Editor’s Message
Dear readers!
[1] The editorial team, managing editors, editorial assistants, and editorial board are delighted to bring you another issue of Music Theory Online. In writing this message, roughly 500 days into a global pandemic, I am particularly grateful to present a special symposium on archival research that has its own introduction! Benjamin Levy and Laura Emmery have stewarded a collection of eight articles on archival materials related to 20th- and 21st-century music that brings readers to the forefront of this maturing subfield. The symposium includes articles by the conveners, as well as Richard Beaudoin, Patricia Hall, Kevin C. Karnes, Landon Morrison, and past MTO editor Jeffrey Perry.
[2] We are also happy to publish three articles and one book review that are not part of the Special Symposium. Matt Chiu, in his “Macroharmonic Progressions through the Discrete Fourier Transform: An Analysis from Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem,” brings the DFT to bear on pitch collections in Duruflé’s work, undergirding a close reading with mathematical and computational approaches. Caitlin Martinkus, in her “Schubert’s Large-Scale Sentences: Exploring the Function of Repetition in Schubert’s First-Movement Sonata Forms,” presents a corpus study of Schubert’s first-movement forms from 1810–28, and details many features of Schubert’s “dissolving third statements.” Loretta Terrigno, in her “Emergent Modality: Minor-to-Major Progressions as ‘Tragic-to-Transcendent’ Narratives in Brahms’s Solo Songs,” adds a new perspective to discussions of Brahms’s Lieder, honing in on specific techniques of modal mixture that shift the expressive register. Finally, Jonathan De Souza reviews John Paul Ito’s Focal Impulse Theory: Musical Expression, Meter, and the Body.
[3] From the sixty people involved in bringing this issue to you, happy reading! I hope to see all of you virtually at SMT’s Annual Meeting in November and in-person in some other November!
Best wishes for the upcoming term,
Mitch OhrinerUniversity of Denver