[ Section 01 (23191) ]
JUMP TO “SEMINAR CALENDAR AND READINGS”
Instructor: Ben Leeds Carson — blc at ucsc dot edu
Meetings: Music Center 245 on Fridays, 1:00 — 4:00 PM
Office: Music Center 148 (on the lower floor, take a right at the bottom of the stairs)
Music Office hours [In room 148, + zoom link below]: Fridays 10:30 AM - 1:00 PM, or by appointment
Additional hours: Mondays 12:15 - 1:15, Thursdays 3:30 - 4:30 PM [ http://ucsc.zoom.us/my/benleedscarson ; passcode: 608213 ]
Office phone: 9-5581 (voicemail not frequently checked; email is better)
ABOUT THIS COURSE
Catalogue Description:
Encompasses various forms of linear analysis, set theory, and selected topics in current analytical practice. Offered in alternate academic years.
Primary readings
Agawu, Kofi. “How We Got out of Analysis, and How to Get Back in Again,” in Music Analysis, Vol. 23, No. 2/3 (Jul. - Oct., 2004), pp. 267-286.Cadwallader, Allen and David Gagne. Analysis of Tonal Music. London: Oxford U Press, 1997.
Carson, B. L. “Matrices & Vectors.” Web resource, 29 Feb 2020.
Cone, Edward T. Stravinsky
Dahlhaus, Carl. Between Romanticism to Modernism. Translated by Mary Whitall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
Ewell, Phlllip. “Music Theory’s White Racial Frame.” In Music Theory Spectrum, Volume 43, Issue 2, Fall 2021, Pages 324–329
Kielian-Gilbert, Marianne. “Interpreting Schenkerian Prolongation.” Music Analysis, Vol. 22, No. 1/2 (Mar. - Jul., 2003), pp. 51-104
Nauert, Paul. Notes on PC-Set Theory. Unpublished.
Straus, Joseph. Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory. [Fourth Edition.] Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2016.
Straus, Joseph. “Normalizing the Abnormal: Disability in Music and Music Theory.” Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Spring 2006), pp. 113-184.
Additional Readings
Carson, B. L. “Schoenberg’s ambivalent thought: subjectivity in ‘Du lehnest wider eine Silberweide…” Chapter 1 of Cox, Biro, Takesugi, & Sigman, eds., Search Yearbook: The Second Century of New Music. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011.
Hatten, Robert S. “Staging Virtual Subjectivity,” in A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music, Indiana University Press (2018), pp. 139-177.
Lerdahl, Fred and Ray Jackendoff. Generative Theory of Tonal Music. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983.
Straus, Joseph. Remaking the Past: Tradition and Influence in Twentieth-Century Music. Cambridge: Harvard, 1990.
OBJECTIVES and ASSESSMENT
Learning Outcomes:
1. Clarify and distinguish aspects of harmonic and contrapuntal listening that are evident and prevalent in 19th-century European (“art” and “popular”) music literature.
2. Grasp the basics of linear and voice-structure analysis; introduce analytical styles associated with late Romantic and early modern thought, including tools associated with Schenkerian analysis, common to contemporary scholarly analysis of tonal music.
3. Grasp the basics of set-theoretic approaches to post-tonal music.
4. Explore and challenge conventional approaches to music analysis as a means of introspection about musical experience.
Assignment format:
Except where a diagram specifically benefits from letter-orientation, please use landscape-oriented staves:
4-system grand-staff sheet for “surface” graphs. These staves give you a maximum ability to diagram 8-12 bars of relativey dense music, or 16 bars of simpler music, on a single system without line breaks.
3-system sheet for sketching and drafting graphs when it is not necessary to show the continuity of a longer musical sentence.
2-system sheet with double-grand-staff systems, for foreground and middleground, or middleground and background graphs. Use these later in the quarter when you wish to show the complex surface of a piece (normally on the bottom grand staff), in parallel with a simpler description of structure, unencumbered by detail (normally on the top staff).
Coursework:
Participants in the seminar are expected on a weekly basis to prepare materials (questions and analysis drafts) for discussion — informal responses to the week’s readings and materials, including your own unstructured exploration of literature related to the topics of the previous week’s discussion. Participants will also prepare materials for formal presentation approximately every 2-3 weeks — a total of two 8-10-min. presentations of draft analyses (approximately in week 2-3 and week 6-7), and two 15-20 min. presentations of complete analyses (approximately in weeks 4-5 and 9-10). We will establish, impromptu, in each week, which seminarians are slated to present for discussion in the following week. Those slated for discussion leadership are required to bring recordings, scores, and 4-5 photocopies of their graphs or written work, as visual aids to their presentation. Many of the assignments in the course are “accumulative,” that is, your success in the course depends on your ability in one assignment to respond to feedback given on the last. Your grade in the course will be a reflection of how these four presentations have taken up the concepts of the course to illuminate a way of hearing specific music literature.
Assessment:
1/4 of the grade will reflect your work in week-to-week exercises and analysis drafts
1/6 will reflect the preparedness of your in-class discussion
1/3 will reflect your success in the two preliminary analysis presentations (one tonal and one post-tonal)
1/4 will reflect the success of your final project.
Lecture Notes for The FIRST MEETING:
This course offers three techniques (see below), and some variants on them, in the analysis of modern Western music literature^1, focusing on music from the early 19th century to the mid-to-late 20th century.^1
The first half of this course^2 concentrates on a particularly “modern” music literature, that is, tonal idioms associated with the rise of a musically literate middle class in 19th-century Europe and its colonies, and the art musics and popular musics that developed from that foundation.^3 We’ll examine the formal and expressive ‘rhetoric’ of that distinctive repertoire, illuminated by aesthetic principles in the 18th-century French tradition (Rousseau, Rameau, Chastellux), and compositional treatises in the German tradition (Reicha, Riepel, Koch), before commencing a critical view of tonal coherence, with Schenker and Schoenberg as the primary representatives of that concept.
