Conference Agenda

Jim Steinman’s compositional style is notorious for its maximalist aesthetic, in particular his songs’ excessive lengths. Little scholarly attention, however, has been given to how he generates his epic song forms. In this talk, I examine Steinman’s approach to such formal excess, particularly how he heightens, delays, and extends climaxes. Building off Drew Nobile’s (2022) initiation–buildup–arrival paradigm, I first focus on verse–prechorus–chorus designs, exploring how Steinman delays arrivals across sections, formal cycles, and entire songs through cadential evasion, excessive repetition, and multi-modular sections. I then consider more radical departures from familiar forms, highlighting the use of interludes, terminal climaxes, and suite-like structures. In each case, Steinman’s techniques further heighten the melodrama, creating what Steinman himself described as “extreme” and “mythic” soundscapes (Steinman 2003). Analyzed songs include “Rebel Without a Clue” (Bonnier Tyler), “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” (Celine Dion), “Bat Out of Hell” (Meat Loaf), and “Dance in My Pants” (Steinman and Karla DeVito), among others.

Can a performer influence ‘unfinished business’ in the composer’s work? This paper examines how One-Time Occurrence (OTO) thematic material within a classical concerto movement (sonata form Type 5) may have its ‘one-timeness’ disrupted by the soloist’s reintroduction of the theme in an improvised or pre-composed cadenza. I explore the frequency of such OTOs in cadenzas and their treatment, focusing on centrality, location, tonal context, and stability. This study centers on thematic OTOs that are particularly striking and memorable: the two dramatic transition themes from the first movements of Mozart’s piano concertos K. 467 and K. 482. These themes share similarities in context and design, each occurring on the minor dominant. Since no Mozart cadenzas for these concertos survive, this study examines 81 cadenzas—either notated or recorded—by influential composers, conductors, and pianists, from the late 18th to the 21st century. The corpus spans diverse stylistic approaches, from Mozartian fidelity to Romantic aesthetics, and highlights contributions of female pianists, whose improvisational and compositional work has been largely overlooked in scholarly discourse. The dramatic transition theme often reappears in cadenzas in various ways, sometimes as a climax, implying the creator’s impulse to resolve the OTO’s isolation. In many of these instances, it returns in the tonic key, providing a reprise absent from the original movement, where it remained on the minor dominant. The findings highlight the cadenza’s potential to reshape both the movement’s design and tonal balance.

Beethoven’s late works are characterized by abrupt stops that separate widely divergent materials. Although these mid-theme breaks can appear to leave the music formally disjointed, this paper argues that the thematic materials lying at either side of them often do, in fact, coalesce into a complete thematic unit which has the same set of initiating, medial, and concluding intra-thematic functions found in a classical-style theme, even if these materials are so different they seem to belong to separate sections. I illustrate this through close form-functional analyses of three passages from Beethoven's Op. 109 Piano Sonata and Op. 126 Bagatelles. The analyses begin by highlighting the sudden mid-theme breaks, proceed then to recompose the music as a straightforward period, sentence, or hybrid, and end by submitting this formal prototype through various stages of elaboration until finally arriving back at the actual music. While the research findings challenge the view that Beethoven’s are formally disjointed, the theoretical framework put forth may prove fruitful for examining the music of other Romantic composers such as Robert Schumann and Brahms, whose works are similarly seen as exhibiting a fragmentary formal structure.