Editor’s Message
[1] Greetings all, and welcome to Volume 31, Issue 1 of Music Theory Online! We here at the journal—the production team especially—are finally finished recovering from publishing the mammoth installment from last quarter. As such, we are relieved to follow that up with a more standard size offering for the present issue. Of course, “standard” for us still means bounteous! Readers may therefore rest easy knowing that the six articles included, as is customary, span an impressive range of topics, repertoires, and approaches to theory and analysis.
[2] Three of the articles in this issue treat popular music. The first, “Beyond Strophic: Prolonged Refrains, Choruses, and Bridges in the Blues, 1923–1966,” by David S. Carter, carries out a corpus study of 113 mid-century songs that diverge from the standard blues model by virtue of containing at least one contrasting section that is not an instrumental solo. In addition to providing new frameworks for categorizing and appreciating these novel forms, Carter’s article provides insights into the cultural and commercial motivations that Black musicians had for expanding the blues in these ways. Emily Schwitzgebel’s “‘Cueing’ Your Playlist: Texture and Teleology in Post-Millennial Pop,” is similarly rooted in corpus study. Following ideas laid out by scholars such as Nobile, Brøvig-Hanssen, Danielsen, and Peres on how EDM and technology have impacted pop composition, this entry compares forms and processes in pre- and post-2000 pop songs. Along the way, Schwitzgebel presents a new method for harnessing Spotify attributes for analysis, for representing these findings in intuitively visual texture models, and for conceiving four general types of perceptual climaxes in pop.
[3] Rounding out the pop offerings is Xieyi (Abby) Zhang’s “Theoretical/Theological Revelations: Reflections on Three Songs from G.E.M.’s Revelation.” In this work, Zhang introduces the MTO readership to G.E.M., a pop artist from Hong Kong whose output harnesses modern, tech-based pop to craft songs with Christian messaging. More specifically, the article presents extensive analyses of three tracks from G.E.M.’s 2022 album, Revelation that consider issues of lyrics, timbre, vocal delivery, form, and narrative. In so doing, Zhang illustrates how these multiple elements forge the sound and meaning of not just the songs but also the larger messages of the concept album: suffering, free will, and the ultimate destiny of the souls of humankind.
[4] On the Classical side, we have two articles examining art music, one concentrating on the more grandiose tradition of the European concert hall and the other on the more intimate tradition of the Harlem Renaissance Salon. In the former category, Benjamin Lavastre examines “György Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto in Light of the Article ‘. . . how time passes . . .’ by Karlheinz Stockhausen.” In the case of the potential influence of Stockhausen on Ligeti, some facts are indisputable, such as that Ligeti spent six weeks at Stockhausen’s home in 1957 and acknowledged in writing the outsized impact his junior contemporary’s methods were having on composition everywhere in the West. To further cement the argument, Lavastre assembles a detailed, technical case in which certain aspects of Stockhausen’s famous theoretical text, such as “field-sizes,” are realized in Ligeti’s score by means as varied as the staging of silences, the superimposition of multiple strata in different tempos, and even the attention given to the performers’ actions. In the latter category, we have Sarah Marlowe and Charity Lofthouse’s “Dreams Realized: Expression and Polystylism in the Art Song Settings of Langston Hughes’s ‘Dream Variation’ by Florence Price and Margaret Bonds.” The authors comparatively illustrate how Price and Bonds—who were close friends and who both knew the poet personally—work in lyrics, key areas, texture, topics and allusion to explore and amplify themes of Blackness in Hughes’s poetry, namely identity, “otherness,” and the (inherently ironic) American dream.
[5] The final article to be introduced in this issue, Vivian Luong’s “Redrawing Analytical Lines,” is somewhat unlike the others; indeed, it is unlike many theory articles one might find in print. Part introduction to the practice of autoethnography as pioneered by Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart and part analysis taking the form of five reflective (i.e., intensely personal) vignettes of Luong’s experiences living with and analyzing a Bach prelude, “Redrawing Analytical Lines” comes across in the spirit of a critical meditation on the act of analysis. Throughout the article, Luong emphasizes that the literal and figurative lines drawn on the score and in the mind harbor peril and promise, in their power on the one hand to exclude ideas and voices in musical discussions and on the other to establish connections and animate music-conceptual worlds.
[6] Much to digest, yes? We, the editors and staff of Music Theory Online, bid you all hearty enjoyment, and hope the ideas in this issue spark much inspiration in and conversation among all the members of our spirited community.
Brent Auerbach, Editor-in-ChiefUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst