About

Steven Rings is a scholar whose work focuses on the analysis of musical performances, particularly in relation to popular music and artists like Bob Dylan. His research emphasizes the importance of engaging analytically with live performances, exploring how musical sound and effect generate aesthetic impacts. Rings advocates for a methodological pluralism that includes spectrographic analysis and schema theory to understand the complexities of performance, especially in the context of Dylan's extensive and varied body of work. His approach challenges traditional notions of musical complexity, highlighting that even seemingly simple songs can yield rich analytical insights. Rings's contributions aim to deepen the understanding of the relationship between song, genre, and performance, emphasizing the sonic particulars that animate musical making.

Research topics

• Art
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Humanities
• Literature
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Law
• Social psychology
• Physics
• Psychology
• Classics
• History
• Linguistics
• Acoustics
• Theology
• Aesthetics
• Art history

Selected publications

• Pleasure, Knowledge, and Politics Revisited

  2025-03-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter reflects on the relationship between musical pleasure, knowledge creation, and political commitment in music studies. It begins by revisiting some early treatments of these issues from the 1990s—the first flush of the New Musicology—and explores how they have persisted and morphed in our current moment of political and disciplinary agita. The chapter argues that these three domains are unproductively knotted at present, and proposes ways to loosen that knot. It does so in part by offering a more capacious account of knowledge, drawing on ideas from Daphne Leong. The chapter concludes with a discussion of John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” that seeks to model a more productive circulation among knowledge, pleasure, and political awareness.

  PublisherDOI

• Expanding the Commons

  Journal of Music Theory · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Aesthetics

