Editor’s Message
[1] Hello readers of Music Theory Online and welcome to Volume 32, Number 1 of our illustrious journal! With this issue, I am excited to officially begin a three-year term as MTO editor. MTO, in my view, represents academic publishing at its best: amid a world of increasing paywalls, predatory journals, pay-to-play publishers, and increasingly prevalent AI slop, MTO continues to publish top-tier, human-created scholarship in an open-access and ad-free format. We are able to do so largely because of the small army of volunteers that make up our editorial and production teams. I’d like to start by acknowledging a few said volunteers who have rotated off their MTO service as of 2026. First, a heartfelt thank you to outgoing editor Brent Auerbach, who steered the journal with care and aplomb as it crossed into its third decade. Second, thanks go to associate editor Zack Bernstein and seven editorial board members—Zachary Cairns, Matt Chiu, Leah Frederick, Julianne Grasso, Tamyka Jordon-Conlin, Robert Komaniecki, and Su Yin Mak—who concluded their respective three-year terms at the end of 2025.
[2] This issue also marks the first time in nearly a quarter century (!) that MTO’s production process was not overseen by longtime managing editor Brent Yorgason. Brent has served in this capacity since 2003, and in that time has overseen—largely singlehandedly—all of MTO’s back-end tech, including not only the public-facing website but also our online submission portal, doi registration, and many other matters of journal management. In February, Brent announced his retirement from the managing editor position. I encourage the entire society to join me in extending our immense thanks to Brent for his role in making MTO’s mission a reality.
[3] Of course, every off-rotation begets an equal and opposite on-rotation, and I am pleased to welcome several new faces to the MTO team. Chris White began a term as associate editor in late 2025, joining returning associate editors Nancy Murphy, Bill O’Hara, and Cecilia Oinas. Seven new members also joined our editorial board: Knar Abrahamyan, Thomas Kirkegaard, Rachel Lumsden, Caleb Mutch, Dylan Principi, Nicholas Shea, and Xieyi (Abby) Zhang. And the production process has been overseen by Andrew Blake and Andrew Eason, who have stepped up mightily to bring this issue to all of you.
[4] Speaking of the issue at hand: we are proud to present eight articles that offer a diverse range of cutting-edge music theory. Two articles take deep dives into topics familiar to any undergraduate theory student, showing them to be more complex than they may seem. Do you think you know what an escape tone is? If so, David Carson Berry has some words for you in his exploration of the concept’s history and theoretical implications. Okay, how about pre-dominant chords, surely we know all about those? Well, some say that we don’t really know anything unless we have the cold, hard data, which is what Jenine Brown, Daphne Tan, Victoria Boerner, and Yeonju Lindsey Lee provide in their comprehensive study of pre-dominant chords’ functions, formal interactions, idiosyncrasies, and more.
[5] Empirical data also factors into Peter Schubert and Sylvain Margot’s investigation of Cipriano de Rore’s use (or non-use, as the case may be) of repetition in his 16th-century madrigals. Though Rore may seem to eschew thematic repetition, Schubert and Margot—with the aid of computational analysis—identify various types of “hidden” repetition buried within Rore’s contrapuntal practice.
[6] The five remaining articles focus on music from the last century. David Hier shows us how Roger Sessions cleverly combines compositional techniques from both Stravinsky and Schoenberg in his Second Symphony (1946). Nick Braae takes on the question of closure in 1970s rock, identifying a range of “closing markers” and demonstrating their deployment in classic tunes by Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd, and others. Gabrielle Choma and Jack Boss adapt Paul Nauert’s concept of “harmonic fields” to explore Kaija Saariaho’s dramatic use of harmonies in her 2000 opera L’Amour de loin.
[7] Rounding out the issue are two articles on contemporary multimedia genres. Joy Li investigates how chromatic mediant modulations interact with formal structure in Japanese anime songs. Drawing on a corpus of 100 such songs from 1989 through 2022, Li shows how anime songs adapt conventions from both Western popular music and the broader J-pop genre to create an idiosyncratic, but not altogether unfamiliar, musical style. Jeremy Smith zeroes in on a specific sound effect heard all over video-game soundtracks: the glissando. Smith deftly demonstrates that glissandi play specific semiotic roles throughout video games’ history, with several analytical demonstrations from the late ’80s through 2020s.
[8] And so, as those of you on the semester system wind down your academic years, and those of us on quarters lament the eight more weeks we have before summer break, we at MTO wish you all happy spring and, as always, Happy Reading!
Drew Nobile, MTO EditorUniversity of Oregon