A brilliant investigation into musical structure through a systematic exploration of tonality, melody, harmony, texture, and rhythm. Discusses early madrigals and Gregorian chants through Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms to Ravel, Bartok, and Berg."
This book is Schoenberg's last completed theoretical work and represents his final thoughts on the subject of classical and romantic harmony. The earlier chapters recapitulate in condensed form the principles laid down in his 'Theory of Harmony'; the later chapters break entirely new ground, for they analyze the system of key relationships within the structure of whole movements and affirm the principle of 'monotonality, ' showing how all modulations within a movement are merely deviations from, and not negations of, its main tonality.
Written by a pupil of Heinrich Schenker, this outstanding work develops and extends Schenker's approach. More than 500 examples of music from the Middle Ages to the 20th century complement the detailed discussions and analyses.
Learning musics organizing principles . . . Approaching the study of form as an exercise in perceiving the interaction of a number of discrete musical events, Spencer and Temkos book embodies much more than a search for visual clues. Students of form develop perceptual tools that allow them to proceed from the aural experience to an understanding of the arch-principles upon which music is organized. The authors hold that the organizing principles of a given piece of music may be gleaned from studying the internal attributes that give a section its specific identity, the functional relations between sections, and the ordering of those sections.
In this book, the authors develop a theoretical framework based on a Gestalt approach, viewing rhythmic experience in terms of pattern perception or groupings. Musical examples of increasing complexity are used to provide training in the analysis, performance, and writing of rhythm.
Building on ideas first advanced by Arnold Schoenberg and later developed by Erwin Ratz, this book introduces a new theory of form for instrumental music in the classical style. The theory provides a broad set of principles and a comprehensive methodology for the analysis of classical form, from individual ideas, phrases, and themes to the large-scale organization of complete movements. It emphasizes the notion of formal function, that is, the specific role a given formal unit plays in the structural organization of a classical work.
In this book, David Temperley addresses a fundamental question about music cognition: how do we extract basic kinds of musical information, such as meter, phrase structure, counterpoint, pitch spelling, harmony, and key from music as we hear it? Taking a computational approach, Temperley develops models for generating these aspects of musical structure. The models he proposes are based on preference rules, which are criteria for evaluating a possible structural analysis of a piece of music. A preference rule system evaluates many possible interpretations and chooses the one that best satisfies the rules. After an introductory chapter, Temperley presents preference rule systems for generating six basic kinds of musical structure: meter, phrase structure, contrapuntal structure, harmony, and key, as well as pitch spelling (the labeling of pitch events with spellings such as A flat or G sharp). He suggests that preference rule systems not only show how musical structures are inferred, but also shed light on other aspects of music. He substantiates this claim with discussions of musical ambiguity, retrospective revision, expectation, and music outside the Western canon (rock and traditional African music). He proposes a framework for the description of musical styles based on preference rule systems and explores the relevance of preference rule systems to higher-level aspects of music, such as musical schemata, narrative and drama, and musical tension.
The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches widens the scope of analytical approaches for popular music by incorporating methods developed for analyzing contemporary art music. This study endeavors to create a new analytical paradigm for examining popular music from the perspective of developments in contemporary art music. "Expanded approaches" for popular music analysis is broadly defined as as exploring the pitch-class structures, form, timbre, rhythm, or aesthetics of various forms of popular music in a conceptual space not limited to the domain of common practice tonality but broadened to include any applicable compositional, analytical, or theoretical concept that illuminates the music. The essays in this collection investigate a variety of analytical, theoretical, historical, and aesthetic commonalities popular music shares with 20th and 21st century art music. From rock and pop to hip hop and rap, dance and electronica, from the 1930s to present day, this companion explores these connections in five parts: Establishing and Expanding Analytical Frameworks Technology and Timbre Rhythm, Pitch, and Harmony Form and Structure Critical Frameworks: Analytical, Formal, Structural, and Political With contributions by established scholars and promising emerging scholars in music theory and historical musicology from North America, Europe, and Australia, The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches offers nuanced and detailed perspectives that address the relationships between concert and popular music.