  i'm persuaded. The term tonality adds little to our theoretical discourse and brings with it a troubling history; we lose little and gain much if we abandon it as an umbrella concept for a range of musical phenomena better theorized à la carte. I'd like to pause over this balance of loss to gain at the outset, as readers of Yust's provocative essay may worry that they are being asked to give up too much. I do not want to downplay the vertigo that some may feel when considering life without tonality—I feel it too. Our curricula are structured around the word, as Yust observes, and it has acted as a kind of intellectual commons for generations of theorists. But I think Yust is right: losing the word doesn't mean we lose the theoretical insights gained under its banner. Nor does it mean we lose the commons. Indeed, as I will argue at the end of this response, moving on from the term offers us an opportunity to reimagine and reconstitute that commons as a more inclusive space, socially and musically. In the process, we also stand to gain much else: ethical clarity, sharper thinking, a nimbler analytical method, and the ability to engage a far greater range of the world's musics in our classes and research. If the cost of these gains is giving up an unwieldy term that was never that well defined in the first place, I'm happy to pay it.This is a different position from the one I took some years ago in my book Tonality and Transformation. I noted in the opening pages that the first word in the book's title, in addition to being definitionally vague, has acquired a considerable amount of ideological freight over its relatively short life, making it not merely a descriptive label for a musical repertory or a set of aural habits, but a concept that has served a variety of ideological interests. (Rings 2011: 2)1The footnote that follows this statement (n. 8) mentions Fétis's racism—via Brian Hyer's discussion in his landmark Grove article on “Tonality,” reprinted in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory—as well as Kofi Agawu's writing on tonality's role as a colonizing force in Africa (Hyer 2002; Agawu 2003).2 I went on: “Given the word's ideological charge and its lack of semantic focus, it might be tempting to jettison it altogether, perhaps replacing it with a more neutral neologism. But to do so would be overly fastidious. Despite its many problems, the word tonality continues to evoke a vivid sound world for many Western listeners” (Rings 2011: 3).3 What struck me as “overly fastidious” a dozen years ago I now find a bold but defensible response to a genuinely vexing issue. Moreover, Yust's bracing article has convinced me that we can continue to engage the “sound world”—or better, “sound worlds”—in question without any need for tonality as a covering term. Indeed, losing the word could well make us more responsive to the sonic effects of the many musics that enter our ears on the regular.Of course, changing a word won't solve all of our problems, nor does Yust claim it would. Structural racism and music theory's white racial frame are rooted deep in our institutions and in our disciplinary practices, as Philip Ewell (2020, 2023) has argued. Genuine change will occur only through sustained effort on multiple fronts. The recent issue of Music Theory Spectrum, which includes Stephen Lett's (2023) essay “Making a Home for the Society for Music Theory, Inc.,” as well as eight responses to it, makes clear that such work, though incipient, is underway. Changing our theoretical language won't accomplish that alone, but it may move the needle. For, as Yust shows, language's effects quickly become reified in our curricula and syllabi—witness the bifurcation between tonal and post-tonal courses with which he begins. As long as those remain our two master categories for music analysis classes, we should not be surprised if the lion's share of the music we teach continues to come from the European classical tradition. To be sure, Anglo-American popular music has gradually found its way into many harmony classrooms, but only rarely do musics from non-Western traditions receive similar attention.4 To be sure, the word tonality is hardly to blame for all of this. But it hasn't helped.For our language, unexamined, can push us around. It routes our thought in certain directions rather than others, at times bringing with it histories that we may find loathsome. This is how I interpret Yust's central argument that tonality's racist foundations are perpetuated by a basic definitional incoherence. Is tonality a label for a set of aural properties or for a historically (and racially) delimited repertory? As theorists we tend to shuttle almost imperceptibly between these two definitions in the daily rough and tumble of music talk.5 This might not be a problem were it not that the historical definition all too often acts to segregate music, with the classical European common practice (unsurprisingly) emerging triumphant. It sits atop of the tonal heap, all other ostensibly tonal musics—from Duke Ellington to Taylor Swift—strewn about on its slopes, as more or less remote declensions from Mozart. It is easy enough to shake our heads at such blinkered Eurocentrism and vow to do better. It is harder to bring awareness to the many small ways we continue to enact it in statements like, “Music x sounds pretty tonal, I suppose, but the harmony isn't functional”; or “I guess music y is tonal, but the voice leading is loaded with bad parallels.” Such seemingly innocuous comments quietly smuggle tonality's elite, Eurocentric biases back into our thinking and teaching, even—perhaps especially—when we are filling our ears with nonclassical music.Philip Tagg, whom Yust does not cite, has written forcefully and eloquently on this matter. Tagg is a theorist sui generis and an old-school Marxist who has been blazing his own trail in the study of popular music for five decades (British by birth, he has taught extensively in Sweden, the UK, and francophone Montreal). In his Everyday Tonality II: Towards a Tonal Theory of What Most People Hear, he bemoans the Eurocentrism of traditional accounts of tonality, offering his book as a corrective that expands the term's reach to nearly all of the world's musics, with a strong emphasis on the vernacular (Tagg 2023). In his account, the European common practice is merely one tonal practice among many others, and by no means typical.6 He advances his argument in part by some definitional play: he suggests that we reserve the word tonal for any music that contains tones. For musics that contain tonics, he proposes the term tonical. Tagg's fondness for neologisms is endearing, but I doubt tonicality will catch on anytime soon. Nor would it likely help, as I can imagine us quickly concluding that Mozart is—lo and behold!—more tonical than other musics, thus leaving us more or less where we began (same heap, new label). And if all music that contains tones is tonal, the adjective—or its nominative form, tonality—becomes so broad as to become virtually useless. None of which is to diminish the practical value of Tagg's work, which is considerable. His book presents a flexible analytical method that engages diverse musics—vernacular and elite, Western and non-Western, from the Global South to the Northern Metropole, Hijaz to Lynyrd Skynyrd—with admirable agility. Indeed, I used the book as the principal text in my most recent graduate class on tonal analysis, about which, more below.Other authors have sought to broaden the definition of tonality historically and/or generically; Yust cites Megan Long (2020), Daniel Harrison (2016), and Dmitri Tymoczko (2023) as three recent examples. This work is invaluable, as are these authors’ efforts to smudge the boundaries of tonality at the edges of the common practice. But I agree with Yust that such work often has to struggle against ingrained habits of thought about tonality (traditionally conceived) and the attendant oppositions that fortify its historical and generic perimeters: tonality vs. modality, tonality vs. atonality, common-practice tonality vs. rock tonality, and so on. If we lose the term, such struggles evaporate. We no longer need to map the precise historical dateline that separates modality from tonality, for example, or fret over the differences between voice-leading in a Motown tune and in a Bach chorale. Tonality and Transformation arose from frustrations around a similar demarcation line: that between common-practice tonality and what some have called “triadic post-tonality” (see, e.g., Straus 2016). Though I retained the term tonality, in retrospect I wonder if it was more of an encumbrance than a help. For in discussions around neo-Riemannian theory the concept all too often led to binaristic