When Schenkerian theory began to influence scholarly circles in the United States, the primary - although not the only - work to which scholars had access was Schenker's last monograph, Der freie Satz. Reading textual passages and examining the many musical graphs in the companion volume of examples influenced their concept of the fundamental structure as Schenker understood it, as well as the relationship of the other levels (Schichten) to the larger structure. The problem is that most of the second generation of Schenkerian scholars were reading the 1956 second German edition, not the 1935 first German edition. The second edition had been altered for textual and musical content by Schenker's student, Oswald Jonas - so there is already a disconnect between the original version and the text scholars were reading at that time (the 1950s, 60s, and 70s). Furthermore, many younger North Americans were insufficiently fluent in German to be able to read the work in the original language. In order to make Schenker's treatise accessible to English-speaking scholars, Ernst Oster set about translating the work into English, a task completed in 1979 just after his death. The text was based on the second German edition (ed. Jonas, Vienna, …

Beethoven's rich compositional language evokes unique problems that have fueled scholarly dialogue for many years. My analyses focus on two types of paradoxes as central compositional problems in some of Beethoven's symphonic pieces and piano sonatas. My readings of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 27 (Op. 90), Symphony No. 4 (Op. 60), and Symphony No. 8 (Op. 93) explore the nature and significance of paradoxical unresolved six-four chords and their impact on tonal structure. I consider formal-tonal paradoxes in Beethoven's Tempest Sonata (Op. 31, No. 2), Ninth Symphony (Op. 125), and Overture die Weihe des Hauses (Op. 124). Movements that evoke formal-tonal paradoxes retain the structural framework of a paradigmatic interrupted structure, but contain unique voice-leading features that superimpose an undivided structure on top of the "residual" interrupted structure. Carl Schachter's observations about "genuine double meaning" and his arguments about the interplay between design and tonal structure in "Either/Or" establish the foundation for my analytical approach to paradox. Timothy Jackson's reading of Brahms' "Immer leiser word meine Schlummer" (Op. 105, No. 2) and Stephen Slottow's "Von einem Kunstler: Shapes in the Clouds" both clarify the methodology employed here. My interpretation of paradox involves more than just a slight contradiction between two …

With the proliferation of Schenkerian theory in the US, Great Britain, and mainland Europe in the past quarter century, the pedagogy of Schenkerian analysis has become an important issue. Schenker himself was suspicious of textbooks with their tendency for artificial codification and over-simplification; rather, he recognized that his “New Teaching” (“Die neue Lehre”) – as he called it – required a different, more “organic” pedagogical approach that was both personal and yet accessible to a wide audience. New digital technologies and the Internet now have made it possible to disseminate Schenker’s pedagogical approach by adapting interactive techniques of Web-based instruction. Schenker’s “new teaching” was as organic as his theory itself – and as novel in the connections it sought to draw between the individualed disciplines of theory, musicology, composition, and performance. The interactive and multi-media components of Web-based instruction enable us to realize Schenker’s own pedagogical approach to Schenkerian analysis instruction.

Arnold Schoenberg's teaching career spanned over fifty years and included experiences in Austria, Germany, and the United States. Schoenberg's teaching assistant, Leonard Stein, transcribed Schoenberg's class lectures at UCLA from 1936 to 1944. Most of these notes resulted in publications that provide pedagogical examples of combined elements from Schoenberg's European years of teaching with his years of teaching in America. There are also class notes from Schoenberg's later lectures that have gone unexamined. These notes contain substantial examples of Schoenberg's later theories with analyses of masterworks that have never been published. Both the class notes and the subsequent publications reveal Schoenberg's comprehensive approach to understanding the presentation of the Gedanke or musical idea. In his later classes especially, Schoenberg demonstrated a method of analyzing musical compositions using illustrations of elements of the Grundgestalt or "basic shape," which contains the technical aspects of the musical parts. Through an examination of his published and unpublished manuscripts, this study will demonstrate Schoenberg's commitment to a comprehensive approach to teaching. Schoenberg's heritage of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music theory is evident in his Harmonielehre and in his other European writings. The latter include Zusammenhang, Kontrapunkt, Instrumentation, Formenlehre (ZKIF), and Der musikalische Gedanke und die Logik, …

