Conference Agenda

The work is finished. The work is complete. In everyday conversation, we might not distinguish between these two statements. In this paper, however, I disambiguate the often-conflated concepts, finishedness and completeness, according to agential and actional attribution. Weaving together Monahan’s agential hierarchy and Moore’s three-part voice identities, I construct a model for understanding the intersections of agency–action and finishedness–completeness in popular music and multimedia. However, this distinction will be complicated by the abrupt ending—a special formal and storytelling device that merges authorial finishedness and the work’s incompleteness. Leaning on theories of closure and endings (Agawu 2009, Atkinson 2018, Burstein 2014, Doran Eaton 2023), I explore unmet expectations within the marked abrupt endings of three case studies: Katatonia’s “Omerta” (2003), the series finale of The Sopranos (2007), and Dolly Parton’s “The Bridge” (1968). In the final case study, I contrast Parton’s studio recording with a live performance on The Porter Wagoner Show, a country music variety show, in which she changes the ending. I situate this change within the political climate of the late 1960s regarding the rights of women and people with the capacity for pregnancy as well as her avoidance of public political commentary in order to speculate on the meaning of the marked and unmarked endings. Ultimately in this paper, I interrogate the complex nexus of meanings that emerge when a listener is faced with an abrupt ending and how these agential and actional attributions can become quite slippery.

In 2002 Joseph Swain noted that “the products of Broadway have not had much success in the annals of scholarly criticism: what [attention] they have received has been patronizing at best.” Twenty years on, this disdain has begun to dissipate: recent publications (Buchler 2008, Hutchinson 2020)—particularly the 2023 collection edited by Buchler and Decker—have begun to accept the music of musical theatre in scholarly analytic contexts. Yet there remains a perplexing resistance to the works of Andrew Lloyd Webber: the aforementioned collection, for instance, mentions him in passing but twice. Despite his unassailable popular success (Walsh 1989), Lloyd Webber continues to suffer the same “hostility and neglect in the academy” (Block 2004); a neglect that Snelson (2004) attributes to “perceived lack of organic unity.”

Using Jesus Christ Superstar as a case study, I demonstrate that contentions regarding lack of structure and unity in Lloyd Webber’s shows do not hold up to analytic scrutiny. In Superstar, a dichotomy between authentic domains that affirm tonic-dominant polarity, and plagal domains that diverge from it (Stein 1983, Harrison 1994) underscores musical tensions and dialogues between characters and ideologies in localized individual songs.

These local harmonic conflicts, however, also serve as germinating seeds for large-scale structure. The show is bounded by D minor, which, along with its authentic extensions, F and A, serves as a referential tonality (McCreless 1982, Gilliam 1991) for those in power (Pilate, Herod) and represent the societal status quo. Conversely, the major-mode subdominant key, G, is used exclusively by Jesus’ disciples who are trying to invoke change. Jesus’ own doubt, introduced by his Bb tonality, infuses a minor-mode inflection into the disciples’ major-mode subdominant, undermining the idealized world anticipated by a major-mode subdominant breakthrough. This enlargement of local harmonic processes thus forms an associative tonal network (Hanninen 2012) representing the show’s tonal structure, where parallel dramatic/musical narratives project a failed per aspera ad astra narrative (Hepokoski and Darcy 2006). Because Superstar ends with Jesus’ crucifixion, both the plagal ^4 and Jesus’ ^6 are subsumed within the D-minor hierarchy, reflecting Almén’s (2008) conception of ‘Tragic’ narrative typology in both drama and music.

As a recognizable stock pattern that occurs at the end of a phrase, a cadence is what we expect when the phrase ends. Statistically, cadences are progressions that occur noticeably more often at the end of a phrase than in any other context and something that allows listeners to connect these patterns with a feeling of “ending.” These definitions all involve some amount of circularity: a cadence ends a phrase, while a phrase ends with a cadence. Such dynamics have been at the center of recent investigations into cadential rhetoric.

This paper argues that the regularity of a cadence’s what and when exist in a balance with one another. In repertoires with variable phrases lengths, cadences are very constrained, while repertoires with predictable phrase lengths have less-determined cadences. To show this variation, we use several corpora: piano sonatas, 21^st century EDM, Baroque guitar, mid-20^th century American radio pop, and early 20^th-century black American vaudeville (constructed for this study).

Our findings inform broader notions of harmonic function and phrase rhythm. For instance, the primacy of quadruple-factored phrase lengths foregrounds the role of hypermeter in phrase construction, while the inter-corpus variation supports repertoire-specific definitions of harmonic function — e.g., rock’s “dominant” IV, versus other harmonies that lead to tonic. Analytically, this suggests that phrasing irregularities — e.g. loose knit constructions and phrase elisions— require strictly-defined cadences, while highly-regular phrase rhythms allow for variable cadential grammars. Cognitively, this study unites two strands of musical expectation: while metric expectation has been shown to be located in the brain’s limbic system and to be prospective in nature, harmonic expectation relies on the brain’s language centers and is more reactive. Overall, we argue that a cadence’s feeling of “ending” relies both on its what and its when, with these parameters shouldering different burdens in different corpora.