In the second half of the course, focusing on the work of the Marxist musicologist Carl Dahlhaus, we'll examine contemporary and historical commentary on how that ‘tonal language’ underwent a pivot (or collapse, or emancipation) toward 20th-century “post-tonal” musics. Some critical intervention from Adorno, Schoenberg, and Kurth will frame what are probably very new conceptions of time and sound in the early 20th century, and in weeks 6, 7, and 8 we will focus on set-theoretic descriptions of musical information, with emphasis on structures of pitch and rhythm (Strauss, Rahn, Nauert). Broadly, then, this course is meant to be a critical study of the genealogy of modernism and modernity in Western Art Music.
The analytic tools of our course, throughout, will focus on three questions—tonal coherence, motivic coherence, and pitch-class/beat-class set (pc set) coherence.
Tonal coherence a shorthand for the practices of harmonic progression, oriented around a single tone, that traverse closely related keys and bind works together, say in diatonic folk idioms, and in the music of, for example, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Scott Joplin, or Jerome Kern. Stylistic features like cadences and sequences usually form a kind of vocabulary that helps to shape a typical phrase with digressions and other rhythmic features—that either prolong or delay chords in those progressions.
Motivic coherence is the simpler idea that music, including some highly chromatic music (music that might lack tonal coherence, or at least suspend it) can be held together, and made to seem whole and unified, by alternative “compositional economies”—a term from Carl Dahlhaus. Mid- and late-nineteenth-century European audiences placed the idea of “motive” at the center of most dialogue about musical form, especially when composers like Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner were the topic. That, in turn, contributes to an ethos in which a work’s success is measured in part by an economy of means — maximizing the composition breadth that can arise from minimum of compositional origins. Emphasis on motive can be scene as a step away from what is conventionally “absolute music”, and toward a culture of visceral musical pleasure: “structure” in late-19th-c. music sometimes arises not through tonal procedures but through invocation and aural connection between immediate sonic experiences, signals that connect and structure experience concretely and iconically, i.e. by how they resemble one another or how they form a dramatic rhetoric in reference to the extramusical.
Pc-set coherence will offer us an introduction to revolutionary and emancipatory conceptions of pitch and time that, in T. W. Adorno’s view, the historical consequence the tension between tonal coherence and its alternatives in subject and musical idea. Because intervals labeled by numbers are abstract values, they’re ideal schema in which to understand music that resists the subordinations of modal and tonal organization, but offers a basis for order uncoupled from small-scale Gestalts. These methods, in turn, offer a foundation for “serial” organization that sets forth one of two overarching polemics of ‘art’ music in mid-20th-c. American and European composers.
A final note—a note about the why—some of the best outcomes of music analysis are ways of hearing music: an analyst finds a way of inhabiting a musical experience, and conveys it in such a way that readers might hear that music anew. The music analyses you complete in this course will attempt to offer insights of that kind—not just chunks of time filled with chords and other data, but also perceptual orientations, modes of listening—as they relate to some kind of whole piece or performance. I hope this course will also present a kind of genealogy of ideas and dialogues that inform us as music-listeners and music-makers today.
NOTES
^1. The word “analysis” is derived from Greek ana- (“back” or “away”) lysis (“loosening”), thus “to loosen up” or “to release from entanglement”—refers to any investigation that involves separating-out the parts of a perceived whole, and considering their relationships to each other. Here is a little blogging on definitions of, and reminders about, common terms for intellectual endeavors: analysis/synthesis, theory/practice, theory/observation, and practice/criticism, and even a little bit about ideology.
^2. By contrast: this course follows, or complements, Music 201 (History of Theory), which surveys a wider chronology of music theory texts, beginning with ancient Babylonian and Chinese texts, emphasizing medieval theory treatises of the Holy Roman, Persian, and Turkish-Ottoman traditions, and closing with Indian and European composition manuals of the 18th century.
^3. “Modern Western music literature”, in this case, refers to musics in “modernity” (not to be confused with modernism); for our purposes, defined by the rise of literate middle-class consumers who were consumers of sheet music in the 1800s, and who participated in cultures of notated “popular” and “art” music in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Until the rise of the Third Reich in the 1930s, composers ranging from Wagner to Offenbach, and from Puccini to Duke Ellington, typically saw art and popular music as part of a continuum, rather than as the two separate streams that structure our thinking today. All of the repertoire arises in “Western” notation, and as such reflects a potentially “colonizing” and subjugating force when it occurs in non-European musics. However, popular culture doesn’t belong to the West. (Resist any assumption that musical traditions of Latin America, East Asia, the Middle East, etc. are caught between Western influence and an “authentic” pre-modern past; rather, their traditions are living, and can retain that life in the face of foriegn influence just as readily as Western tradition can.)
Academic Integrity:
Be careful to distinguish borrowed ideas and language from your own ideas and language. Plagiarism is the misuse of others’ material, representing someone else’s thoughts or observations as your own. When you write or speak, you join an ongoing conversation whose strength depends on honesty and integrity. That integrity consists not only of accurate information, but transparency of perspective—not only what you say, but your forthrightness about the circumstance in which you say it.
In your notes—whether they pertain to readings, lecture, discussion, interviews, or any other kind of research—use quotation marks, use footnotes, and make attribution clear. Anyone who, in the context of this seminar, attempts to take credit for the work of others, or who fails to credit others as sources in the work that they submit, will be subject to disciplinary action. That action will always include a report of academic misconduct to the university; it may include a failing grade in the assignment or the class, and/or a notation on your academic record.