From 1831 to 1836, Victor Hugo and Louise Bertin collaborated on an opera titled La Esmeralda. For Hugo, it would be the only opera libretto he would ever write, a mere footnote to his collection of widely admired novels, plays, and poetry; for Bertin, however, it would become her most important work, yet seemingly destined to fade into obscurity like so many great pieces of art. Using Schenkerian analysis, this thesis uncovers the tonal and voice-leading structure of the first act of La Esmeralda. A study of this nature, which operates from the premise that forms as large and complex as opera can be examined in terms of a large-scale structure, is valuable because it sheds new light on the correlation of tonal structure and dramatic organization. Through these methods, Act I of La Esmeralda is read as a background progression from D major (with F# kopfton) to F major, composing-out an F#/F♮ dichotomy introduced in the overture. With reference to several musical-symbolic ideas - including the representation of virtue through the pitch F#, the key of Notre-dame's bells - it is shown how the musical structure of Act I expresses the Hugolian themes of fate and decay.

With the founding of the Paris Conservatory in 1795, a diversity of instructional methods for the teaching of harmony were used. Each theory instructor insisted upon using his own system; some relied heavily upon the theories of Rameau, while others used ideas based on eighteenth century German or Italian theorists. The Conservatory administration, realizing the need to unify theoretical instruction into a single method, formed a committee to evaluate the different harmonic systems available. After considering several treatises, including the theories of Rameau, the committee chose the Traité d'harmonie of Catel as the work best suited for their purposes. This investigation deals with Catel's synthesis of various theoretical principles, concentrating on his concise, often simplistic approach to harmonic theory. The major contribution of the Traité is the classification of chords into two categories: "natural harmony" and "artificial harmony." Catel believed that only one chord exists in harmony, the dominant ninth chord, which he derived from the first nine partials of the overtone series. From this chord, he formed the basic triads of "natural harmony," describing these chords as suspensions ("prolongations") of "natural harmony."

This study explores Sibelius's last and, perhaps, most enigmatic Symphony from historical (source-critical), Schenkerian, and transtextual perspectives. Through a detailed study of its genesis, musical architecture, and meaning, the author maintains that the Seventh, its composer, and its generative process, can best be understood as a series of verges: conceptual points of interaction between two or more forces. Verges between Sibelius's nature mysticism and the dramatic biographical circumstances of the period (1914-1924), between inspired and reasoned modes of composition, between genres (symphony and fantasy), between various form types, between tragic despair and hopeful yearning, between innovation and classicism, and between a host of other seeming oppositions, all define the Seventh Symphony and illuminate various facets of the composer's life and thought.

The Czech-born music theorist, Václav Philomathes, wrote the Musicorum libri quattuor in 1512 while attending the University of Vienna. This didactic treatise became one of the most widely published theory treatise of its time with 26 copies of five editions remaining today and covers the topics of Gregorian chant practice, Solmization, Mensural Notation, Choir Practice and Conducting, and Four-voice Counterpoint. Of particular note, is the section on choir practice and conducting, of which there is no equivalent prior example extant today. This dissertation provides a Latin-English translation of Philomathes’s work, as well as produces a critical commentary and comparison of the five editions while positioning the editions within the context of the musico-theoretical background of early-to-mid-16th century scholarship in Central Europe.

This study investigates the influence of the Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker on American music theory since 1940, including a survey of writings related to Schenker and theory textbooks displaying his influence. The Schenker influence on American music theory includes many journal articles on Schenker and his principal students. His methods are employed often in analytical discussions of various issues. In addition to numerous dissertations and theses written about Schenker, a number of textbooks are now based wholly or in part on his approach to musical understanding. The current trend towards accepting Schenker's theories is likely to continue as more people are exposed to his teachings.

This investigation traces the history and development of music theory in Mexico from the date of the first Mexican treatise available (1776) to the early second half of the nineteenth century (1866). This period of ninety years represents an era of special importance in the development of music theory in Mexico. It was during this time that the old modal system was finally abandoned in favor of the new tonal system and that Mexican authors began to pen music treatises which could be favorably compared with the imported European treatises which were the only authoritative source of instruction for serious musicians in Mexico.

