Unless stated otherwise, all events are on Wednesdays at 4:00 pm in SM267 (inside the Cook Music Library in the Simon Music Center), unless otherwise noted. Participation by Zoom is an option for those unable to attend in person. To request Zoom meeting credentials, email mustheor@iu.edu.
Fall 2025
- August 27 — Kyle Adams, Lina Tabak, Alex Shannon, Job Search Series 1: Presentation on Current Job Search Issues
- September 3 — Andrew Goldman, “Hearing As”: Prior Knowledge of Syntactic Structure Affects ERP Components for Musical Expectation
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Abstract: Harmonic expectation is an important mediator of musical experience. EEG research has identified ERP components associated with expectation, including the early (right) anterior negativity (E(R)AN), which is theorized to index harmonic surprisal with reference to long-term memory of the statistical structure of music. However, the role of top-down influences on harmonic predictions remains under-explored. One specific influence concerns how a given harmony can be interpreted in different ways, depending on its syntactic role in a musical context. We present data from a novel paradigm that cues listeners to the syntactic structure of the stimuli (but not whether they contain improbable events). Our main result revealed larger E(R)AN amplitudes for improbable chords when listeners knew that additional context would follow a surprising harmony; P3a and P600 amplitudes were also larger in such cases. Using the theoretical framework of predictive coding, we propose that in such cases, listeners assign lower precision to their predictions, leading to larger prediction errors as indexed by the E(R)AN, P3a, and P600 ERP components, and that the components do not index automatic and mandatory processes that evaluate harmonic probability. Musical surprisal arises from a dynamic interplay between bottom-up cues and a listener’s top-down anticipation of specific syntactic structure.
. - September 10 — Robert Hatten (University of Texas at Austin), Lecture/Recital: “Textural Strategies in Solo Keyboard Works by Bach, Haydn, and Chopin”
*This event will take place at 3:30pm in Ford-Crawford Hall
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Drawing from my book-in-progress on textural strategies in solo keyboard music, I offer a nuanced perspective on the constructive and expressive roles of textures, considering not only their spatial disposition but also their temporal evolution through a work. Thus, my working definition of texture is “the functional interaction of coordinated lines/voices with respect to their disposition and character as they evolve in support of the expressive trajectory of a movement or work.” With examples focused on keyboard works by Bach (the Courante from Partita no. 4 in D Major), Haydn (the first movement of his last piano sonata, Hob. XVI: 50, Landon 60), and Chopin (Etude in Eb Minor, Op. 10, no. 6, and Nocturne in Eb Major, Op. 55, no. 2), I offer a preliminary historical overview of nuanced textural strategies as they emerged throughout the tonal era, and I demonstrate through performance the impact they can have on interpretation.
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- September 17 — Kyle Adams, Lina Tabak, Job Search Series 2: CV/Cover Letter Review
- September 24 — James Donaldson, Amy Tai: “What I Wish I’d Known in my First Year of Grad School”
- October 1 — Andrew Goldman, Noah Kahrs: “Proposals, Presentations, Posters: Practical Pointers for Polished Professional Presence”
- October 15 — Jonathan Biss: “Exploring Beethoven’s Late Piano Sonatas”
Ford-Crawford Hall, 3:30pm-5pm
Five Friends Master Class Series honoring Robert Samels - October 22 — SM267, 3:30pm-5pm
Genre topics, intertextuality, and narrative in Yoasobi’s “Idol”
Noriko ManabeYoasobi’s “Idol” (2023) has achieved unprecedented success for a Japanese song, reaching #1 on Billboard’s Global ex-US chart. The opening theme for the anime Oshi no ko, the song encapsulates the series’ critique of the pop-idol industry by focusing not on its main characters but on Ai, a legendary idol who is murdered in the first episode but remains the characters’ object of obsession. Structured as three verse-chorus cycles presenting, in turn, the viewpoints of fans, Ai’s bandmates, and Ai herself, the song narrates this story by employing multiple genres as topics and exploiting their associations.
