Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington. / Bibliography: l. 333-344.

Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of California, Los Angeles, 1987. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 441-475).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1939. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 343-365).

How forgivable is a musicological text on deconstruction two decades after its assimilation by the other "humanities" disciplines? Moreover, how forgivable is a discipline as a whole which has allowed one of the most challenging aspects of post-war critical theory to pass it by to this extent? In no other field are Laing's remarks more likely to resonate today than that of critical musicology. Even the adoption of the critical epithet itself is a relatively recent phenomenon. However, it is indicative of an emergent desire for musicology to finally engage with contemporary critical discourse in general. Such a call has been made from "outside" the profession by cultural critic Edward Said, who calls for an end to "the generally cloistral and reverential, not to say deeply insular, habits in writing about music." [Musical Flaborations, p.58] From "within" the field, Susan McClary laments that the crucial critical debates are "almost entirely absent from traditional musicology." [Feminine Endings, p.54] Likewise, what is increasingly unforgivable according to Ruth Solie is "our customary methodological behindhandedness [sic]" [Musicology & Difference, p.3]. Various routes away from the methodological backwaters have been suggested. For instance, in a conference paper in 1984, Richard Middleton defined a twofold approach which appears to combine aspects of structuralism and Marxism. Middleton called firstly for a move in to "semiology, broadly defined and stressing the social situation of signifying practise: this should take over from traditional formal analysis." [quoted in Shepherd, Music as Social Text, p.209] Secondly, this should be supplemented with an "historical sociology of the whole musical field, stressing critical comparison of divergent sub-codes of the 'common musical competence': this should take over from liberal social histories of music" [ibid., p.209] As a method for introducing this new musicological mode, Middleton recommends the inclusion of popular music as a field of study. Indeed, his implication is that such a challenge to the classical hegemony would naturally entail a move towards this twofold approach, and would by itself open up "a golden opportunity to develop a critical musicology" [Studying Popular Music, p.123]. In this sense, an expansion of the field of study could lead to a necessary adoption of new methodologies.

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.

Es ist unmöglich, in einem Artikel ein ausführliches Bild der ukrainischen Musikwissenschaft aufzuzeigen. Unser Ziel besteht darin, dem Leser einen Einblick in das vielfältige Panorama der heutigen ukrainischen Musikwissenschaft zu vermitteln. Dabei ist es nötig, auch die gesellschaftlich-sozialen Umstände zu nennen, die direkt oder indirekt auf die gegenwärtige Situation in der ukrainischen Musikwissenschaft Einfluß haben und den Geist der Zeit bestimmen.

Beruht auf Diss. Brandeis Univ., 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 195-205) and index.