Heinrich Baryphonus (1581-1655) and Heinrich Grimm’s (1592/3-1637) didactic treatise, Pleiades musicae (1615/1630), provides a vivid testimony to the state of music education and music theory pedagogy in Protestant Germany in the early seventeenth century. Published initially by Baryphonus for use at the Gymnasium in Quedlinburg and reissued in an expanded format by Grimm for use at the Gymnasium in Magdeburg, the text examines the fundamentals of pitch, intervals, counterpoint, and, in the second edition, triadic theory and composition. Throughout the remainder of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth century, music theorists including Johann Andreas Herbst (1588-1666), Otto Gibel (1612-1682), and Andreas Werckmeister (1645-1706), used the document as a source for their own musical writings, solidifying its status as a significant contribution to the field of music theory. Recently, scholars such as Carl Dahlhaus, Benito Rivera, and Joel Lester have found value in Pleiades musicae for its role in the early stages of the development of triadic theory and the emergence of harmonic tonality. However, with the exception of the passages on triadic theory, the treatise continues to be relatively unknown. In order to understand the full extent of Baryphonus and Grimm’s contributions to the history of music theory, and …

This thesis treats Daniel Read's music analytically to establish style characteristics. Read's fuging tunes are examined for metric placement and structural occurrence of dissonance, and dissonance as text painting. Read's comments on dissonance are extracted from his tunebook introductions. A historical chapter includes the English origins of the fuging tune and its American heyday. The creative life of Daniel Read is discussed. This thesis contributes to knowledge of Read's role in the development of the New England Psalmody idiom. Specifically, this work illustrates the importance of understanding and analyzing Read's use of dissonance as a style determinant, showing that Read's dissonance treatment is an immediate and central characteristic of his compositional practice.

Gustav Mahler's Seventh Symphony seems to belie traditional notions of symphonic unity in that it progresses from E minor in the first movement to C major in the Finale. The repertoire of eighteenth and nineteenth century composers such as Haydn, Beethoven, and Brahms indicates that tonal holism is a significant factor for the symphonic genre. In order to reconcile Mahler's adventurous key scheme, this dissertation explores a multidimensional harmonic model that expands upon other concepts like Robert Bailey's double-tonic complex and transformation theory. A multidimensional musical object is a nexus of several interconnected chords that occupy the same functional space (tonic, dominant, or subdominant) and can be integrated into a Schenkerian reading. Mahler's Seventh is governed by a three-dimensional tonic object that encompasses the major and minor versions of C, E, and A-flat and the augmented triad that is formed between them. The nature of this multidimensional harmony allows unusual formal procedures to unfold, most notably in the first movement's sonata form. To navigate this particular sonata design, I have incorporated my own analytical terminology, the identity narrative, to track the background harmonic events. The location of these events (identity schism, identity crisis, and identity reclamation) is critical to the …

Philip Glass's minimalist opera The Voyage commemorates the 500th Anniversary of Christopher Columbus's discovery of America. In the opera, Philip Glass, like other composers, expresses singers' and non-singers' words and activities by means of melodies, rhythms, chords, textures, timbres, and dynamics. In addition to these traditional musical expressions, successions of reiterating materials (RMs, two or more iterations of materials) and non reiterating materials (NRMs) become new musical expressions. However, dividing materials into theses two categories only distinguishes NRMs from RMs without exploring relations among them in successions. For instance, a listener cannot perceive the functional relations between a partial iteration of the RM and the NRM following the partial RM because both the partial RM and the NRM are NRMs. As a result, a listener hears a succession of NRM followed by another NRM. When an analyst relabels the partial RM as partial loop, and the NRM following the partial RM as loop breaker, a listener hears the NRM as a loop breaker causing a partial loop. The musical functions of loops and loop breakers concern a listener's expectations of the creation, sustaining, departure, and return to the norm in successions of loops and loop breakers. When a listener associates …

The use of algorithms in compositional practice has been in use for centuries. With the advent of computers, formalized procedures have become an important part of computer music. David Cope is an American composer that has pioneered systems that make use of artificial intelligence programming techniques. In this dissertation one of David Cope’s compositions that was generated with one of his processes is examined in detail. A general timeline of algorithmic compositional practice is outlined from a historical perspective, and realized in the Common Lisp programming language as a musicological tool. David Cope’s compositional output is summarized with an explanation of what types of systems he has utilized in the analyses of other composers’ music, and the composition of his own music. Twentieth century analyses techniques are formalized within Common Lisp as algorithmic analyses tools. The tools are then combined with techniques developed within other computational music analyses tools, and applied toward the analysis of Cope’s prelude. A traditional music theory analysis of the composition is provided, and outcomes of computational analyses augment the traditional analysis. The outcome of the computational analyses, or algorithmic analyses, is represented in statistical data, and corresponding probabilities. From the resulting data sets part of …

