Editor’s Message
[1] Greetings all, and welcome to Volume 31, Issue 3 of Music Theory Online! In the fall, the prevailing mood in academic circles now turns to one of anticipation, as scholarly folk gear up for a new year of research and teaching. It is a time when instructors make their last adjustments to their syllabi, adding new readings and pieces that they themselves are looking to learn more about. It is when researchers who have been excitedly clasping their AMS/SMT acceptance notices since spring rush to polish and perfect their pitches and presentations for the upcoming Annual Meeting in Minneapolis. And despite the fact that many of us have been through so many Septembers, it remains true that each one that comes around still seems to feel new.
[2] The same holds for each quarterly arrival of Music Theory Online, which this year—due to happy circumstance—seems unusually attuned to these fall feelings. My saying this does not so much refer to the offerings on hand being new and exciting, because first, of course they are! and second (and not truly paradoxically), there’s nothing actually new about that. It has more to do with the fact that the articles all seem to turn on the notion of “beginnings.” In some cases, we see authors of this issue newly scrutinizing composers’ formative works or, alternatively, delving deeply into the “source” texts of traditions. In others, we see them poring over decades of treatise and score examples as a path towards for shedding new light on the origins of entire musical conventions.
[3] Notably, two entries in this issue examine the origins of formal practices in the Classical era. The first is Omer Maliniak’s “The Classical Concerto First-Movement Cadenza: Origins, Growth, Facilitating Factors and the Eventual Decline.” This ambitious article opens by providing historical context from Quantz, Kollmann, and contemporaries on how sonata form elements found their way into concertos. The theoretical payoff takes the form of a detailed examination of how that impulse shaped the development of first-movement cadenzas and then the argument that awareness of these forces should change how we collectively regard (categorize) and listen to such cadenzas. In “The Expositional Rondo: A New Formal Type in Pre-Classical and Classical Rondo Finales,” Graham Hunt notes a problem in our current theories of form, which is they do not play well with sonata-rondos that arrive at their recapitulations. . . and then seemingly abandon much of the recap material. One way to approach examples of this procedure, which appeared as late as the 1790s in Haydn’s music, would be to declare such pieces “problematic” or “experimental.” Hunt instead peers in detail back into thematic and harmonic Galant practices from decades before, arguing that these pieces should be viewed in their own right as “five-part expositional rondos.”
[4] Next, Henry Martin regales us with another splendid account of origins, this one concerning “The Evolution of Improvisation in Early Jazz Piano Pedagogy.” He discusses the impact of early pedagogues such as Scott Joplin and Zez Confrey on the development of knowledge of ragging and blues, and then centers on the Vincent Lopez Modern Piano Method from 1934, a work that provided detailed guidance into the specifics of playing “hot” (in the original sense, meaning on a chorus divorced from its original song) and “blue.” Near the end, Martin delves deeper into the workings of Lopez’s system and considers its significance both for contemporary players and for present-day jazz theorists.
[5] In “Modes in Klezmer Music: A Corpus Study Based on Beregovski’s Jewish Instrumental Folk Music,” authors Yonatan Malin and Daniel Shanahan similarly investigate a pivotal theoretical work documenting practices in a musical tradition. They, too, go “back to the source,” which in this case is an authoritative compilation of Jewish tunes transcribed by Moshe Beregovski and his colleague, S.M. Schnaider during the twentieth century. Via their rigorous data analysis of this 249-tune corpus, Malin and Shanahan identify prevalent intervallic structures, likely modulatory schemes, and probability distributions of melodic tones. In so doing, they illuminate new aspects of the modes used in klezmer, modes, they stress which are “worlds” that serve as the scaffolding for “hundreds of tunes carried in memory, notation, and recordings.”
[6] The three remaining articles examine the origins of both performance and compositional practices. On the former front, Rachel Hottle discusses the sound of an underappreciated legend of Piedmont blues in “The Embodied Folk Guitar of Elizabeth Cotten.” Hottle’s argument— rooted in both a thorough account of how left-handed people in general must adapt to standard, “righty” guitar playing and close analysis (transcriptions and video analysis) of the Cotten's performances—is that the blues artist’s inimitable style emanated in large part from ergonomic solutions to voicing and picking problems. For readers interested in learning more about embodiment work in music theory and/or disability studies, this would be an ideal source to consult!
[7] On the latter front, we have two articles that go “back to the beginning,” as it were, of the artistic development of two pivotal composers of the twentieth century. In “Symmetrical Structures in Xenakis’s Okho: At the Intersection of Mathematics and Literature,” Joseph Chang looks to augment traditional approaches to analyzing Xenakis with one informed by the tradition of Classic Greek literature, with which the composer was intimately familiar from childhood. From this, Chang reveals the presence of both palindromic and chiastic structures underlying the rhythm, form, and rhythmic form in Xenakis’s music. In “Gestural Forces in Steve Reich’s Augmentation-as-Process Works,” Martin Ross works to fill a notable lacuna in studies of this pioneering minimalist, examining two early works often overlooked on the basis of them being process pieces that do not rely on phasing. Ross argues that, in place of phase technique, that process plays out via gestural forces, one quite literal in the case of Reich’s Pendulum Music and one more abstracted and composed out in Four Organs.
[8] Rounding out the issue is a review from Sean Smithers of Fernando Benadon’s Swinglines: Rhythm, Timing, and Polymeter in Musical Phrasing (Oxford University Press, 2024). This equally highly recommended read not only considers the merits and significance of Benadon’s highly imaginative theories; it also puts considerable effort into translating those theories—both in prose and visual examples—into terms well-suited for any and all interested newcomers.
[9] So there you have it: an issue of MTO in which the offerings are both linked, thematically, but also cover an impressive range of topics (form, rhythm, embodiment, process) in a wide-ranging set of styles and dialects (blues, klezmer, Classical, and post-tonal). With such variety and such strong scholarship at hand, we have no doubt our readers will find something—or many somethings—to sit with and learn from in the coming weeks. As always, we, the earnest, hardworking team of editors and staff, bid you a fine fall season full of intellectual and spiritual renewals, and Happy Reading!
Brent Auerbach, Editor-in-ChiefUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst