The Computational Attitude in Music Theory

Music studies’s turn to computation during the twentieth century has engendered particular habits of thought about music, habits that remain in operation long after the music scholar has stepped away from the computer. The computational attitude is a way of thinking about music that is learned at the computer but can be applied away from it. It may be manifest in actual computer use, or in invocations of computationalism, a theory of mind whose influence on twentieth-century music theory is palpable. It may also be manifest in more informal discussions about music, which make liberal use of computational metaphors. In Chapter 1, I describe this attitude, the stakes for considering the computer as one of its instruments, and the kinds of historical sources and methodologies we might draw on to chart its ascendance. The remainder of this dissertation considers distinct and varied cases from the mid-twentieth century in which computers or computationalist musical ideas were used to pursue new musical objects, to quantify and classify musical scores as data, and to instantiate a generally music-structuralist mode of analysis. I present an account of the decades-long effort to prepare an exhaustive and accurate catalog of the all-interval twelve-tone series (Chapter 2). This problem was first posed in the 1920s but was not solved until 1959, when the composer Hanns Jelinek collaborated with the computer engineer Heinz Zemanek to jointly develop and run a computer program. Recognizing the transformation wrought on modern statistics and communications technology by information theory, I revisit Abraham Moles’s book Information Theory and Esthetic Perception (orig. 1958) and use its vocabulary to contextualize contemporary information-theoretic work on music that various evokes the computational mind by John. R. Pierce and Mary Shannon, Wilhelm Fucks, and Henry Quastler (Chapter 3). I conclude with a detailed look into a score-segmentation algorithm of the influential American music theorist Allen Forte (Chapter 4). Forte was a skilled programmer who spent several years at MIT in the 1960s, with cutting-edge computers and the company of first-rank figures in the nascent fields of computer science and artificial intelligence. Each one of the researchers whose work is treated in these case studies—at some stage in their relationship with music—adopted what I call the computational attitude to music, to varying degrees and for diverse ends. Of the many questions this dissertation seeks to answer: what was gained by adopting such an attitude? What was lost? Having understood these past explorations of the computational attitude to music, we are better suited ask of ourselves the same questions today

Beat-Class Tonic Modulation as a Formal Device in Steve Reich\u27s The Desert Music

Beat-class analysis is a model of rhythm employed by Richard Cohn and John Roeder to analyze textural form in the compositions of Steve Reich (Roeder 2003, 275). Rhythmic attacks are regarded based on the modulus analytically assigned to a particular section (eighth note, sixteenth note, etc.). This paper will offer an in-depth analysis of beat-class modulation and transposition in Steve Reich’s The Desert Music, with a focus on the third movement. Applying this analytical technique to The Desert Music (a piece never before analyzed using beat-class analysis) proposes a fresh analytical approach to Reich’s 1984 piece. This perspective will show that the transpositional relationships found among beat-class tonics serve to generate a sense of form within The Desert Music. It will be shown through the use of beat-class analysis, that small and large formal implications within the movement are present. As a result of research and analysis, multiple transpositional relationships (tn relationships) and instances of beat-class tonics can be seen. Reich establishes multiple tn relationships between beat-class tonics and individual strands of phrasing. Each tn relationship and beat-class tonic modulation revolves around the numbers two and four, which will be shown to have significance in The Desert Music. Terminology from the research of Cohn and Roeder will be adopted and modified as necessitated by the music

The Anxiety of Influence in Twentieth-Century Music

The musical world of this century has been dominated, to an extraordinary and unprecedented degree, by the music of the past. Performers play music primarily by long-deceased canonical composers, composers learn their craft by studying the master-works of the past, including the distant past, and scholars devote themselves to studying increasingly ancient musical monuments. The past has never been so powerfully present as in this century. In this historical situation, composers have felt an understandably deep ambivalence toward the masterworks of the past. On the hand, those masterworks inspire admiration, even reverence. At the same time, they also inspire the kind of anxiety that one often feels the presence of powerful, dominating, and intimidating figures. In Stravinsky\u27s phrase: The artist feels his \u27heritage\u27 as the grip of a very strong pincers. The musical tradition, Stravinsky suggests, may provide inspiration, but it also imposes narrow constraints

