Statistical techniques are well established in many historical disciplines and are used extensively in music analysis, music perception, and performance studies. However, statisticians have largely ignored the many music catalogues, databases, dictionaries, encyclopedias, lists and other datasets compiled by institutions and individuals over the last few centuries. Such datasets present fascinating historical snapshots of the musical world, and statistical analysis of them can reveal much about the changing characteristics of the population of musical works and their composers, and about the datasets and their compilers. In this thesis, statistical methodologies have been applied to several case studies covering, among other things, music publishing and recording, composers’ migration patterns, nineteenth-century biographical dictionaries, and trends in key and time signatures. These case studies illustrate the insights to be gained from quantitative techniques; the statistical characteristics of the populations of works and composers; the limitations of the predominantly qualitative approach to historical musicology; and some practical and theoretical issues associated with applying statistical techniques to musical datasets. Quantitative methods have much to offer historical musicology, revealing new insights, quantifying and contextualising existing information, providing a measure of the quality of historical sources, revealing the biases inherent in music historiography, and giving a collective voice to the many minor and obscure works and composers that have historically formed the vast majority of musical activity but who have been largely absent from the received history of music.

Both minimal(ism) and postmodern(ism/ity) are terms that occupy a peculiar space in contemporary discourse: in academic circles their characterisation is contested and debated in everyday life they have become so ubiquitous that everyone associates them with something, but not necessarily with any degree of consensus. Both become widely recognised terms during the latter half of the twentieth century: decades characterised by unprecedented globalisation of culture and communication. This thesis seeks to explore the emergence of these terms, and the events they sought to describe, but it does not attempt to impose a 'correct' definition on either term. Instead, the thesis investigates the discourse that surrounds each concept, assembling a network of ideas that characterise those terms. I will demonstrate that each label acts as a signpost to a flexible collection of theories and characteristics, and argue that minimalism can be seen as a significant cultural response to an emerging postmodernity. The structure of this thesis has been informed by the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, particularly their writings on rhizomatic thought. Their thinking is not the subject of this research, but is the inspiration for a particular attitude to ideas that has been used as a structuring device for the text: that is, a structure that hopes to demonstrate the interconnectedness of contemporary experience. The image of the kaleidoscope is used as a metaphor for this rhizomatic approach. While the physical object represents the 'totality that many regard postmodernity to be, the experience of viewing a kaleidoscope the constantly shifting parts and the resultant patterns that we recognise is imagined as an illustration of the way that postmodernity and minimalism can be understood. Three parts magnify these terms in increasing detail. The first explores postmodern discourse and its relationship to culture. The second examines the development of, and critical response to, minimalism. The third takes a single composer, Louis Andriessen, and attempts to show how the postmodern condition frames his creativity, and his particular response to minimalism. All of these parts contain connections within and between, each part. While these connections will often be alluded to, I have tried to avoid solidifying these relationships in a way that might appear too 'linear' so as to invite the reader to participate in the interpretive process, and to retain the openness so characteristic of Deleuzian thought.

The influence of Peircian semiotics on the study of music has grown during the last two decades due to the recognition of Robert Hatten's achievements, a major study by Naomi Cumming, the prolific final years of Raymond Monelle and the continued success of Eero Tarasti's work with the International Association of Semiotic Studies. Peirce's thought is extraordinarily rich and rigorous but this thesis identifies a tendency amongst musicologists deploying Peircian thought to reinscribe a number of ideological convictions. In broad terms these convictions can be described as the reification and legitimization of a body of music, and more specifically as an attempt to stabilize musical meanings whilst locating them within a 'music-in-itself. It is in this sense that Peircian semiotics has been used to resist developments in popular and new musicologies. The role of Peirce's theory in this discourse needs careful re-examination. The work of Robert Hatten in its search for meaning through and around the contextual (or intertextual) relations of a 'work' represents the most successful application, to date, of Peircian semiotics to music. But Hatten's emphasis upon composers, structure and stylistic contexts, and his relative neglect of listeners, subjectivity and social forces renders his project incomplete. Through a detailed explanation of some of the central insights offered by Peirce's philosophical project this thesis develops a theory of musical meaning which has listening processes and the formation of identity/subjectivity at its centre. A key tool in developing this theory concerns the dimensions of time and their coordination with Peirce's universal categories. The possibility of informing and developing the close-reading practices that still dominate the tradition of musical analysis will be explored through a discussion and analysis of the Allegro of Mozart's 'Prague' Symphony in the light of the theories developed in earlier chapters, with particular reference to Peirce's concept of valency.

No description available.