This paper illustrates the use of topics as narrative devices in popular music, in this case forming a metacommentary of the entertainment industry. Taking Mirka’s definition of topic as styles taken out of their proper context to use in another and applying Peircean analysis, I demonstrate how the evocation of rap, trap, cantata, idol pop, singer-songwriter, and Eurobeat—each with its own conventions, associations, and well-known songs—produces a multifaceted narrative. I begin with a close analysis of texture (cf. Moore, Lavengood), melody, and harmony to identify the topics, combined with examining wordplay and references to the Oshi no kofranchise and short story “45510” to establish narrative. The conventions of trap—quotations of famous tracks, orchestral hits, booming bass, triplets, shifting rhyme placement, and intonational patterns—signal internal darkness subverted by a kawaii (cute) delivery. Plaintive, leaping melodies with chromatic harmonies on piano recall female singer-songwriters like Yūming and Aiko and their nods to emotional truth. Idol-pop tropes—the half-time pre-chorus with otaku participation, the unprepared upward modulations—evoke the brighter-than-bright J-pop sound and fan culture, while the Eurobeat chorus recalls hit songs and groups of the late 1990s to early 2000s, when Ai’s life is set. The novelty layer (e.g., handclaps, shouts, breaking glass) references events in the series and adds to the narration. This strategic topic-mixing and intertextuality tell a complex story of the imagery and toxicity inherent in the entertainment industry. This case study illustrates how popular music deploys genre-topics as narrative and cultural critique.
Cyberspace, Threads, and AI Music: Music’s Role in Taiwan’s 2024 Blue Bird Movement
An-Ni WeiAfter abolishing 38-year martial law in 1987, Taiwan entered a new period in which freedom of speech, publishing, and assembly were no longer restricted. Ever since, political participation has become a part of daily life: people talk about politics, go on the streets to fight for their rights, and exercise their civil rights by directly voting for their presidents, mayors, and legislators. In this flourishing era of civic participation, music plays a crucial role in mobilization and engagement with its feature of bonding people emotionally, expressing their identity, and promoting specific ideology.
With my internet-based ethnography and personal experience, this paper will focus on the role of music and social media in mobilizing the Blue Bird Movement—a significant civic protest in Taiwan that emerged in response to a controversial legislative reform proposal in March 2024. The study explores how participants used cyberspace, particularly social media platforms like Threads, to organize and amplify the movement. The focus is on the use of AI-generated music and the creative integration of digital symbols, such as hashtags and fan culture, to engage the public. These tools allowed for efficient mobilization both online and offline. Additionally, the paper discusses the controversial political statements made by celebrities, including Mayday and Jolin Tsai, during their China tour, which sparked debates within the movement. This research highlights the intersection of digital and physical spaces in modern social movements, illustrating how AI-generated music and online collaboration shape contemporary protest strategies and political discourse in Taiwan.
Is counting a joke? Beethoven’s sketches for the Scherzo of Quartet Op. 127
Wanyi LiMy paper examines two hypermetrical issues in the Scherzo–Trio movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 127: first, the function and meaning of the ritmo di tre battute marking, which appears once in the Scherzo’s A section and once in its returning A; and second, the hypermetrical strategy in the coda. The ritmo di tre battute marking appears in modern critical editions such as Henle and Bärenreiter but not in the widely accessible Breitkopf & Härtel edition. Beethoven himself in fact added it late in the Juilliard autograph, but Schott’s (1826) first edition omitted it in the part scores, a mistake perpetuated by later editors. Since Beethoven introduced the marking only at the final stage of the creative process, the notion of a triple meter seems to have evolved during the sketching process rather than determined from the outset. I therefore adopt a comparative approach to examine the sketches and the rationale behind his revisions.
My paper demonstrates that the ritmo di tre battute marking, far from denoting a fixed hypermetrical structure, it clarifies passages of rhythmic and harmonic ambiguity—a use distinct from that in the Ninth Symphony (Cohn 1992; 2023). More broadly, this study uncovers that analysis as an integral part of composition—a means of reflection and problem-solving within the act of composing. This idea of analysis-in-composition enriches current scholarship on the intersection of analysis, cognition, and composition (Lerdahl 2020). .
