Editor’s Message

Dear MTO readers,

I hope your summer thus far is enjoyable or productive, or perhaps even both. For many of us, this is a time to reflect on our teaching and research and reorganize our materials. Accordingly, the MTO editors have taken time to reflect on our submission guidelines, and have revised them with a clearer organization. We have also explained our submission, review, and publication processes in greater detail, which will be especially helpful information for new authors.

In other journal-housekeeping news, our managing editor Brent Yorgason and his assistants have been working on retrofitting the early issues of MTO: modernizing the tables of contents for each issue, updating the article layouts to conform to our current style, and most importantly, converting the audio and other media to the latest formats. The first five issues of volume 0 (the initial beta stage of the journal), issues 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, and 0.5, are now complete. We invite you to peruse these articles of earlier vintage in a new and more easily readable guise.

The current issue of MTO features two articles each on the topics of harmony, form, and meter, plus one article on schema theory. The articles focused on harmony are both—perhaps unsurprisingly—concerned with chromaticism, in two different repertoires: 19th-century art music and 21st-century art rock. We are pleased to be able to posthumously publish an article by Richard Burke (with the assistance of L. Poundie Burstein) on harmonizations of an unusual chromatic scale, the scala enigmatica, which were printed in the Gazzetta musicale di Milano in the late 19th century and which also occur in the music of Verdi and Puccini. David Heetderks analyzes chromatic seventh-chord progressions in recent art rock as transformations of more rock-normative diatonic progressions, and offers theoretical models for their harmonic function, voice leading, and progression.

The two articles on form also address the two repertoires of classical and rock music. Timothy Mastic examines the recomposed recapitulations in Haydn’s Symphony no. 100 and string quartet Op. 33 no. 6, and their potential relation to eighteenth-century conceptions of wit. Gilad Cohen explores techniques of formal expansion in Pink Floyd’s extended track “Dogs,” identifying various musical parameters that compensate for the minimal thematic material and slow harmonic rhythm.

Of the two articles on meter, one is a top-down theoretical approach with examples from various musics, while the other is a bottom-up analysis taking a specific oeuvre as its point of departure. Mark Gotham provides a mathematical formalization for mixed meters, and describes and compares their numerous properties and interrelationships. Wing Lau surveys the function and the expressive affect of notated meter changes in several songs of Brahms.

Robert Gjerdingen and Janet Bourne consider schema theory through the lens of contemporary linguistics, identifying six pertinent principles of construction grammar and demonstrating them with examples from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pedagogy and composition. The article is designed as a series of web pages and represents one of MTO’s first publications in this format.

Thanks to our excellent reviews editors Kyle Adams and Heather Platt, we also present three book reviews in this issue: Daniel Chua assesses Mark Evan Bonds’s Absolute Music: The History of an Idea, John Covach considers Robert Freeman’s The Crisis of Classical Music in America, and Robert Hatten evaluates Matthew Riley’s The Viennese Minor-Key Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Mozart.

We would like to encourage new and creative submissions to MTO. Although we are especially well suited for the publication of articles that incorporate recordings, videos, and other media, we also welcome text submissions in a variety of formats, including full-length articles, shorter essays and commentaries, conference reports, and entire special volumes. Commentaries in response to this issue’s articles, as well as announcements for our job listings and dissertation index, may be submitted to the Editor for publication in the next issue. Please refer to our submission guidelines.

All MTO volumes dating back to our first issue in 1993 can be accessed from the contents page at http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/issues.html. Thank you, as always, for your support of MTO—a Journal of the Society for Music Theory.