This thesis examines the musical cultures associated with extreme-right politics, considering not only what this music projects about extreme-right ideology, but also the various ways in which music functions as part of a political subculture. This analysis extends beyond the stereotypical extreme-right music associated with the skinhead subculture, often referred to as Oi!, to incorporate extreme-right engagement with genres such as metal, folk, country and classical music. The chapters explore various aspects of identity—including race, sexuality, gender and class—and their significance to and reflection through extreme-right music, as manifested in genre choices, lyrics, album artwork and the features of the music itself. The thesis also considers the way in which less explicit content is produced and the motivation behind this, the importance of myth and fantasy in extreme-right music, and the way that the conspiracist mindset—which is prevalent, albeit not homogeneous, in extreme-right culture—is articulated both in extreme-right music and in the interpretation of mainstream music as antagonistic to extreme-right goals. Music is significant to extreme-right politics for a number of reasons. It is generally understood to be an effective tool in the indoctrination and recruitment of individuals into extreme-right ideology and politics, which is why music is sometimes freely distributed, particularly to youths. The very existence of this music can act to legitimise extreme-right views through the implication that they are shared by its producers and audience. Music also acts as an important tool for the imagining of an extreme-right community through its creation of a space to meet and create networks, a function consolidated by the media surrounding music, particularly websites, forums and magazines. As well as constructing the spaces for extreme-right communities, this music plays an important role in identifying the characteristics of those communities, in articulating what it is to be “us” as contrasted to “them.” Analysis of this music suggests that it has the ability to resolve the ideological contradictions which define the extreme right, even as this analysis reveals such contradictions.

This thesis explores relationships between music produced around 1800 for domestic consumption and the fictional genre of romance – a genre of fantastic atmospheres, settings and characters, quest plots with dramatic events, and a sense of antiquity and desire that represents remoteness and addresses the cultural periphery. What this fiction says about music offers a new view of romanticism in British print culture, making this thesis serve as counterhistory to studies of nineteenth-century European operatic and orchestral canons and their links with later fiction. I survey the use of music in romance novels by Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Sir Walter Scott and James Hogg in the period 1790-1830, interrogating the ways that music served to create mood and atmosphere, enlivened social scenes and contributed to plot developments. I explore the connections between musical scenes in romance fiction and the domestic song literature – short accompanied songs, both sacred and secular, by composers such as Thomas Attwood, John Wall Callcott, Matthew Cooke, John Baptist Cramer, John Barnett, François Hippolyte Barthélemon, Charles Dibdin, William Hawes, Thomas Moore, John Parry, William Reeve, Reginald Spofforth, and Sir John Stevenson. My intersectional reading revolves around a series of imaginative figures – including the minstrel, fairies, ghosts, witches, and other supernatural figures, and Christians engaged both in virtue and vice – the identities of which remained generally consistent as influence passed between the art forms. While authors quoted song lyrics and included musical descriptions and characters, their novels recorded and modelled the performance of songs by the middle and upper classes, influencing the work of composers and the actions of contemporary performers who read romance fiction. My thesis shows how the intersection of romances with vocal music recorded a society on the cusp of modernisation, with a printing industry emerging to serve people’s growing appetites for entertainment amidst their changing views of religion and the occult. No mere diversion, fiction was integral to musical culture and together both art forms reveal key intellectual currents that circulated in the early nineteenth-century British home.

Im Oktober 2008 fand an der Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Graz (KUG) der 8. Kongress der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie (GMTH) zum Thema »Musiktheorie als interdisziplinäres Fach« statt. Die hier vorgelegten gesammelten Beiträge akzentuieren Musiktheorie als multiperspektivische wissenschaftliche Disziplin in den Spannungsfeldern Theorie/Praxis, Kunst/Wissenschaft und Historik/Systematik. Die sechs Kapitel ergründen dabei die Grenzbereiche zur Musikgeschichte, Musikästhetik, zur Praxis musikalischer Interpretation, zur kompositorischen Praxis im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert, zur Ethnomusikologie sowie zur Systematischen Musikwissenschaft. Insgesamt 45 Aufsätze, davon 28 in deutscher, 17 in englischer Sprache, sowie die Dokumentation einer Podiumsdiskussion zeichnen in ihrer Gesamtheit einen höchst lebendigen und gegenwartsbezogenen Diskurs, der eine einzigartige Standortbestimmung des Fachs Musiktheorie bietet. / The 8th congress of the Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie (GMTH) took place in October 2008 at the University for Music and Dramatic Arts Graz (KUG) on the topic »Music Theory and Interdisciplinarity«. The collected contributions characterize music theory as a multi-faceted scholarly discipline at the intersection of theory/practice, art/science and history/system. The six chapters explore commonalties with music history, music aesthetics, musical performance, compositional practice in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, ethnomusicology and systematic musicology. A total of 45 essays (28 in German, 17 in English) and the documentation of a panel discussion form a vital discourse informed by contemporaneous issues of research in a broad number of fields, providing a unique overview of music theory today. A comprehensive English summary appears at the beginning of all contributions.