distinctions—“Is this piece/phrase/passage tonal or not?” Such questions, by my lights, distracted from the many fascinating ways that tonal effects were bent and refracted in such music.7Let's try theoretical life without such unproductive binaries. I suspect we would find the experience liberating. In what remains of my response I would like to explore one reason for this, amplifying an aspect of Yust's essay that seems especially promising. This is his component-wise account of different musical parameters that contribute to a sense of tonalness. As he states, “the word tonality is used to refer to many different features of music, all of which have other names, and there is little downside in using more precise terms” (p. 66). He proposes six broad categories that we can theorize independently: (1) Key(2) Tonic or tonal center(3) Scales and macroharmony(4) Scale degree(5) Triadic harmony and consonance(6) Functional harmonyIt's a somewhat unruly bunch, given that the categories have different degrees of complexity or hierarchical layering. Some categories, like scale degrees and scales/macroharmony, are relatively simple, either involving atoms of musical structure (scale degrees) or sets of such atoms (scales and macroharmony). Others are more elaborate. Key, for example, is an emergent effect of the coordination of various of the other parameters, likely including tonics, scales, scale degrees, and (in some styles) functional harmony. It also may well involve some items not on Yust's list such as phrase rhythm, coordination of harmony and meter, cadence, texture, repetition, and outer-voice counterpoint. As this list already suggests, key is also one of the parameters still quite susceptible to a classical, Eurocentric bias. Yust addresses this by referring explicitly to the major-minor key system, but I wonder if we might broaden our sense of key to be less Eurocentric. Does the concept hold up in musics that do not admit of understanding in the major-minor system? If so, how much would it rely on the other categories for definition? Does a sense of key, for example, necessarily assume a tonic? Does it require a circumscribed scalar vocabulary, or slow-moving macroharmony? Do keys presume a predominantly triadic chordal vocabulary? Could one, for example, project a sense of key with only McCoy Tyner–style quartal harmonies? Put otherwise, what is the status of key in much of A Love Supreme? At what point does attenuating some or all of these elements also attenuate one's sense of key? And how much is this an emic/etic matter? That is, do practitioners within a given musical style answer these questions differently than analysts who are cultural outsiders? What kinds of vernacular music theories have musicians within these traditions developed to understand the sounds they make?8 I raise these questions not as objections, quite the contrary. These are all fascinating issues opened up by Yust's component-wise reframing. Each question is an invitation to expand the commons.On reading Yust's discussion I was reminded of the graduate tonal analysis class I taught in the winter of 2022, mentioned above. In that class, I indeed tried out such a component-wise, parametric approach to analyzing a wide range of tonal musics, from Delta Blues to Tin Pan Alley, Nina Simone to (yes) Mozart. My working hypothesis for the class was that we can productively engage with such a diversity of tonal musics if we consider each practice as a special configuration of some familiar tonal categories. I provided a list in the syllabus, which has some overlap with Yust's, and the same unruliness. I tried to provide some order, though, by dividing the entries into three categories: Materials (out of time) ScalesChordsKeysTonicsSyntax (in time) Phrase rhythmCoordination of harmony, melody, and meterVoice-leading, especially bass-melody skeletonsCadence or other conventional means of punctuation/caesura/closureRegulating concepts (both) HierarchyAsymmetryConsonance/dissonanceDeparture/returnRepetitionI proposed that the class begin by visualizing a mixing board and consider each of these parameters as a slider. My wager was that different tonal idioms would position the sliders in different configurations. For example, one idiom might have plenty of diatonic scales and triads but provide a weak sense of key and tonic; another might have really clear phrase rhythm but place very little emphasis on outer-voice counterpoint; a third style might lean hard on an opposition between consonance and dissonance, while another might blur that distinction so much as to make it all but meaningless. And so on. In each case we could imagine the sliders maxed out, somewhere in the middle, or drawn all the way down to silence. I suspected that our sense of the tonalness of some bit of music was related to these slider configurations. I further had a hunch that the drawing down of several sliders to zero or near zero would place pressure on other sliders to max out—for example, if the music has a weak sense of key or tonic, it'll need some strong sonic markers of tonalness in its chordal and scalar vocabulary if we are still to hear it as, to some degree, tonal. This still raises the question of what I mean by the word tonal, and whether the concept is ultimately still dependent on sonic similarity to the European common practice, and hence to tonality. It's hard to escape the gravitational pull of these familiar terms. But Tagg's book shows that there is still much one can say about the tonal effects of the world's musics within a more hierarchically flattened conception that does not privilege elite European art music.9 As analytical work continues to emerge on the many musics of the world, our corpus for understanding the diversity of such tonal effects will only grow.10Before closing, it is worth pointing out one serious shortcoming of the above discussion, and of Yust's essay: the relentless focus on pitch. Of course, any discussion of tonality (or its abandonment) will give pitch pride of place. But pitch myopia is a familiar problem for music theorists; if we pin our hopes on renovating our thinking about pitch systems, a great many crucial aspects of the world's musics will continue to slip through our fingers. Timbre is the most obvious overlooked parameter, but gesture, texture, articulation, intensity, interaction, and simple volume are also nearby. Here my thinking is influenced in large part by the music of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (or AACM), which I have been teaching much in recent years, and which is the subject of Paul Steinbeck's recent book, Sound Experiments (see my review in this issue). When analyzing this music, I'm often struck by the conceptual inadequacy of that basic music-theoretical particle, the “note.”11 Notes, as abstractions, are bearers of quantifiable information on pitch and rhythm, the very things conventional music theory is best at modeling. But much of the AACM's music—especially in its improvisational sections using “little instruments”—arguably trades not in notes at all but sounds of varying sizes, textures, and tactilities. The title of Roscoe Mitchell's first album, Sound, says as much.12 Much other music from the Black radical tradition—here I think in particular of Albert Ayler and players influenced by him—similarly gives timbre the central role. While old habits of thought often treat timbre as a kind of decorative color for the “real” syntactical substance of pitch, I often feel that these priorities are reversed in Ayler: it is pitch that colors timbre. Change the pitches and not much is lost; change the timbre and everything is. The putative secondary parameter becomes primary.13 If we wish to expand our theoretical horizons to encompass more of the world's musics, we will need to venture forth more regularly from the well-mapped coordinate spaces of our pitch systems, tonal or otherwise.This reflects a call that many have made, over generations, to broaden what we theorize.14 So if you're in wonder we still so on pitch. I think it is in part pitch is a commons. It a of and of any of timbre those same can share pitch. is a musical in which our can sound This is one of as well as its whether share pitch in musicians (see or in In this I'm very by Yust's comments about the aspects of the tonality has been a concept that the of a of The concept is and on a cultural between and of This that each musical have its own way for music to be (p. the a of musical perhaps the most effect of our theories of pitch. That pitch are is not the or But music theorists have been to the The more we is, the more we theorize pitch more quickly we may find that we are already Yust's around the theoretical commons. When our that a may well as an a a new disciplinary