- October 29 — Drake Eshleman, Abigail Webster“Silent Hearing” in Marc Applebaum’s Darmstadt Kindergarten
Drake EshlemanMarc Applebaum’s 2015 piece for string quartet, Darmstadt Kindergarten, disrupts visual performance standards through its use of non-instrumental, choreographed hand gestures. In this paper, I employ Joseph Straus’s notion of “deaf hearing” – particularly its constituent domains of “seeing” and “silent,” or “inner” hearing – to argue that Darmstadt Kindergarten welcomes its listeners to, per the composer, “‘hear’ the instrumental material when later voiced by choreographed action,” even when entirely silent. (Straus 2011, 167–170; Applebaum 2015).In Darmstadt Kindergarten, after each repetition of a seventeen-measure theme, one of the four performers rises from their chair, sets their instrument down, and performs the next repetition choreographically – through carefully-synchronized hand gestures rather than instrumental sounds – such that the final repetition of the theme is entirely choreographic and ostensibly silent. In my analysis, I outline the relationship between the piece’s instrumental and choreographic versions. To do so, I divide the score into ten “gestural groups,” each of which possesses a distinct character; these groups serve as the basic formal units of the piece. This division allows for the comparison between instrumental and choreographic material, both within one performer’s part and across the ensemble. Finally, I consider how the piece’s macrostructure complicates the listener/viewer’s ability to comprehend the piece and requires them to engage in “silent hearing.”Following this analysis, I consider how the piece’s optional introduction – which consists of a repetition of the theme played on instruments, but with the cellist silently miming its instrumental part – engages with scholarship on mimetic comprehension, bodily hearing, and motor theories of perception (Cox 2016; Mead 1999; Godøy 2019). I also discuss the relationship and difference between Applebaum’s choreographic gesture and practices of musical signing in Deaf music. I argue that, although Applebaum’s means for invoking his audience’s “aural imagination” are distinct from Deaf musical practices, they encourage audiences to reconsider what it means to “hear” and challenge established standardized listening practices. Finally, I encourage further scholarship on music and performance which, through their structure, framing, or presentation, encourages audiences to partake in disablist or otherwise non-normative modes of hearing.
Identity in the Brass Quintet Genre
Abigail WebsterThe brass quintet is a heavily male–dominated genre; its performers and composers are disproportionately male, even when compared to the predominantly male world of Western art music. Due to the presumed masculinity of this genre, female performers and composers are expected to adhere to a standard of maleness. Female brass performers have few options when programming quintets by female composers; among these few is Joan Tower’s Copperwave. While Tower’s music has been studied using traditional post-tonal analytical techniques, her music has not been studied from a feminist perspective. In this paper, I investigate Joan Tower’s compositional approach to a male–dominated genre in Copperwave, considering orchestration, texture and timbre, and motivic transformation with respect to the genre’s norms. This analysis is informed by Marian Kielian–Gilbert’s concept of poetic analyses using situated knowledges (Kielian–Gilbert 1994), Suzanne Cusick and Judy Lochhead’s analyses of gender(-ed) performance in chamber music (Cusick 1994) (Lochhead, 2023), and finally Ellie Hisama’s discussions of gender in the works of modernist female composers (Hisama 2001). I also consider my own personal experiences as a female horn player who has played in numerous brass quintet settings. I do this in hopes of illuminating the unique ways in which Tower roots her compositional output within her gender identity and how performers interpret those decisions. With this research, I aim to encourage further study, particularly through a feminist lens, of brass chamber music and prompt further discussion of performance practice and gender identity within male–dominated genres.
- November 11 — Yoel Greenberg: “How to Compose Without the Least Knowledge of Music: Eighteenth-Century Precedents for AI Composition” SM242, 6:15pm
Five Friends Master Class Series honoring Robert SamelsWill computers ever truly compose music? Should one still study composition if machines can already do it “well enough”? Can we even tell the difference between music written by humans and by algorithms? Such questions have become increasingly urgent in the past two years, as AI has stepped into the limelight of our daily lives.In this talk, I approach the issue of machine-assisted composition through a historical lens, by examining an earlier enthusiasm for algorithmic music – eighteenth-century algorithms devised in the age of Bach and Mozart. I will show how these mechanical composers promoted themselves using many of the same promises as today’s AI platforms, and I will draw some lessons from the past about how the wolf may dwell with the lamb, and the algorithm may lie down with the composer.
