A Model of Melodic Expectation for Some Neo-Romantic Music of Penderecki

“Copyright 2007 Perspectives of New Music. Used by permission. This article first appeared in Perspectives of New Music vol 25, number 1, 2007.

Scoring Loss in Some Recent Popular Film and Television

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Music Theory Spectrum following peer review. The version of record is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mtu014A certain tonally- and temporally oriented progression of two triads, dwelt upon usually through undulation, accompanies scenes depicting the contemplation of a considerable sorrowful loss in many popular films and throughout one television program produced between 1985 and 2012. In lieu of any strong stylistic precedent for this musico-dramatic association, certain structural relationships between the two triads relative to other triadic pairings may account for possible motivations of the association

The Major Tritone Progression in Recent Hollywood Science Fiction Films

This is the author's accepted manuscript, and the publisher's official version is available electronically from: http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.06.12.2/mto.06.12.2.murphy.htmlIn the 2002 film Treasure Planet, composer James Newton Howard accompanies the primary shot of the titular orb with an undulation between two major triads a tritone apart. I offer three approaches to understanding the appropriateness of this image/music pairing. First, I present several scenes from recent Hollywood films that conspicuously combine this triadic progression with settings of, or objects from, outer space. Second, I relay ways in which the intrinsic harmonic and voice-leading characteristics of this triadic progression invoke the concepts of great distance, ambiguity, and unfamiliarity. Third, I conclude with a more thorough study of Howard's harmonic language in the score for Treasure Planet, suggesting that this progression and the scene it accompanies represents the culmination of musical and visual/narrative processes, respectively

Metric Cubes in Some Music of Brahms

The metric cube is a kind of graph of meters proposed as a complement to the types of metric spaces that have already been put forth in music-theoretic scholarship, particularly by Richard Cohn. Whereas Cohn's most recent kind of metric space (2001) can compare meters only if they interpret the same time span, metric cubes permit the comparison of meters that interpret different time spans. Furthermore, a metric cube posits a different kind of adjacency relation: while Cohn's most recent metric space connects two meters if their ordered pulse representations differ by only one pulse, a metric cube connects two meters if their ordered factor representations differ by only one factor. Metric cubes, and metric operations that act on the contents of a cube, reveal patterns of metric structure in three works by Brahms: the first movement of the Third Symphony op. 90, the third movement of the Second Symphony op. 73, and the last two movements of the Second String Quartet op. 51/2. These analyses also suggest correspondences in these movements between metric relationships and relationships of key, harmony, and form

On Metre in the Rondo of Brahms's Op. 25

The rondo from Brahms's Piano Quartet Op. 25 projects a number of different metres which may be organised into various metric spaces modelled on those of David Lewin and Richard Cohn. Although this organisation does not yield the multiple pitch-time analogical mappings proposed by Lewin and Cohn, it may be fruitfully applied to many works of Brahms and other composers. I argue that a movement's centrally located metre (the work's `logical' metric tonic) tends also to be its primary metre (the work's `rhetorical' metric tonic), and outline a new method for hearing contiguities in certain metric spaces. I conclude by designing a metric space tailored for the metres of the Op. 25 rondo, in which the refrain's `tonic' metre is centrally located in three dimensions

In the Beginning of Penderecki's Paradise Lost

This is the publisher's version, also available from http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8967795&fileId=S1478572213000030Instead of using Milton's famous opening lines, librettist Christopher Fry begins the text for Krzysztof Penderecki's opera Paradise Lost with the invocation that opens Book III, which alludes to acts of creation both biblical and literary. While the primordial effects of Penderecki's instrumental introduction to the opera parallel this allusion in easily discernible ways, his melodic lines used within this introduction also parallel this allusion in ways understood using recent theoretical perspectives on the composer's neo-Romantic style. These melodies exhibit a rare feature of paradoxicality, in that they are at once finite and infinite within stylistic constraints. This musical paradox corresponds to notions of paradox in accounts of cosmological creation, in a literary-operatic creation in which the author is character, and in the hypostatic union of the divine and human in Jesus Christ, a union foregrounded more in Fry's and Penderecki's opera than in Milton's original poem

Considering Network Recursion and Bartok's "Fourths"

This is the author's final draft. The publisher's official version is available from: http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.07.13.3/mto.07.13.3.murphy.htmlNotions of network recursion, as they have been designated in music analyses, may be organized into five categories that range from exact self-similarity to self-dissimilarity. This perspective reveals that Michael Buchler’s critique of network recursion does not necessarily fully apply to analyses in all categories of network recursion. An analysis of Bartók’s “Fourths” serves as an example of how network recursion analysis can achieve significant results and avoid most of, if not all of, Buchler’s critique

A Composite Approach to Ives' "Cage"

This is the published version.In his book "A Union of Diversities," Larry Starr's analysis of Charles Ives' "The Cage" contrasts with most readings of the song in that he focuses on how the points of congruence between the highly dissimilar vocal and piano parts form a "powerful unity" but provides no specific analytical method for examining this unity more closely. A study is presented that offers one such method for "The Cage," revealing a path within a virtual, bounded space that correlates with some of the syntactic and semantic aspects of the song's text. The author shows how these syntactic correlations also hold true in a similar passage in Ives' song "Majority.

Teacher and student perceptions of the development of learner autonomy : a case study in the biological sciences

Biology teachers in a UK university expressed a majority view that student learning autonomy increases with progression through university. A minority suggested that pre-existing diversity in learning autonomy was more important and that individuals not cohorts differ in their learning autonomy. They suggested that personal experience prior to university and age were important and that mature students are more autonomous than 18-20 year olds. Our application of an autonomous learning scale (ALS) to four year-groups of biology students confirmed that the learning autonomy of students increases through their time at university but not that mature students are necessarily more autonomous than their younger peers. It was evident however that year of study explained relatively little