Introduction to Panorama of Music Theory, 1987–97

[1] When I was asked by Thomas Christensen to participate in this plenary session, my first inclination was to review and celebrate the published work of the last decade in the fields of music theory to which I have contributed. But as I thought through the last ten years, I reminded myself that half of my contributions to music have been in composition and that my interests and attitudes, both musical and academic, have broadened in ways I could not have predicted in 1987. So, for a while, I was at a loss to know how to respond. After further reflection, I realized that I should compose some music for this session rather than present a paper. Actually, my decision does reflect an important and recent direction in musical scholarship: the emphasis upon musical experience, in all its guises and disguises, either in opposition to, or in cooperation with, the ongoing study of musical structure. Besides, music theory scholarship and pedagogy has been a major influence on my compositional poetics, and I have been worried that the present-day separation of composition from theory and analysis in many academic institutions may have gone too far.

[2] I found I wanted to express in music the sense of wonder at the rich, deep, provocative, and often beautiful insights, thoughts, and conceptions that I had encountered in music- theory writings of the last ten years. So, after reviewing the literature, I selected 35 quotations, one per author, to be read over a specially designed musical fabric of slowly evolving harmony. The order of the quotations was chosen for aesthetic reasons and does not consciously reflect any bias or prominence of interest on my part. The limitation to culling relatively short quotations that suggest issues rather than documenting results or reviewing detailed and subtle reasoning eliminated more than many important contributions. But perhaps the other speakers will discuss such texts.

[3] With some trepidation, I have provided a handout to accompany your listening to my piece, if you so desire. Let me assure you the handout is not a necessary part of this presentation; nevertheless, let us look at it for a moment. The list under the heading in bold-face: “Order of Authors” lists the authors of the quotations in order of appearance in my piece; a series of asterisks indicates a short section of music without text. When listening to the piece, those of you who are immediately curious about who wrote a text you hear can find out by glancing at the list but without losing your concentration on the music of words and sounds. Of course, others of you may enjoy not knowing the identity of the authors until the piece is over. In any case, the reverse side of the handout provides a bibliography for the quotes.

[4] The composition is in 50 sections, 35 of which have texts. The numbers 35 and 50 might suggest to some of you something about the structure of the piece. In any case, there are connections between the music-sound and the texts, some of which are obvious and perhaps amusing. The sounds were generated in my own computer music set-up at home, then transported to one of the computer music studios at the Eastman School of Music, where they were mixed in stereo with the texts. I am very grateful to the five readers: Gavin Chuck, Ellen Koskoff, Elizabeth West Marvin, Thomas Paul, and Kala Pierson.

Panorama of Music Theory, 1987-97

by

Robert (D.) Morris

in celebration of The Society of Music Theory’s 20th Anniversary

Voices of Gavin Chuck, Ellen Koskoff, Elizabeth West Marvin,

Thomas Paul, Kala Pierson

This composition has 50 sections, 35 of which have texts. The following “Order of Authors” lists the authors of the texts in order of occurrence. (See below for exact citations.)

Order of Authors:
(“* * * * *” indicates a section without text)

Jonathan Kramer

* * * * * *

Joseph Dubiel

Stephen Peles

Ed Sarath

Eugene Narmour

Brian Hyer

Joseph N. Straus

* * * * *

John Roeder

Joel Galand

* * * * *

Larry Polansky and Richard S. Bassein

* * * * *

William Rothstein

Rosemary N. Killam

Kate Covington and Charles H. Lord

* * * * *

Michael L. Friedmann

* * * * *

Matthew Brown and Douglas J. Dempster

Daniel Harrison

* * * * *

Marion Guck

Richard Cohn

Elaine Barkin

* * * * *

Norman Carey and David Clampitt

* * * * *

* * * * *

Elizabeth West Marvin and Robert W. Wason

John Rahn

Peter Westergaard

* * * * *

Stephen Soderberg

* * * * *

* * * * *

Benjamin Boretz

* * * * *

Kevin Korsyn

Steven Block

Kofi Agawu

Diana Deutsch

John Clough, Jack Douthett, N. Ramanathan, and Lewis Rowell

Suzanne G. Cusick

Jonathan W. Bernard

Andrew Mead

* * * * *

Iannis Xenakis

Arthur Komar

The computer-generated sounds and voices were mixed in the Computer Music Studios of the Eastman School of Music, August 1–3, 1997.

Robert Morris
Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester
Departments of Composition and Music Theory
26 Gibbs Street
Rochester, NY 14604
rdm@wozzeck.esm.rochester.edu

Works Cited

Key to line citations: [page, paragraph, line(s)]

Agawu, Kofi. 1992. “Theory and Practice in the Analysis of the Nineteenth-Century Lied.” Music Analysis 11.1 [11, 3, 1–4].

Barkin, Elaine. 1992. “‘either/other’.” Perspectives of New Music 30.2 [218, 2, 1].

Bernard, Jonathan W. 1995. “Theory, Analysis, and the ‘Problem’ of Minimal Music.” in Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann, Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945. Rochester: University of Rochester Press [266, 1, 1–2].