This thesis describes research in the computational analysis of harmony in western art music, focussing particularly on improving the accuracy and information-richness of key and chord extraction from digital score data. It is argued that a greater sophistication in automatic harmony analysis is an important contribution to the field of computational musicology. Initial experiments use hidden Markov models to predict key and modulation from automatically labelled chord sequences. Model parameters are based on heuristically formulated chord and key weightings derived from Sch¨onberg’s harmonic theory and the key and chord ratings resulting from perceptual experiments with listeners. The music theory models are shown to outperform the perceptual models both in terms of key accuracy and modelling the precise moment of key change. All of the models perform well enough to generate descriptive data about modulatory frequency, modulatory type and key distance. A robust method of classifying underlying chord types from elaborated keyboard music is then detailed. The method successfully distinguishes between essential and inessential notes, for example, passing notes and neighbour notes, and combines note classification information with tertian chord potential to measure the harmonic importance of a note. Existing approaches to automatic chord classification are unsuitable for use with complex textures and are restricted to triads and simple sevenths. An important goal is therefore to recognise a much broader set of chords, including complex chord types such as 9ths, 11ths and 13ths. This level of detail is necessary if the methods are to supply sophisticated information about the harmonic techniques of composers. Testing on the first twenty-four preludes of J. S. Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, hand annotated by the author, a state of the art approach achieves 22.1% accuracy; our method achieves 55% accuracy.

Music theory has acquired a unique position in between many fields, most notably composition, historical and systematic musicology and music pedagogy. Motivated by the topic »music theory and interdisciplinarity«, this essay explores the fields spanned by today’s music theory in seven short chapters. The first chapter describes changes of the discipline in German-speaking countries since the 1960s and its development from a simple synonym of practical harmony and a propedeutic means for music analysis to a postmodern, rich and scholarly ambitous field that can hardly be reduced to a common denominator. In the second chapter the author, drawing on Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, argues that music theory should not limit itself to purely »technical« issues, but must also address emotional or expectational realms of musical meaning. The third chapter further explores this point by discussing the opposition between musical theory and practice, suggesting that music theory indeed has the potential to let these two poles stimulate one another. The same is true for the often debated divide between »artistic« and »scholarly« aspects of music theory, explored in the fourth chapter: They are not mutually exclusive, but rather always have influenced each other, as evidenced by eighteenth-century treatises. Exchange with related disciplines such as music psychology has increased since the 1960s, as chapter five summarizes, although the relationship between music theory and musicology sometimes remains problematic. In the sixth chapter, a short analytical approach to four examples from the standard repertoire (Schubert, Bach, Brahms, Mozart) attempt to demonstrate the potential of specifically music-theoretical viewpoints. The final section advocates the strengthening of a specific profile for music theory: The liberation from dogmatic thought and systematic rigour should not lead us to overstretch music-theoretical questions.

The listener’s experience as an embodied subject is at the centre of this work. Embodied experience forms the basis for analyses of three contemporary compositions that sample bodily sound, in order to question how such works represent and mediate the body. The possible applications of this embodied methodology are illustrated through three case studies: Crackers by Christof Migone (2001), A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure by Matmos (2001) and Ground Techniques (2009) by Neil Luck. The findings of each analysis are placed within discussion of critical and theoretical concerns related to the (re)presentation, mediation and manipulation of the body both as materiality and as social construct, using, in particular, work by Hansen (2004) and Wegenstein (2006). The sampling practices of these works lead to the fragmentation of the represented bodies, in which margins between bodily interiors and exteriors are frequently crossed, bringing about a reconfiguration of the musical subject. Furthermore, the celebration of the bodily origins of these works complicates notions of recorded sound as disembodied. The analytical methodology developed in this thesis derives from a consideration of approaches in a number of fields: feminist musicology, music psychology, embodied cognition, phenomenology, music and gesture and new media theory. The sensations and affective responses of the listening body are discussed alongside an examination of how listening is shaped by processes of technological mediation. This thesis attends to both the body that is listening and the body that is listened to. I argue that it is not adequate to understand the works studied as merely representing the body, but suggest it would be more appropriate to understand the relationship between work and body as multi-faceted, conceptualising the body and recorded sound as mutually framing. This uncovers not only technology as mediation, but also the body as mediation. Finally, the case studies are used to reflect upon the limits of the embodied analysis methodology and its potential for wider application.