Editor’s Message
Dear MTO readers,
It’s summertime, and whether or not the livin’ is easy, we hope you find some opportunities for recreation and relaxation. For your reading pleasure, we are pleased to present our new issue, MTO 22.2, featuring three articles, a group of essays on analysis and performance, and four book reviews.
In “A Platonic Model of Funky Rhythms,” Richard Cohn explores the dissonance created by triple groupings in a duple context in a variety of popular musics, and offers a broader model for juxtapositions of these two smallest primes, which also applies to the acoustic generation of our tonal system. In “Rock Modulation and Narrative,” Scott Hanenberg suggests five potential archetypes for narrative interpretations of tonal shifts, based on case studies from recent rock music. In “Types and Applications of P3,0 Seventh-Chord Transformations in Late Nineteenth-Century Music,” co-authors Samuel Reenan and Richard Bass investigate transformations between seventh chords that hold one tone in common while the other three tones move by semitone, with examples from the music of Wagner, Richard Strauss, and others.
“Performance and Analysis Today: New Horizons” is based on the Performance and Analysis Interest Group panel at the Society for Music Theory meeting in 2014. The panel organizers and co-chairs of the group, Daniel Barolsky and Ed Klorman, have provided an introduction to the essays. Benjamin Binder contemplates the different perspectives of performers and analysts through the lens of C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” (humanities and sciences). Daphne Leong argues for the value of analysis and performance as multiple ways of knowing. Peter Martens explores the role of the body in music analysis from the perspectives of music theory and music cognition. Fabio Morabito considers the analytical potential of performers’ markings in scores, taking violinist Pierre Baillot’s chamber concerts in 1820s Paris as a point of departure. In their responses, the influential scholars John Rink and Janet Schmalfeldt thoughtfully reflect on the essays and the broader issues and questions they raise.
Thanks to our excellent reviews editors Kyle Adams and Heather Platt, we also present four book reviews in this issue. Justin Lavacek engages with the ideas in Anna Zayaruznaya’s The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet. Megan Kaes Long assesses the contributions to scholarship of Ruth I. DeFord’s Tactus, Mensuration, and Rhythm in Renaissance Music. L. Poundie Burstein and David Temperley offer two perspectives on The Art of Tonal Analysis, a collection of lectures by Carl Schachter transcribed and edited by Joseph N. Straus.
In other journal-related news, MTO’s recent webinar on the College Music Society’s manifesto regarding undergraduate theory teaching was very well-attended and generated a lively discussion, and a follow-up is planned for later in the summer. Along with our sister journal Music Theory Spectrum, we have adopted a set of style guidelines for the chord symbols used in jazz and popular music, which is now available on our submission guidelines page at http://www.mtosmt.org/docs/authors.html. We are pleased to report that the MTO retrofitting project of updating older issues is nearing completion.
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.