Form in the Music of John Adams

The American composer John Adams, born in 1947, has composed a large body of work that has attracted the attention of many performers and legions of listeners. In addition, this work has drawn the attention of scholars intent on understanding its historical and theoretical context.;Among the theoretical writings are two papers by Catherine Pellegrino: Formalist Analysis in the Context of Postmodern Aesthetics: The Music of John Adams as a Case Study of 1999, and its offshoot article Aspects of Closure in the Music of John Adams of 2002. In these writings she conducts analyses of music by John Adams in order to determine if it is understandable in terms of formalist musical analysis, specifically by the metrics of closure and hierarchy. Closure is attained through pattern-completion. Hierarchy is attained through organic generation of surface content from background content of a single idea; Schenkerian theory and analysis is the classic means of demonstrating this.;Pellegrino ultimately determines that Adams problematizes closure , and when she attempts to abstract the large scale tonal organization of a number of works by Adams in order to determine if a logical hierarchy is consistently operative, she asserts that the analyses fall short with regard to the requirement of comprehensiveness .;In addition, music composed by John Adams later in his career can be characterized as disunified as a consequence of an intuitive compositional approach documented by researcher K. Robert Schwarz, and demonstrated through analyses by Pellegrino. For Pellegrino, these disunified works are inaccessible via the methods of formalist analysis, nor is there a good theory of disunified music to apply to them as well.;The purpose of this research paper is to demonstrate that there is music by Adams that is formalist, specifically Phrygian Gates (1977-1978), and that its formalism can be corroborated by testing for closure and hierarchy by analytical means.;The purpose of this paper is also to show how works by Adams that are non-formalist and disunified can be rendered analytically accessible. This will be accomplished by first determining the goals appropriate for analyzing disunified music, and by providing a historical context for disunified music in practice and theory; and secondly by creating a method for analyzing non-formalist music, applying the method to two works by Adams, including Century Rolls (1996) and Son of Chamber Symphony (2007), and summarizing the results

When Words Are Not Enough: Tracing the Development of Extended Vocal Techniques in Twentieth-Century America

Although multiple books and articles expound upon the musical culture and progress of American classical, popular and folk music in the United States, there are no publications that investigate the development of extended vocal techniques (EVTs) throughout twentieth-century American music. Scholarly interest in the contemporary music scene of the United States abounds, but few sources provide information on the exploitation of the human voice for its unique sonic capabilities. This document seeks to establish links and connections between musical trends, major artistic movements, and the global politics that shaped Western art music, with those composers utilizing EVTs in the United States, for the purpose of generating a clearer musicological picture of EVTs as a practice of twentieth-century vocal music. As demonstrated in the connecting of musicological dots found in primary and secondary historical documents, composer and performer studies, and musical scores, the study explores the history of extended vocal techniques and the culture in which they flourished

The Relation of Analysis to Performance of Post-tonal Violin Music: Three Case Studies

This dissertation investigates analytical and performance relationships through studies of three post-tonal pieces for solo violin: Élégie by Igor Stravinsky (1944), Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi by Elliott Carter (1984), and Melismata by Milton Babbitt (1982). The challenge of interpretation is especially evident in non-tonal music, as performers are unlikely to have any knowledge of the relevant relationships between pitches, functions of harmonies, or formal features in the pieces they play. In this respect analysis can contribute to an understanding needed to form a meaningful interpretation. I will attempt to show that even the most seemingly abstract theoretical concepts can have direct bearing on performance of modernist music and will propose a four-step process that I believe is effective at producing analyses in a form that can influence playing, down to the minute details

Reconsidering Organicism in Milton Babbitt\u27s Music and Thought

This dissertation makes two related but distinct claims. The first explores the influence of organicism, particularly in the hierarchical formulation developed by Heinrich Schenker, on Milton Babbitt\u27s thought. This influence is shown to inform Babbitt\u27s writings on a range of issues, guiding his analyses, his view of music cognition, and his understanding of the tonal and twelve-tone systems, including his own compositional twelve-tone techniques. Analysis of Babbitt\u27s compositions, however, reveals several complications with the organicist model: there are a number of pieces and situations that conflict with the expectations of hierarchical organicism. As a result, this dissertation advocates for a more limited and nuanced view of the role of organicism in Babbitt\u27s music, situating it as one concern among many. Various non-systematic aspects of Babbitt\u27s music, artistic concerns that have little to do with the twelve-tone system, are illuminated by this approach. This dissertation is informed throughout by the newly available Milton Babbitt Collection of the Library of Congress

A narrative approach to composition

Progress in utilising ideas from the study of narratives as an approach to composing is explored. The initial objective was to develop the technical skills for composing music drawing on different narrative forms. This investigated narrative as an innovative way of thinking about musical structure. As the compositions developed it became apparent how naïve that objective was. This thesis therefore explores the emergence of an understanding of the sequential structure that I find satisfying in my compositions. Six pieces, for various instrumentation, are presented as stages in the development of these explorations. The successes and failures of each of these pieces elucidate the strengths and weaknesses of different aspects of this narrative approach to contemporary music. In the early stages of these explorations the requirements of content (‘character’ in story telling) and form or structure (‘plot’ in narratives) emerge as fundamental challenges to the process of composing. These challenges are revealed in an early piece that attempts to reflect fundamental narrative themes. The extra-musical framework limits the success of the piece. Subsequent compositions start from more clearly musical origins with increasing success. They include explorations of how the form of a composition can encompass variations in texture as well as development of thematic material. The Stravinsky paradox that the abstract nature of instrumental music means it cannot refer to anything outside of the music itself, whilst the power of much music often comes from such external references, emerges as the central dilemma that my composing processes seek to resolve