Editor’s Message
Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come
Whispering ‘It will be happier;’ and old faces
Press round us, and warm hands close with warm hands,
And thro’ the blood the wine leaps to the brain
Like April sap to the topmost tree, that shoots
New buds to heaven, whereon the throstle rock’d
Sings a new song to the new year—and you,
Strike up a song, my friends, and then to bed.
— Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Foresters, Act I Scene III
Here at the threshold of the year to come, we are pleased to present a new issue of Music Theory Online, comprising five articles, four book reviews, and a conference report. Andrew Aziz surveys second-theme groups in Chopin’s sonata-form works, Laurel Parsons suggests pedagogical strategies for teaching aural skills to students with dyslexia, and Keith Salley draws connections between Bergson’s concept of duration and Schoenberg’s concept of developing variation. The last two articles in the issue concern Schenkerian methodologies, albeit from very different perspectives: Michael Schachter proposes a theory of structural levels in South Indian music, and Jason Yust offers a generative approach to Schenker’s theory of tonal structure and a model for voice-leading transformations.
Thanks to the efforts of our excellent reviews editors Kyle Adams and Heather Platt, we also present four book reviews: Joe Argentino considers Jack Boss’s Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Music, winner of the 2015 Wallace Berry Award; William Marvin reflects on Markus Neuwirth and Pieter Bergé’s collection What is a Cadence?; Jan Miyake assesses Heinrich Schenker: Selected Correspondence, edited by Ian Bent, David Bretherton, and William Drabkin, and its relationship to Schenker Documents Online; and JW Turner reviews conductor Markand Thakar’s Looking for the “Harp” Quartet. Finally, Joseph Kraus reports on the Second Congress of the Russian Society for the Theory of Music (Philip Ewell reported on the inaugural congress in 2013 in MTO 19.4).
We offer sincere thanks to the outgoing board members who have served MTO faithfully over the past three years, Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen, David Clampitt, and Jan Miyake, and we are pleased to welcome new members Melissa Hoag, Rachel Wells Hall, Jocelyn Neal, Christopher Doll, William Renwick, and Sarah Weiss to our expanded editorial board. Thanks also to managing editor Brent Yorgason for his skillful work behind the scenes, to the members of the editorial board, and the editorial assistants. We are, in addition, deeply indebted to the many referees who provide lengthy, detailed, and well thought-out reviews containing excellent advice for our authors. This reflects an impressive and commendable commitment to mentoring new scholarship in the discipline as well as helping to disseminate it.
Work on our retrofitting project continues apace, and MTO volumes 0 through 5 have now been modernized, and much of the remaining work has been done as well. We expect to have all issues modernized in the first half of 2016.
We 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.
