Conference Agenda

The oldest native instrument of China, the guqin is a seven-string plucked monophonic instrument known for its ornamented melodies and nuanced performing style. Despite long-time associations with the literati, guqin musical forms remain undertheorized as discussions tend to be metaphorical rather than analytical. Moreover, the native notational system jianzipu is essentially a tablature that indirectly communicates pitches via fingerings and articulations without rhythmic or phrasing details.

Contextualized by perspectives on performance practice, organology, and Chinese culture, this paper proposes a hierarchical framework for understanding guqin’s phrase structure. Named “the Repetition Scheme,” it explicates three interconnected aspects of phrases: components, boundaries, and transformations. Extending from ancient and contemporary sources, I classify guqin’s playing techniques as basic articulations (individual playing techniques that activate a string), compound articulations (customary combinations of basic articulations), and elaborative gestures (left-hand slidings after basic articulations that modify the sound). These techniques are congruous with the timbral qualities, kinesthetic energy levels, and pitch content they generate.

Invoking the Chinese philosophical and literary idea of “harmony,” I propose that the reiteration of pitch classes realized contrastingly in musical parameters such as articulation, register, timbre, and ornamentation is the fundamental organizing and developing principle both within and between phrases in guqin music. In addition, phrases can be complicated by transformations such as elision and internal expansion. I hope this framework can assist the dapu process of many uninterpreted ancient scores and the idiomatic composition of new pieces for the guqin while illuminating programmatic titles commonly associated with guqin pieces.

While one can hardly claim that the reception of Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal and dodecaphonic compositions has not been widely examined, the sites where his influence has been documented have yet to include Ukraine. Yet, Schoenberg’s musical compositions and techniques made their mark on early-twentieth century composers working within the contemporary borders of the Ukrainian nation state, dovetailing with harmonic experimentations already taking place and contributing to a unique musical marriage of tradition and revolution. The imprint of free atonality and dodecaphonic techniques can be found from Lviv (or Lemberg, as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) through Kyiv and across the Dnipro River all the way to Kharkiv, a burgeoning capital of modernism. Though the music of each city was shaped by its distinct cultural and political history, a continuity emerges that aligns with studies of other artistic forms of modernism in Ukraine. As scholars of visual, literary, and theatrical arts have already begun to show, the brand of modernism that emerged within the borders of contemporary Ukraine brought together the traditional and the experimental in a unique balance. By looking at music composed between 1910 and 1930 in Lviv, Kyiv and Kharkiv, this paper begins to stake out a space for defining a unique Ukrainian musical modernism. Through the use of several case studies, I explore the particularities of atonal and serial composition in Ukraine in the early 20^th century, starting with the music of composers who engaged with Schoenberg, personally and ideologically. From the compositions of early twelve-tone innovator Yukhym Holyshev (Yefim Golyshev) and Schoenberg disciples Mykola (Nikolai) Roslavets and Jozef Koffler, I develop a framework for defining Ukrainian musical modernism, which can be applied to music written throughout the lands of contemporary Ukraine by composers including Borys Liatoshynsky, Levko Revutsky, Pylyp Kozytsky, Stefania Turkevych, Yuliy Meytus and others.

This paper explains how the five-course guitar functioned as an “instrument of music theory” (Rehding 2016) in seventeenth-century Iberia. During this period, Iberian music theory was characterized by a great “theoretical rift” separating the writings produced by church musicians from those produced by secular musicians who were predominantly guitar players (Gallardo 2012). While the former group’s treatises emphasize “conservative” topics such as plainchant and modal theory, the latter group produced “progressive” works including some of the earliest theoretical conceptions of the triad as an independent entity, and some rules for the accompaniment of melodies anticipating some of the principles of bajo continuo.

Through the study of pedagogical texts by Amat (1596), Velasco (1640), Sanz (1674), and De Huete (1702) this paper explores several of their most original explicit and implicit theoretical ideas. These include the tenets of alfabeto notation, the theoretical emancipation of the triad through the punto concept, a rule-of-thumb system for the harmonic realization of a bassline, and highly refined understandings of tonal space and chordal inversion condensed in Velasco’s musical circles and Sanz’s laberinto.

This heterogenous group of composers/performers/theorists—possibly influenced by Cartesian rationalism—demonstrate a profound interest in sophisticated topographical representations of tonal space using figures of circles. Some of these figures are practical solutions to some of the necessities of their emerging theoretical systems such as early attempts at a generalized theory of transposition. Others are original examples of speculative theoretical constructs such as intervallic cycles, and prototypical scale harmonizations. Ultimately, these new geometries of tonal space anticipate other more celebrated circular representations (such as those by Johann David Heinichen and Johann Mattheson) by several decades and arguably demonstrate a rarely discussed form of transnational intellectual dialogue between the Iberian Peninsula and other European nations in matters of harmonic syntax at the turn of the eighteenth century.