Editor’s Message
[1] Greetings all, and welcome to Volume 30, Issue 4 of Music Theory Online! I would like to begin the “December” issue message, as customary, by sharing the brilliant successes of MTO authors whose work was recently honored at the 2024 Annual Meeting for the Society for Music Theory. At the meeting in Jacksonville, Lori Burns received the Outstanding Publication Award for “Female Subjectivities in the Words, Music, and Images of Progressive Metal” (2023, issue 29.4). Remarkably, this article also garnered the Outstanding Publication Award given by the SMT’s Interest Group on Popular Music. Three other MTO pieces were awarded the Emerging Scholar Award for articles: Olivia Lucas’s “Performing Analysis, Performing Metal” (2021, issue 27.4), Anabel Maler and Robert Komaniecki’s “Rhythmic Techniques in Deaf Hip Hop” (2021, issue 27.1), and Thomas Posen’s “Windows into Beethoven’s Lessons in Bonn: Kirnberger’s Die Wahren Grundsätze Zum Gebrauch Der Harmonie (1773) and Vogler’s Gründe Der Kuhrpf&aauml;lzischen Tonschule in Beisiegel (1776/1778)” (2021, issue 29.4). Congratulations to them all on these highly impressive achievements!
[2] For those lamenting the late arrival of this “December 2024” installment, the editors and staff are pleased to offer more than ample compensation for your patience. We have, first, our own full issue, which contains five entries that treat common-practice, post-tonal, pop, and theater musics. In “‘Feel the Emptiness:’ Micro-Schemata in the Music of Henryk Mikolaj Górecki,” Evan Martschenko narrows in on the schema concept, distilling it down to the point where it may manifest as a “voicing, a specific harmony, a three-note motive, etc.” At this micro level and with aid of corpus analysis, he demonstrates the utility of micro-schemata as measurable markers of a composer’s style and, in special cases, their aesthetic. A wholly separate approach to twentieth-century music is found in James Sullivan’s “Performing Meter: Toward a Motive-Oriented Performance Practice for Post-Tonal Music.” Here, Sullivan creatively synthesizes a wide variety of metric theories—most prominently, those of Lerdahl & Jackendoff and Ito—to formulate an approach that models how performers actively forge musical narratives out of rhythmic and metric ambiguities appearing in works by Debussy, Berg, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Penderecki, Barber, and others. The book review for this issue, by John Y. Lawrence, provides a detailed and thoughtful appraisal of Here for the Hearing: Analyzing the Music in Musical Theater, edited by Michael Buchler and Gregory Decker.
[3] The three remaining research pieces appearing in this issue are thematically linked, in that all examine the circumstances under which musicians, past and present, carry out their work. In “Who is Allowed to Be a Music Theorist? Sarah Mary Fitton and Conversations on Harmony (1855),” Stephanie Venturino examines the work of a prolific author who popularized many technical aspects of botany and music through dialog-based treatises. Where scholars have before considered Fitton’s work from a pedagogical standpoint, Venturino examines her scholarly contributions—in particular, those concerning the structure and function of augmented- sixth chords—in more purely theoretic terms and, at the same time, as a means for understanding gendered reception of scholarship.
[4] In “Vocal Production, Mimesis, and Social Media in Bedroom Pop,” Alyssa Barna and Caroline McLaughlin theorize at length—which is to say: with the support of extensive anatomical, video, and spectrographic evidence—on the central vocal aspects of an important genre born out of the digital/home studio age. Where the notion of “bedroom pop” has been recognized for decades, the genre skyrocketed to prominence in the Covid years, during which musicians in isolation and quarantine found that making music in the confines of their domiciles was the only way to make it at all. Last, and of special relevance to professional music theorists, Janet Bourne, Rachel Lumsden, and Inessa Bazayev present their “Survey of the Impact of COVID-19 on Music Theorists.” This document, which reports on and summarizes the experiences of 139 theorists striving to maintain their research, teaching, and careers during a period of intense personal, familial, and financial difficulty, stands both as a testament to their (and in many cases, collectively “our”) fortitude and as an important historical document in a world in which global health stability seems to be an increasingly precarious prospect.
[5] In addition, and in the compensatory spirit alluded to above, we at Music Theory Online are proud to present a full guest issue on global music theory titled Music Theory in the Plural. This project, proposed and expertly stewarded by Edwin Li, Chris Stover, and Anna Yu Wang, seeks, first, to make more theory source documents from other cultures available to Western readers, and second, to promote dialog about these sources by creatively pairing them with scholarly peer commentaries. (As the authors explain in their introduction, the present offering, as impressive as it is, represents just an early step in a far more ambitious and expansive endeavor.) For their extraordinary efforts in bringing this project to fruition, we offer special thanks to our incredible production team, in particular Managing Editor Brent Yorgason, Senior Editorial Assistant Andrew Eason, and the four Editorial Assistants, Andrew Blake, Lauren Irschick, Amy King, and Dorian Mueller. In the last few weeks, these staff members have put in more than twice the amount of work than usual for an issue, much of it entailing the meticulous setting of foreign language characters in side-by-side translation format.
[6] The last thing I wish to announce on the technology and outreach front is that Music Theory Online has recently joined the Bluesky social network! (For those who haven’t yet heard of it, Bluesky functions similarly to other [*ahem*] Twitter-style apps, except that is intended to run as a US public benefit corporation). Please follow us @mtosmt.bsky.social! The MTO feed on Bluesky is, admittedly, just a trickle at present. Pending a groundswell of interest from the community, we hope to expand the content beyond quarterly announcements of issue publication.
[7] Operating as we do at the cresting wave of scholarship, it seems like there is always something new afoot and more than a few exciting somethings in development at Music Theory Online. As always, we encourage all our readers to visit us often as we make good on our quarterly pledge to bring you the most compelling and up-to-date theory offerings we can. We wish you all a happy start to 2025 and look forward to seeing you again soon in spring!
Brent Auerbach, Editor-in-Chief
University of Massachusetts Amherst