Block, Steven. 1990. “Pitch-Class Transformation in Free Jazz.” Music Theory Spectrum 12.2 [202, 2, 3].

Boretz, Benjamin. 1994. music/consciousness/gender. [3, 2, 1].

Brown, Matthew and Douglas J. Dempster. 1989. “The Scientific Image of Music Theory.” Journal of Music Theory 33.1 [97, 3, 1–2].

Carey, Norman and David Clampitt. 1989. “Aspects of Well-Formed Scales.” Music Theory Spectrum 11.2 [202, 1, 2–3].

Clough, John and Jack Douthett, N. Ramanathan, and Lewis Rowell. 1993. ”Early Indian Heptatonic Scales and Recent Diatonic Theory.” Music Theory Spectrum 15.1 [57, 1, (1–2 & 5)].

Cohn, Richard. 1992. “The Autonomy of Motives in Schenkerian Accounts of Tonal Music.” Music Theory Spectrum 14.2 [168, 2, 1–2].

Covington, Kate and Charles H. Lord. 1994. “Epistemology and Procedure in Aural Training: In Search of a Unification of Music Cognitive Theory with its Applications.” Music Theory Spectrum 16.2 [161, 0, (4–5 & 8)].

Cusick, Suzanne G. 1994. “Feminist Theory, Music theory, and the Mind/Body Problem.” Perspectives of New Music 32.1 [18, (2, 3–4 & 3, 1)].

Deutsch, Diana. 1991. “The Tritone Paradox: An Influence of Language on Music Perception.” Music Perception 8.4 [345, 1, 1].

Dubiel, Joseph. 1991. “Three Essays on Milton Babbitt (2).” Perspectives of New Music 29.1 [94, 2, 1].

Friedmann, Michael L. 1990. Ear Training for Twentieth-Century Music. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, [(xxii, 4, 1) & (xxiii, 1, 2)].

Galand, Joel. 1995. “Form, Genre, and Style in the Eighteenth-Century Rondo.” Music Theory Spectrum 17.1 [43, 1, 1–2].

Guck, Marion. 1995. “Music Loving, Or the Relationship with the Piece.” Music Theory Online 2.2 [*, [34], 4].

Harrison, Daniel. 1990. “Rhetoric and Fugue: An Analytical Application.” Music Theory Spectrum 12.1 [40, 4, 1–2 & 40, 7,1)].

Hyer, Brian. 1994. “Chopin and the In-F-able.” In Raphael Atlas and Michael Cherlin, eds., Musical Transformation and Musical Intuition: Essays in Honor of David Lewin. Roxbury, Ma..: Ovenbird Press [159, 3, 1–3].

Killam, Rosemary N. 1993. “Woman Working: An Alternative to Gans.” Perspectives of New Music 31.2 [243, 5, 3–4].

Korsyn, Kevin. 1994. “Review of Mark Evans Bonds, ‘Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Forms and the Metaphor of the Oration,’” Music Theory Spectrum 16.1 [124, 2, 3–5].

Kramer, Jonathan. 1988. The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies. New York: Schirmer Books [55, 2, 1–3].

Marvin, Elizabeth West and Robert W. Wason. 1995. “On Preparing Anton Webern’s Early Songs for Performance: A Collaborators’ Dialogue.” Theory and Practice 20 [120, 5, 1–3].

Mead, Andrew W. 1994. An Introduction to the Music of Milton Babbitt. Princeton: University of Princeton Press [8, 1, 4–5].

Narmour, Eugene. 1990. The Analysis and Cognition of Basic Melodic Structures: The Implication-Realization Model Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press [21, 2, 2].

Peles, Stephen. 1992. “Continuity, Reference, and Implication: Remarks on Schoenberg’s Proverbial ‘Difficulty’.” Theory and Practice 17 [36, 1, 5].

Polansky Larry, and Richard S. Bassein. 1992. “Possible and Impossible Melodies: Some Formal Aspects of Contour.” Journal of Music Theory 36.2 [271, 3, (1 & 4)].

Rahn, John. 1993. “Differences.” Perspectives of New Music 31.1 [67, 1, 3–4].

Roeder, John. 1988. “A Declarative Model of Atonal Analysis.” Music Perception 6.1 [22, 1, (1 & 3)].

Rothstein, William. 1991. “On Implied Tones.” Music Analysis 10.3 [323, 0, 3–4].

Sarath, Ed. 1996. “A New Look at Improvisation.” Journal of Music Theory 40.1 [14, 0, 1–2].

Soderberg, Stephen. 1995. “Z-Related Sets as Dual Inversions.” Journal of Music Theory 39.1 [77, 2, 1].

Straus, Joseph N. 1990. Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press [184, 2, 6–7].

Westergaard, Peter. 1996. “Geometries of Sounds in Time.” Music Theory Spectrum 18.1 [3, 1, 1–3].

Xenakis, Iannis. 1989. “Concerning Time.” Perspectives of New Music 27.1 [91, 4, 1–2].

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