Andrew Blake, Jacob Eichhorn, Robert Hamilton, Lukas Perry, Co-Editors
Hanisha Kulothparan, Reviews Editor
Andrew Blake and Ruixue Hu, Web Managers
Editors’ Note (i)
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Articles
Andrew Aziz | Tonal Rumble: Simultaneous and Successive Bitonality in West Side Story (1–27)
HTML & PDF ——AbstractThis article offers original listening strategies for two dimensions of bitonality featured in West Side Story, both implied (but not defined) in Bernstein’s writings (1959, 1976): “simultaneous,” or the vertical superimposition of clashing strata, and “successive,” in which non-stratified tonal events generate tonally ambiguous environments, suggesting more than one key. Bernstein’s compositional strategies align with the plot’s trajectory: successive bitonality appears when the gangs stalk each other at a distance (centrally in “Prologue,” “Dance at the Gym Blues,” and “Maria”), with simultaneous bitonality capturing their fateful clash (centrally in “Quintet” and “Tonal Rumble”). Throughout, the analyses apply contemporary theories of tonal transformation (Kaminsky 2004, Rings 2011), scalar dissonance (Martins 2019), and harmonic “divorce” (Temperley 2007, Nobile 2015, De Clercq 2019), amongst others. Finally, I summarize that octatonicism in West Side Story is best contextualized as a processual byproduct of tonal relations, with the seeds sewn in “Prologue.”
Matthew Bilik | Key Duality and Melody-Bass Disjunction in Fauré and Duruflé (28–48)
HTML & PDF ——AbstractThis paper explicates how the sensation of two active keys, known as key duality or tonal pairing, often results as disjunction between the melody and bass in the music of Gabriel Fauré and Maurice Duruflé. In Fauré’s late chamber works, a distinct type of key duality arises not as a juxtaposition of two keys but from the superposition of two. Fauré’s use of key duality is mirrored by other twentieth-century French composers; Duruflé echoes a similar type of duality, albeit to a greater extent. Employing motivic segmentation and voice-leading analysis, I adapt the research of Peter Smith (1997 and 2013), Kaminsky (2004), and Ferrandino (2022), among others, to illustrate how the sensation of two tonal centers emerges when the tonal outline of a melody or bass projects its own center separate from that of other voices. Attention to outer voices sheds light on Fauré and Duruflé’s tonal sleight of hand—a topic many have noticed but few have illuminated.
Gabriel Fankhauser | Displaced Cadential Six-Four Chords (49–70)
HTML & PDF ——AbstractBuilding on research into the efficacy of inverted cadential six-four chords, this article proposes that some unconventional harmonies function as cadential six-fours. Considering a cadential six-four chord’s syntactical role more than its surface harmony or voice leading, this article identifies remarkable treatments that defy traditional analysis. Some examples of chromatically displaced cadential six-four chords seem harmonically strange yet continue to support underlying conventional function. As a result, a conflict forms between a chord’s grammatical clarity or syntax (the function of the chord in a progression) and its morphology (the chord’s pitch content and vertical arrangement). Analysis of excerpts from diverse styles—including examples from Wagner, Brahms, the Beatles, and the Eagles—illustrates how alterations of the cadential six-four chord help maintain its relevance in post-Classical music. More notable displacement in music by Liszt, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich exhibit idiomatic usage that intertwines conventional syntax and structure with innovative grammar and expression.
Analytical Vignette
Zachary Lloyd | The Lydian Mode and its Narrative Implications in Tesori/Thompson’s Blue (2019) (71–80)
HTML & PDF ——AbstractIn Blue, Jeanine Tesori and Tazewell Thompson’s 2019 opera, a celebration of birth turns to the mourning of a teen’s senseless murder. Exploring the complexities of a shared Black experience in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, Blue focuses on a family whose son loses his life at the hands of his Father’s police officer colleague. While the score moves through various tonal spaces over the course of the opera, I examine Tesori’s specific use of the Lydian mode and the narrative implications that this mode’s usage carries. In Blue, the Lydian mode evokes extramusical associations with the supernatural, transcendence, and “sorrowful joy” demonstrating the possibility of a subtextual narrative reading in which the thoughts and desires expressed at the moment of the Lydian mode’s emergence will later be rendered impossible.
Reviews
Stefanie Bilidas | Focal Impulse Theory: Musical Expression, Meter, and the Body by John Paul Ito, Indiana University Press, 2020 (81–85)
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Victoria Malawey | Time’s A-Changin’: Flexible Meter as Self-Expression in Singer-Songwriter Music by Nancy Murphy, Oxford University Press, 2023 (86–90)
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