Research on the music–language interface has shown that prosody can shape musical organization, not merely function as a surface feature of text setting. Yet studies of tone–melody relations have focused largely on modern vernacular lyrics, leaving Classical Chinese regulated verse—with its highly codified ping–ze (level/oblique) prosodic system—underexplored as a source of compositional structure.

This paper examines Du Fu’s regulated-verse cycle Stirred by Autumn and Jia Daqun’s 2020 song cycle of the same title for baritone and piano. I argue that Jia does not treat tonal prosody primarily as a device for text intelligibility. Instead, he converts regional phonology—specifically, the tonal dynamics of the Chengdu dialect—into a generative mechanism. Tonal motion is abstracted into a transferable contour template (motivic kernel) that governs motive formation and contributes to pitch organization and formal articulation. In this process, regulated-verse prosody is translated into audible structural tension, while Du Fu’s Kuizhou context is reframed through pitch motion and timbral strategy.

Focusing on the first song of the cycle, I show how Chengdu tonal dynamics are distilled into three related motivic families that serve as primary generative materials. At the formal level, the poem’s oblique-initial, level-final prosodic scheme is translated into patterns of segmentation and hierarchy, shaping musical initiation, continuation, and closure. At the micro-level, the opening phrase (“玉yu 露lu 凋diao 伤shang”) provides a controlled instance of how contrasts between compressed and sustained prosodic profiles are consolidated into the contour template and realized through pitch-centered motion, intervallic drift, and registral trajectory.

By shifting attention from surface correspondence to generative function, this paper offers a replicable framework for understanding how regional phonology can operate as structural force in contemporary art song and clarifies poetry–music intertextuality as a demonstrable process in motive, pitch, and form.

Analytical accounts of Yoruba Dùndún drumming have most often explained musical meaning by treating the instrument as a surrogate for speech, mapping drum sounds onto discrete tone levels derived from tonal African languages. While this approach accounts for certain communicative functions, it leaves largely unexplored how musical meaning emerges from the continuous, embodied shaping of pitch that characterizes Dùndún performance practice. This paper addresses that gap by refiguring musical meaning in Dùndún drumming as the product of transformations of membrane tension rather than fixed pitch outcomes.

Drawing on transformational theory (Lewin 2007), I introduce tension (T) as the core analytical variable, defining it as a continuously changing measure of physical effort produced through the drummer’s manipulation of the drum’s leather cords. Pitch thus becomes an audible trace of an underlying kinetic process. As the membrane stretches and relaxes, it generates glissandi that form pathways of musical motion, while drum strikes function as punctuating moments that illuminate states within an ongoing tension trajectory. In Lewinian terms, what is traditionally modeled as an intervallic relation between musical states is reconfigured here as a transformation of embodied tension connecting successive kinetic configurations of the membrane.

I develop a transformational grammar for tracking how tension-based gestures remain recognizable across change. The model accounts for effort-scaling, reciprocal squeeze-and-release motions, and repetition as processes through which gestures preserve proportional shape, reshape tension contours, and stabilize as musical symbols. Analytical examples drawn from recorded performances are supported by pitch-trajectory visualizations that render visible the continuous effects of changing membrane tension and demonstrate that identical tension trajectories can yield different symbolic meanings depending on context, register, and repetition.

The paper argues that coherence and meaning in Dùndún drumming lie not in discrete pitch categories or speech imitation, but in the relational organization of embodied effort over time. By relocating musical meaning from pitch objects to trajectories of tension, this study offers a framework for analyzing pitch and meaning in performance traditions grounded in adaptive musical processes, extending transformational theory beyond object-based pitch systems.

In The Musical Language of Italian Opera, William Rothstein calls for music theorists to “learn to hear different kinds of music with different ears—German ears for German music, Italian ears for Italian music and so forth.” How better could one develop such language-specific ears than by analyzing seventeenth-century opera, when composers drew on no preexisting musical conventions but sought only to invent a music that would mimic the patterns and rhythms of rhetorical speech? Composers pursued this goal in different ways in different languages as opera spread throughout Europe, with each language bringing to the operatic form its own traditions of speech rhythm, word accent, phrase emphasis, and poetic meter, all of which left an indelible mark on the subsequent phenomenon of national metrical styles.

In this paper, I examine the language-music connection in opera’s seminal, early decades through the lens of the sole seventeenth-century opera with surviving scores in two different languages. Francesco Cavalli’s Erismena premiered in Venice in 1656 (some twenty years into the great experiment of public opera performances) and was adapted into English by the merchant Richard Bargrave in the years immediately after the premiere. Because Italian and English verse operate on fundamentally different principles, Bargrave was obliged to alter both the verse structure of the libretto and the rhythmic structure of the score. This unique act of translation and adaptation offers a precious, comparative glimpse into the linguistic patterns that make Italian and English opera so different from each other.