- November 12 — Yoel Greenberg: “Theory in time: Towards a Diachronic Music Theory” SM267, 3:30-5:00pm
Five Friends Master Class Series honoring Robert SamelsFew periods, if any, have seen social and cultural changes as fast and radical as those we have observed over the past few decades. Facilitated by the broad availability of computers, the increased availability of online materials, and the means of analyzing large swaths of data, our ability to answer questions and the type of questions we ask are in constant flux. Music theory is changing its methods too, responding to much of the potential offered by these developments in computer-assisted and corpus-based research. Corpus studies, not long ago a suspicious newcomer to the field of music theory, are now a matter of course in the field.Twenty-first-century music theory has thus changed its methods, but has it modified its aims accordingly? I argue that in at least one significant way, the answer is negative. The availability of large corpuses and of powerful data-crunching tools enables us for the first time to study music-theoretical trends in a responsible manner – to see not only what things were, but also where they were going and why they did so. We are now empowered as never before to ask questions of a diachronic nature – to inquire about processes rather than definitions.The most influential current theories of eighteenth-century music in recent decades all rely upon elaborate typologies pertaining to specific, synchronic time frames. I argue that this structure inevitably results in three significant limitations, or “blindspots.” First, synchronic approaches are incapable of explaining trends – they at best capture “snapshots” along a timeline, but cannot explain processes: how one snapshot progressed to another. Second, music written between two snapshots is evaluated either according to a defunct model, or to one that had not yet existed. Third, these snapshots obscure underlying trends, presenting a façade of stability that masks dynamic shifts over time.In this lecture I illustrate several such blindspots, showing how a diachronic approach reveals significant insights that could never emerge using synchronic reasoning and methods. I will likewise present what I view as some of the fundamental tenets and guidelines of a diachronic music theory, thereby aiming to encourage a fresh approach to music theory, one which no longer deals with frozen, time-bound entities, instead embracing the ever-changing dynamics of theoretical systems.
- November 19 — Thomas Collison: “Musical Runes: Archaeological Listening and Meaning-Making in Elden Ring (2022)”
In his book On Soulsring Worlds, Marco Caracciolo (2024) coins the term “archaeological fandom” to describe the unique mode of player engagement elicited by Fromsoftware’s famous series of role-playing videogames, and Elden Ring (2022) in particular. Archaeological play is characterized by close attention to details of the game world and environment, and appreciation of stratified meanings therein; this is most clearly demonstrated by observing the online fan communities for these games, whose discussion and theory-crafting about mysteries and lore forms a remarkably sophisticated discourse which asks players to contextualize their personal traversal of a game with the experiences shared by others. This intersubjective engagement relies upon Fromsoftware’s careful and subdued method of storytelling, burying suggestive details and narrative information within their worlds while also obscuring things such that definite “truths” are often unattainable. This propels players into what Daniel Vella (2015) calls the “ludic sublime,” a state of continuously striving for mastery over game systems while also recognizing that full comprehension/control of them is an impossibility. Much has been said about Elden Ring’s spatial storytelling and environmental design: fans have drawn from many different fields to bring various details to the fore of narrative interpretation, including mycology, botany, chemistry, military history, architecture, and archaeology. However, less attention has been given to the game’s soundtrack, despite ample praise from both fans and critics. In this talk I argue that Elden Ring’s soundtrack deliberately employs ambiguity across musical domains to furnish players with opportunities for an archaeological mode of listening. After presenting an overview of motive in the soundtrack, I show that thematic material is composed with a shared body of proto-motivic fragments, which are combined and ordered to form more distinct motives and themes in a manner which bears striking resemblance to the metaphysical “runes” which comprise the titular Elden Ring of the game’s world. The proto-motivic material exists prior to distinct meanings and semioses, but its presence across the soundtrack invites players to consider a host of connections between musical passages; Elden Ring’s soundtrack is designed in a way which emphasizes broader coherence between elements, sometimes obfuscating musical identities in the process but also affording myriad interpretive possibilities. I also explore how textural play compounds this, constantly familiarizing and defamiliarizing listeners to their aural environments through unorthodox orchestration, distortion of timbre, dynamic audio transitions, and the blending of diegetic and non-diegetic sound. As a result, Elden Ring’s soundtrack presents archaeologically-minded players with rich opportunities for meaning-making, comparable both in depth and breadth to the surreal visual storytelling characteristic of Fromsoftware’s games. - December 3 —CANCELLED
- December 10 — 3pm-5pm
Daniel Martin: “Melodic Axis Pitches in Popular Music: The ‘Ambient 5th’ and Retro Style”Recent uses of the sound of the 1980s—in meme soundbites, Mac Miller’s “The Spins,” and the synthwave revival known as “retrowave”—share a nostalgia for the cassette era, often attempting to re-create its most clichéd yet celebrated features. Jazz educators like Adam Maness have similarly embraced these “optimistic” retro sounds, encouraging students to idealize and emulate them. Such retroactive engagements tend to schematize, generalize, and exaggerate the past; while this reductive mimicry may lack historical authenticity, it nonetheless reveals latent continuities across the 1980s catalogue that were less perceptible in their original context.
