Patent Litigation in Europe—A Glimmer of Hope? Present Status and Future Perspectives

Little imagination is needed to realize the magnitude of the potential for European patents’ validity and infringement litigation in the fifteen Member States of the European Union

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

Stravinsky\u27s Serial Mistakes

In 1952, after the completion of The Rake\u27s Progress, Stravinsky embarked on a remarkable voyage of compositional discovery. His late works differ from his earlier ones in striking and profound ways. During the final two decades of his life, every major work was almost shockingly new, right down to original, and ever-changing, principles of structural formation. The works in this period describe a succession of compositional firsts, including his first works to use a series (Cantata [1952], Septet [ 1953], Three Songs from William Shakespeare [1954]); his first fully serial work (In Memoriam Dylan Thomas [1954]); his first work to use a twelve-tone series (Agon [1954-57]); his first work to include a complete twelve-tone movement ( Surge, aquilo, from Canticum Sacrum [1956]); his first completely twelve-tone work (Threni [1958]); his first work to make use of twelve-tone arrays based on hexachordal rotation (Movements [1959]); his first work to use the verticals of his rotational arrays (A Sermon, A Narrative, and A Prayer [1961 ]); his first work to rotate the series as a whole (Variations [1965]); his first work to rotate the tetrachords of the series (Introitus [1965]); and his first work to use two different series in conjunctio (Requiem Canticles [1966]—his last major work). The pattern of innovation is remarkable, persistent, and unprecedented. I can think of no other major composer, at a comparably advanced age and pinnacle of recognition and success, who so thoroughly altered his compositional approach, or whose late works differ so greatly from his earlier ones. While there is some truth in the cliche that Stravinsky always sounds like Stravinsky, nonetheless the late works differ radically from the earlier ones at every level, from their deep modes of musical formation to the rhythmic and intervallic details of the musical surface. Furthermore, Stravinsky\u27s late works are not only radically different from the earlier ones, but are highly individuated from each other as well. There is no major work in this period in Stravinsky did not try something new

Three Stravinsky Analyses: Petrushka, Scene 1 (to Rehearsal No. 8); The Rake’s Progress, Act III, Scene 3 (“In a foolish dream”); Requiem Canticles, “Exaudi”

Most published work in our field privileges theory over analysis, with analysis acting as a subordinate testing ground and exemplification for a theory. Reversing that customary polarity, this article analyzes three works by Stravinsky (Petrushka, The Rake’s Progress, Requiem Canticles) with a relative minimum of theoretical preconceptions and with the simple aim, in David Lewin’s words, of “hearing the piece[s] better.

SMT 1997 Plenary Session: Introductory Remarks

The Society for Music Theory celebrates its twentieth anniversary amid the growing diversity of our field. Six of our most distinguished members have been asked to talk about what has interested them most in the past ten years, since our tenth-anniversary celebration in 1987 at the Eastman School of Music

Normalizing the Abnormal: Disability in Music and Music Theory

The emerging interdisciplinary field of disability studies takes as its subject matter the historical, social, and cultural construction of disability. After a brief introduction to disability studies, this article explores the interconnected histories of disability and music as they are manifested in three theoretical approaches to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Western art music (the musical Formenlehre and the tonal theories of Schoenberg and Schenker) and in three works by Beethoven and Schubert. Around the turn of the nineteenth century in Western Europe, disability began to be understood not as something natural and permanent but rather as a deviation from a normative standard, and thus subject to possible remediation. In the same time and place, art music also underwent a significant shift (reflected in the more recent theoretical traditions that have grown up around it), one that involved an increasing interest in rhetorically marked deviations from diatonic and formal normativity, and the possibility of their narrative recuperation. The article describes ways in which language about music and music itself may be understood both to represent and construct disability. More generally, it suggests that disability should take its place alongside nationality, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation as a significant category for cultural analysis, including the analysis of music

A Primer for Atonal Set Theory

Atonal set theory has a bad reputation. Like Schenkerian analysis in its earlier days, set theory has had an air of the secret society about it, with admission granted only to those who possess the magic password, a forbidding technical vocabulary bristling with expressions like 6- Z44 and interval vector. It has thus often appeared to the uninitiated as the sterile application of arcane, mathematical concepts to inaudible and uninteresting musical relationships. This situation has created understandable frustration among musicians, and the frustration has grown as discussions of twentieth-century music in the professional theoretical literature have come to be expressed almost entirely in this unfamiliar language

Kiss- Duet: Sweetest maid of all

https://digitalcommons.ithaca.edu/sheetmusic/1201/thumbnail.jp

Post-structuralism and Music Theory (A Response to Adam Krims)

In a recent article in this journal, Adam Krims has argued that mainstream music theory, with its organicist bias, is fundamentally incompatible with post-structuralist thought. This commentary is a defense of theory-based analysis in a postmodern world

Two Mistakes in Stravinsky\u27s lntroitus

During the 1950s and 60s, Stravinsky learned, mastered, and significantly transformed a musical language that was, for him, entirely new—the language of twelve-tone serialism. As the abundant compositional sketches from this period in the Paul Sacher Foundation make clear, this process was not always an easy one for Stravinsky. Indeed, the sketches show him groping for solutions to basic compositional problems, including particularly the problem of creating meaningful vertical harmonies from the essentially linear nature of the twelve-tone system