The Surface and the Series in Composition for Four Instruments

Composition for Four Instruments is among Babbitt’s best-known compositions and is frequently cited as an example of a piece with trichordal arrays. Nonetheless, the work’s hierarchical underpinnings—the means by which its arrays can be understood as outgrowths of its underlying twelve-tone series—remain undertheorized, a situation that has resulted in the publication of many different series for the work. A close examination clarifies the work’s series by considering surface elements such as simultaneities and the sequence of array materials. The significance of surface events in determining serial structure leads to comparison with Richard Cohn’s work on Schenkerian theory and motive. Furthermore, these surface elements are rhetorically significant: the sole surface trichord that confounds serial derivation is used to link the beginning and ending of the work, contributing to a rounded conclusion.

Resolving Tensions between Outer Form and Inner Form in Fugue: A Comparative Analysis of J. S. Bach’s Fugue in D minor (WTC I)

This study offers a comparative analysis of J. S. Bach’s Fugue in D minor, from the Well-Tempered Clavier Book I (WTC I). Detailed examination of multiple divergent readings of the same musical excerpts raises important questions about Schenkerian theory and its application to fugal textures. I suggest that analytical discrepancies arise primarily when voice-leading concerns are not completely disentangled from our deeply rooted views of formal design in fugue. In the end, an over-reliance on the details of outer form risks blocking access to the fugue’s inner form. I identify and resolve significant differences that emerge at the foreground in these readings, later considering how a combined view of formal design (outer form) and tonal structure (inner form) resolves ambiguities and enhances our understanding of the work as a whole.

Queer Music Theory

Queer musical phenomenology refers to the practice of disorientation away from established music theories, including one’s own. In Lewin’s “Phenomenology” article, queering can be understood as his intentional, self-critical, conceptual disorientations—first departing from Schenkerian theory, and then moving toward and finally away from the perception-model. Through a close reading of Lewin in combination with Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, which offers a theory of embodied lives marginalized by pathways of normativity, I examine the generalizable application of theories such as queer phenomenology to another domain beyond gender and sexual embodiment: music theory at large. Lewin’s practice models a form of music theory that I regard as phenomenologically queer.

Canons as Hypermetrical Transitions in Mozart

This article explores gradual hypermetrical shifts, or hypermetrical transitions, in imitative contexts. The concept of hypermetrical transition, introduced by David Temperley, presupposes metrical conflict in the course of the transition. My principal goal is to place imitative metrical conflicts in the context of Schenkerian theory and to propose that each imitative part may suggest its own middleground structure, based on this part’s individual metrical pattern. The relative validity of the two resulting voice-leading graphs, based on harmonic and other musical cues, is then viewed as a tool for “measuring” the smoothness of the shift. The article includes analyses of several imitative passages from Mozart’s chamber works and culminates in a discussion of a lengthy canon from the String Quartet K. 499, movement 1, an exemplary case of a smooth hypermetrical transition.

About a Key

In the sonata practice of the mid-eighteenth century, composers frequently asserted the minor dominant prior to the major dominant in the second part of the exposition. Beethoven dramatized this technique in two senses: first, he used it after it had largely fallen out of fashion, thus affording it considerable dramatic impact (e.g., Piano Sonatas Ops. 2, no. 2, and no. 3); second, he graduated from using the “wrong” mode to the more radical technique of using the “wrong” key. For instance, for the secondary key of the Piano Sonatas Ops. 31, no. 1, and 53 (“Waldstein”), he substitutes the major mediant for the dominant. These and similar cases result in the deferred arrival of the tonic in the secondary theme of the recapitulation. Consequently, when the tonic belatedly arrives, the listener is more cognizant of it. In this way Beethoven brings the resolution of large-scale tonal dissonance to the fore. I suggest that such a tactic is metamusical—that Beethoven was in a sense writing music about music, about the relationship between a particular piece and the tonal and formal conventions it relies on and also problematizes. After presenting a number of such metamusical instances, this article traces the stages by which Beethoven “progressed” from the mid-eighteenth-century approach to sonata expositions to his more radical one; it then offers a typology of key-problematizing techniques. It concludes by briefly considering the extent to which these procedures can be squared with Schenkerian theory and its ideal of structural hearing.