.

First, technological context influences which musical cognitive processes scientists study. Drawing from contextualist theories of cognition—which take the stance that the mind’s structure (musical or otherwise) is akin to a set of affordances to be applied to the tasks of the day, rather than a set of fixed, modular capacities—I argue that musicians do not just apply cognitive processes within technological context, but rather interaction with technology can define the processes that are then then studied scientifically. I support this argument with examples from music-theoretical scholarship describing human-technology musical interactions.

Second, experimenters must operationalize musical phenomena to do experimental work, that is, design laboratory-measurable proxy tasks for otherwise complex and polysemous acts. I focus on studies of improvisation because of the instructive difficulty in delimiting its processes. Notably, such operationalizations are not in fact neutral proxies for improvisation tout court. Instead, the tasks (which do not always align with each other) are influenced by the experimenters’ theorizations of improvisation. Accordingly, whatever scientific explanation is formed from experimental findings inherits (or sustains) the contingency that influenced the choice of task.

Finally, I synthesize these two forms of contingency to comment on the character of scientific explanations about musical processes, and argue that an embrace of contingency will better integrate scientific and humanistic aspects of music studies. Contingent scientific findings are still explanatory despite their respective influences, but should not be confused for ahistorical and acultural truths. Scientists might have created explanations of different processes had the context been different. Also, by acknowledging contingency, we validate the priority of humanistic scholarship that provides the scientist with phenomena to study in the first place (e.g., by describing human-technology interactions, or theorizing definitions of activities like improvisation). Finally, contingency invites a certain humility for cognitive scientific studies given the indeterminacy of some future musical mind, with unforeseen context.

Mashups are seldom discussed analytically in the scholarly discourse of music theory, and when they are mentioned, it is often in terms of comedy or parody. Neil Cicierega’s Mouth albums – a quartet of albums drawing heavily on Smash Mouth’s “All-Star” – transgress their surface-level parodic boundaries and contain unique intertextual relationships to pop music and internet culture that need to be unpacked. In this presentation, I will give a brief background of Cicierega’s colorful relationship with the internet, discuss how his third album (Mouth Moods) sidesteps purely parodic interpretations, and provide an inroad to how Cicierega’s humor and recontextualization work together to achieve a unified artistic product.

This presentation aims to shed light on Cicierega’s multi-layered approach to sampling and referentiality, and to broaden the lens through which we examine mashups. First, I will demonstrate how Cicierega creates intertextual connections between his first two albums and Mouth Moods in mosaic mashups – tracks composed of many short samples. He recasts and reuses earlier material to not only deepen the referential connections to popular and internet culture, but also to include self-referentiality as an artistic device. This deviates from the intent of established mosaic mashup artists like DJ Earworm, as Cicierega uses this process to establish a sense of thematic unity within the context of the albums.

Next, I will examine a selection of A+B mashups – the most common kind, usually created by taking vocals from one song and the accompaniment from another – and analyze how diametrically opposed genres can create and resolve musical-lyrical dissonance. This examination will include discussion of how Cicierega’s approach to A+B mashups differs from mashup artists like Girl Talk, both in its comedic effect and its intertextuality. I will then argue that the synthesis of these elements in the album Mouth Moods represents an artistic product separate from the goals of most mashups, and suggest a closer examination of intertextual relationships in other instances of sample-based music.

Most English-language texts constitute a line of verse, often made up of a syntactic unit such as a clause, which are set to a musical phrase of, say, two to four measures (BaileyShea 2021). Setting Japanese texts to Western-style music is challenging, as Japanese morphemes are so multisyllabic that it is difficult to complete a subject-verb clause in two-to-four measures. It takes fifteen morae to say “I love you” in grammatically correct Japanese, so that a literal translation of the Beatles’ “Michelle” could take as many as 15 morae. Such difficulties perpetuated the myth that Western music couldn’t be sung in Japanese. How, then, did Japanese songwriters adjust their music to a metered, riff-defined genre such as rock?

This paper explores the myths and realities of Japanese songwriting by examining the work of seminal Japanese rock band Happy End (1969–1973). In the great Japanese rock debate featured in New Music Magazine (1970), Happy End argued with fellow band Flower Travelin’ Band (FTB) as to whether rock could be written in Japanese. The FTB camp criticized Happy End’s song, “Haru yo koi” (Come, Spring, 1970) as awkward, as it takes eleven measures—a half-minute—to complete a single clause.

Happy End’s second album, Kazemachi Roman (Romance of the Wind City, 1971)—an ode to a disappearing Tokyo in the face of urban renewal—showed a maturation of their text-setting skills. In “Kaze o atsumete” (Gather the Wind), Hosono Haruomi retains interest during Matsumoto’s 60-morae-long sentence by withholding a strong cadence until the end of that sentence, marking the beginning of the chorus; his meandering harmonic progression parallels the linguistic sentence extensions and captures the image of someone ambling about the city, stumbling upon an unexpected vista. In “Haikara hakuchi” (Stylish Idiot), Ōtaki’s habit of lengthening phrase endings is marshaled to highlight the wordplay in the title. Through subtle text setting, Happy End demonstrates not only that Japanese can indeed constitute a rock lyric but also that the combination of Japanese words and music can encapsulate an ephemeral moment in Tokyo’s ever-changing cityscape.