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.