Beneath Improvisation

Improvisation has been construed as Western art music’s Other. This chapter urges music theorists to take the consequences of this configuration seriously. The decision to exclude improvisation as inherently unstable is not neutral, but is bound up with the endemic racism that has characterized social relations in the West and that is being brought to the fore in Black Lives Matter and other recent social and political movements. Traditional music theory is not immune from such institutional racism—its insistence on normative musical behaviors is founded on the (white) phallogocentrism of Western thought. Does the resurgent academic interest in improvisation offer a way out? No, at least not as it is currently studied. Even an apparently impartial approach such as cognitive science is not neutral; perception is colored by race. To get anywhere, this chapter argues, improvisation studies must take difference seriously. Important impetus for a more inclusive critical model comes from such fields as Black studies, Women’s studies, subaltern studies, queer studies, and disability studies.

Meter

This chapter presents a sketch of an analytical model of musical meter, focused on sound rather than notation. A meter is defined as a set of pulses, and classified as an ordered set of adjacent pulse pairs, or minimal meters. The model encourages a view of meter as ever-changing and form-shaping. Metric change is defined as pulse substitution. Scripts of metric change are illustrated through analyses of brief passages of Schumann, Glass, and Ghanian dance-drumming. Hypermeter and quasi-meter (that is, non-isochronous or additive meter) are conceived as complementary ways to generalize meter.

Key and Modulation

What harmonic features are involved when a musical passage, or a work, is in a particular key? How is balance achieved between modulations that reinforce the home key and those that supplant it altogether? The chapter starts by analyzing “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” the opening song in Robert Schumann’s song-cycle Dichterliebe. It considers the criteria for identifying keys and provides a brief history of the role of closure in the definition of key before discussing how composers move between keys and what kinds of key relations they choose. It then explores new theoretical insights on common-tone modulation, along with the issue of content versus cadence in determining degrees of certainty about the establishment of new internal keys. It also compares definitions of tonicization and modulation and concludes with an assessment of how key relations have been shaped into tonal spaces. An important observation—one that highlights the tension between contents and cadences—is that the presence or absence of a final cadence is commonly used to ascertain whether or not a key has been fully articulated. The chapter describes a range of scenarios of such tension as well as the views of various theorists and analysts regarding the relative importance of content versus cadence.

Interval

In the Western music-theoretical tradition, intervals are basic and foundational. They are also transhistorical, occupying theorists continually from classical origins to the present. Considering their foundational position, one might assume that intervals have a primitive, elementary character with little ideational content, and that the relevant literature is weakly innovative. Intervals appear within systems that reflect certain styles of thinking about musical objects and musical spaces. There are various modes of movement in those spaces, expressed as various counting rules, complicated by a tension between theoretical conventions that regard intervals as magnitudes and theoretical conventions that regard intervals as directed magnitudes. Reflecting on the relevant intuitions and exploring the systems associated with these conventions teaches us important lessons about foundational music-theoretical constructs in Western music theory.

Melody

Melody is a fundamental concept in Western musical thought; it connotes the form and affective power of successive sounds in motion, perceived as an aesthetic unity. Yet for many writers, melody does not exist as an autonomous form, and for those who credit its existence, few agree on what it is, or how it functions in relation to harmonic voice leading and phrase rhythm. This chapter examines the historical emergence of a theory of melody in the West, from Aristoxenus to Leonard Bernstein; it traces the rich intellectual currents that saw melody variously coupled to ideas of voice, schemes of rhythmic symmetry, overtones, spatial organization, theories of evolution, and computational analysis.

Tonal Harmony

This chapter introduces a novel explanatory model for the tonal grammar of music from the thoroughbass era, encompassing baroque and galant practices. The framework models the internalized knowledge of a skilled continuo player improvising at the keyboard prior to Rameau’s invention of the fundamental-bass concept. It makes predictions about the tonal tendency of a chord based on the interaction of its constituent scale-degrees. The framework models something like Schenker’s “will of the tones,” predicting whether individual tones in a chord will tend to “feel” stabilized or mobilized. Stabilized tones tend to remain in place, and mobilized tones tend to move by step. These tendencies are regulated by the intervallic relations among notes in a chord, and can be expressed as two simple laws: a Law of Counterpoint that applies to generic pitch-class intervals regardless of which specific scale degrees they span, and a Law of Harmony that makes scale-degree-specific predictions.

Phrase

Like so many foundational music-theoretical terms, “phrase” has been adopted in divergent ways, sometimes unreflectively. Notions of phrase are necessarily contingent upon styles, genres, historical and cultural contexts, social functions, and ties to syntax, cadence, and form. Although no global definition is feasible, commonalities among appropriations of the term emerge. This chapter explores the ineluctable association of phrase with text and punctuation, from Western medieval chant to Stravinsky; but conflicting theories of phrase functions and cadences raise questions for non-texted music. Influential eighteenth-century definitions of phrase and phrase expansion suggest the strong, regularizing influence of galant dance. The young Beethoven flaunts the ever-increasing potency of phrase repetition and expansion; Schumann shows how to undercut the emerging problem of “foursquareness”; excerpts from Messiaen, Ligeti, and Ghanaian Agbadza music demonstrate that phrase is not reliant upon tonaltity. Just the same, composers, listeners, analysts, and especially performers depend upon the perception of “phrases” implicated in so much music of different styles, eras, and cultures.

Pitch, Tone, and Note

This chapter recasts the terms “Pitch,” “Tone,” and “Note” as far-reaching historical-materialist categories, with a view to expounding and defending the following ideas: (1) there is an immanent developmental logic to the way that Pitch, Tone, and Note have changed over time; (2) this trajectory of development is open to empirical investigation and to explanation anchored in the concrete features of human practices and institutions and their environing natural and social contexts; and (3) this developmental dynamic has had, and continues to have, appreciable consequences for many aspects and types of “musicking.” After setting up a Marxian framework, we then put these categories to explanatory work in a series of three case studies concerning the development of music’s “forces of production.” The origins of music printing, the evolution of piano manufacture, and the birth of sound synthesis are used to reveal causal linkages between changes in musical practice and trends in capitalist development.

Form

Form is one of the most foundational concepts in music theory, but identifying a suitably precise and meaningful definition of the term proves challenging. This essay does not attempt to offer a singular definition, but rather seeks to explore aspects of the term’s history and origin, exemplifying its usage (and its implications for writing on music) across a broad repertoire from Machaut to Miles Davis. Form is predictive, regulative, and heuristic. Despite its central place in much musical thought and practice, however, it is form’s instability and openness to appropriation and change that is arguably its most persistent characteristic.

Temporalities

This chapter examines the question of musical temporality in broad historical perspective. Through a series of reflections on the philosophy of time, theories of musical time, and the material history of time in the past 250 years, the chapter outlines the basic temporal antinomies of the West. This modern conception of temporality, broadly construed as a precisely-segmented linear time set against narratives of alternative, cyclical time, is shown to be bound up with the project of colonial expansion. The chapter furthermore argues that the value brought to analyses of global time by new phenomenologies of listening, on the one hand, and by disjunctures and differences of polychronic scale, on the other, are grounded in ab initio exclusions of certain modes of practice and thought. By scrutinizing the double conceptions of rhythm and meter in relation to African musical practice, the chapter suggests an opening for thinking outside of hegemonic time.