Arvo Pärt, an Estonian composer, was born in 1935. Most of the works at the beginning of his career were for piano in the neo-classical style. After that, he turned his interest to serial music and continued creating works with serial techniques throughout the 1960s. After his "self-imposed silence" period (during the years 1968-1976), Pärt emerged with a new musical style, which he called tintinnabuli. Although, this technique was influenced by music from the medieval period, the texture and function of its musical style cannot be described easily in terms of any single musical technique of the past. This study explores the evolution of Arvo Pärt's tintinnabuli technique in its first decade 1976-1985, which is divided into three different types. It provides musical examples from the scores of selected works, Für Alina, Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, Cantate Domino canticum novum, Missa Sillabica, Stabat Mater and Es sang vor langen Jahren, and their analyses with supporting interpretative sketches. The goal of this thesis is to provide the reader a basis for understanding and recognizing the different types of Pärt's tintinnabuli technique.

Antoine Reicha stands as an important figure in the growing systematization of musical form. While Traite de melodie (1814) captures the essence of eighteenth-century concern with tonal movement and periodicity, Reicha's later ideas as represented in Traite de haute composition musicale (1824-26) anticipate descriptions of thematic organization characteristic of his nineteenth-century successors. Three important topics emerge as crucial elements: melody, thematic development, and schematic categorization of complete pieces.

The purpose of this study is to provide a practical English translation of Vincenzo Galilei's significant treatise on ancient and modern music (1581). In spite of the important place this work holds in the history of music, it has never before been made available in its entirety in any language other than the original Italian. This volume includes the front matter and chapters 1-3.

Allen Forte's theory of pitch-class set structure has provided useful tools for discovering structural relationships in atonal music. As valuable as set—theoretic procedures are for composers and analysts, the extent to which set relationships are perceptible by the listener largely remains to be investigated. This study addresses the need for aural-perceptual considerations in analysis, reviews related research in music perception, and poses questions concerning the aural perceptibility of set relationships. Specifically, it describes and presents the results of a computer-assisted experiment in testing the perceptibility of set-equivalency relationships.

The present study develops a dynamic model of strict and free composition that views them as relative to a specific historical context. The dynamic view espoused here regards free embellishments of an earlier compositional generation as becoming the models for a strict compositional theory in a later one. From the newly established strict compositional models, succeeding generations of composers produce new free embellishments. The first part of the study develops the dynamic conception of a continuously emerging strict composition as the context necessary for understanding Anton Bruckner's compositional methodology with respect to the harmonic instruction of his teacher, Simon Sechter. In other words, I view Sechter's harmonic theories as a strict compositional platform for Bruckner's free compositional applications. Many theoretical treatises of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries such as those by Christoph Bernhard, Johann Philipp Kirnberger and Sechter acknowledged that strict composition must provide the structural framework for free composition. The above procedure becomes a manner of justifying a free embellishment since a "theorist" can demonstrate or assert the steps necessary to connect it with an accepted model from a contrapuntal or harmonic theory. The present study demonstrates that the justification relationship is a necessary component for understanding any …

The purpose of the study is the investigation of the topics of transposition and the transposed major and minor modes as discussed principally by selected French authors of the final twenty years of the seventeenth century and the first three decades of the eighteenth. The sources are relatively varied and include manuals for singers and instrumentalists, dictionaries, independent essays, and tracts which were published in scholarly journals; special emphasis is placed on the observation and attempted explanation of both irregular signatures and the signatures of the minor modes. The paper concerns the following areas: definitions and related concepts, methods for singers and Instrumentalists, and signatures for the tones which were identified by the authors. The topics are interdependent, for the signatures both effected transposition and indicated written-out transpositions. The late Baroque was characterized by much diversity with regard to definitions of the natural and transposed modes. At the close of the seventeenth century, two concurrent and yet diverse notions were in evidence: the most widespread associated "natural" with inclusion within the gamme; that is, the criterion for naturalness was total diatonic pitch content, as specified by the signature. When the scale was reduced from two columns to a single one, …