Conference Agenda

Practical piano treatises (C.P.E. Bach, 1753/1762; Clementi, 1802; Czerny, 1851) from the 18^th and 19^th centuries typically illustrate just one version of the minor scale: melodic. And yet, popular programs today such as ABRSM require students to perform both harmonic and melodic minor in the 650,000+ exams it administers in 93+ countries each year. Practicing harmonic minor is at odds with the music-theoretical conception that it is a collection that comprises minor-mode Roman numerals (Piston, 1959, p.11), not something that occurs melodically within the repertoire. For example, Clendinning and Marvin (2021, p.98) write that in minor, “rising lines are usually associated with the raised forms of ^6 and ^7."

This project initially illustrates the ways that minor scales were described in practical manuals and composition treatises of the past 300+ years, and ultimately posits that Hanon’s piano manual (1873) was the first to include harmonic minor alongside melodic for daily practice. We then question whether the elevation of harmonic minor to scale practice by Hanon is substantiated in the repertoire. To date, no empirical study has investigated the prevalence of minor scales in Western Classical music, despite claims surrounding their frequency by influential music theory texts (above). In response, we leveraged the Yale-Classical-Archives-Corpus (White & Quinn, 2016) to extract the following scale-degree patterns occurring contiguously in the highest voice within minor-mode excerpts: ↓6-↓7-1, ↓6-↑7-1, ↑6-↑7-1, and ↑6-↓7-1, and these patterns in reverse. 18,939 approaches to/from^1 were identified. We then quantified the frequency of minor-scale excerpts in the literature and determined whether this distribution differs across musical eras and/or composers.

Broadly, this research provides the first large-scale study of minor-mode scale frequency in Western Classical repertoire, and combines data-driven and musicological approaches to understanding scale pedagogy across centuries. It adds to growing scholarship (redacted) that questions the rationale for which harmonic minor was incorporated into piano manuals like Hanon, a tradition that continues even in current practice.

This research delves into the historical struggles of women in Western art music, focusing on the transformative contributions of contemporary composers Dana Kaufman and Leaha Villarreal. The study traces the evolution of opportunities for female composers across historical eras to the 20th century. Kaufman, an advocate for underrepresented voices, and Villarreal, an avant-garde composer, embody the transformative role of contemporary female artists. Kaufman's "Diary of a Madman (2012)" merges Eastern European influences, while Villarreal's "Never Not (2014)" challenges norms with experimental modes and instruments. The research addresses the exigency of gender equality in music by examining the unique perspectives of these composers, filling a gap in previous research. Employing historical context and analytical methods, the study uncovers how Kaufman and Villarreal reshape narratives in the male-dominated music industry. The main findings illustrate their dedication to individual recognition and innovative approaches, marking a pivotal moment in the relationship between music, gender, and activism. The significance lies in contributing to a nuanced understanding of this evolving dynamic and advancing the ongoing shift towards gender equality in the contemporary music landscape.

The anecdote about Bud Powell's composition "Glass Enclosure" is often used to show the pianist's struggle with New York's racist law enforcement agency and oppressive psychiatric institution. Composed in 1953 while locked inside his apartment as a form of "house arrest," "Glass Enclosure" stands out among the composer's oeuvre for its lack of improvisatory passage and down-beat accented rhythmic organization—both contribute to the piece's overall feeling of rigidness. In this talk, I introduce another compositional element that supplements the metaphor of a glass enclosure, an inversional symmetry.

An inversional symmetry is a self-regulating structure where an intervallic change in one line must be reflected in the other line. This gives symmetry a sense of perfection, and composers like Arnold Schoenberg use symmetry to represent the idea of God, for example, in Moses und Aron (premiered in 1957). The perfection, however, can manifest as oppression with its unyielding rigidness. For example, the opening passage of "Glass Enclosure" contains the first instance of symmetry between the top (Bb-C-A-Bb) and bottom (G-F-Ab-G) melodic lines, which are in mirror inversion of each other. The clash of ic1 between A and Ab generates a pitch-class set {5890} in the third chord, a non-trivially symmetrical tetrachord and a sonority less common in the jazz idiom (Fmaj/Ab). The recurring symmetrical motives correlate with our bodily engagement with a glass enclosure that is rigid and refractory. This biographically informed analysis helps the listeners to construct a more comprehensive interpretation of the piece and the oppressive social condition.

Modi di cantar or “ways of singing” consist of a variety of melodic and/or accompanimental formulas for performing poetry found in Italian musical documents between the early sixteenth and mid seventeenth centuries. Though printed alongside monuments of partsong and monody and copied into personal collections with frequency, these unassuming pieces have been treated only sparingly by song and lute scholars, and have yet to be addressed wholistically across poetic and source types for the duration of their appearance in notation. In order to illustrate trends in the transmission and practice of modi di cantar, this poster will offer graphical analyses of a set of over 70 examples collected from both print and manuscript sources of vocal polyphony, tablature, and solo song produced between 1504 and 1635.

Data visualizations featuring isolated textual, musical, and material criteria such as form, meter, melodic and harmonic attributes, notation, authorship, and concordances are particularly valuable to our understanding of modi di cantar’s range of practical roles. By identifying and comparing their patterns, I propose a new stemmatic understanding of song formulas associated with particular texts and verse forms. Mapping these relationships allows us to articulate more tangibly the conventions of oral and improvisatory song practices and their interactions with written composition, practices increasingly recognized as central to musical life in early modern Italy. This poster will also feature selected musical examples relevant to the categories represented in the charts and stemma.