Here, I aim to identify patterns and phenomena that most closely align with broadly understood harmonic and structural mechanisms. Two phenomena—distinct uses of slash chords and stylistic melodic pedal tones—bear complex origins that span Classical, folk, bluegrass, Dixieland jazz, funk, doo-wop, and early 1970s rock. “Inverse pedal tones” (Jamieson 2021) in particular interact with harmonic loops such as the Aeolian or “Plateau” (Moore 1992; Duinker 2019), the “Axis” (Richards 2017), and related progressions. My prior work (Martin 2023) on prolongational analysis in Lady Gaga’s music emphasizes function and octave species over fixed tonal centers (Richards, Duinker, Doll 2017), especially in modally inflected pop and rock (Duinker 2019). Building on this, I argue that melodic pedal tones can be understood through scalar frameworks such as “six-based minor” (De Clercq 2021) and movable-do, particularly in contexts with “double” (Nobile 2020), “fragile/emergent/absent” (Spicer 2017), or otherwise elusive tonics (Biamonte 2017). These pedals often serve as integral components of harmonic progression, shaping listener expectation and surprise (Meyer 1956) and engaging memory and stylistic knowledge (Narmour 1990; Huron 2006; Snyder 2000).
A survey and typology of melodic pedals across contemporary pop, rap, and film music reveals the phenomenon’s enduring versatility. Its recurrence in stylistically and temporally distant contexts—often with contrasting moods or aesthetics—suggests a broader compositional superposition of melody and harmony, one that becomes expressive when dialectical tensions are foregrounded. Therefore, more non-dichotomous ways of describing melody and harmony are needed. The 1980s, I argue, simply harnessed the expressive potential of these phenomena, offering a template that continues to resonate as a “retro topic” for those feeling nostalgic.
Amy Tai: “The Topology of Choreomusical Space-Time”
In this paper, I explore how dance and music portray ever-varying psychological landscapes within the confines of the stage space. I do so by synthesizing metaphors of topology in mathematics and phenomenological ideas. In mathematics, topology means transformation without breaking, which is how we experience movement in dance and music. I compare dancers and chords in music to masses in physics that exert gravity on each other, causing the “warping” of choreomusical space-time and turning it into a vector force field, a metaphor taken from general relativity. I use Rudolf Laban’s and Ernst Cassirer’s ideas that different regions of space have different qualities to show how a movement in space is simultaneously a change in mood and vice versa. This interpretation of space-time explains the sensation of moving between the inner and outer worlds of the dancers during a choreography, something Laban explains with topological shapes such as the Möbius strip, which has no strict division between the inside and the outside. I further explain the slippage between the inside and the outside by using Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “non-coincidence,” wherein terms in a relation co-create and co-define each other without settling into a stable relationship, so that there is constant movement between the two. I apply these ideas to analyze Petite Mort (1991) by Jiří Kylián, choreographed to the second movements of W. A. Mozart’s Piano Concertos nos. 21 and 23. I argue that the two halves of the choreography portray journeys from the outer, visible world into the interior worlds of the dancers, but ultimately the dancers are still subjected to societal pressures in the outer, visible world as the scenery and mood change at the end like the flip of a coin, an effect made possible by the topological principles discussed in this paper.
To view past colloquium talks and sessions, please visit our Colloquium Archive.