  PublisherDOI

• Sound Experiments: The Music of the AACM

  Journal of Music Theory · 2024 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Acoustics
  • Art
  • Physics

  let's begin at the beginning—no, before the beginning—with the first sentence of the acknowledgments: “This book is an offering to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), an organization that has had a profound effect on my life” (ix). The prose is clear-eyed and unpretentious, virtues in all of Steinbeck's writing, but the sentiment is hardly simple; it is delicately poised. Note the word “offering.” Steinbeck does not dedicate the book to the artists of the AACM, but offers it to them, in gratitude for the “profound effect” they have had on him. The tone is one of care, appreciation, and giving back. Steinbeck writes as a white male musician—a lanky bass player from Nebraska, as it happens—who has unfolded his scholarly and musical life in the vast creative space that the AACM has opened and cultivated for over half a century.1 As he goes on to detail in the acknowledgments, he was introduced to the AACM while an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, via former AACM chair Mwata Bowden. Steinbeck went on to perform with several AACM members, and for his PhD ultimately landed at Columbia, where he studied with one of the AACM's brightest luminaries: George Lewis. Steinbeck's scholarly work in the years since has centered largely on the AACM, offering an analytical complement to Lewis's own compendious history of the organization (2008). Steinbeck's first book, Message to Our Folks (2017), delved into the music of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, one of the AACM's premiere groups. The present book is a wider-ranging study of music from other AACM figures and ensembles. It is thus no exaggeration to say that the AACM created the conditions of possibility for Steinbeck's career, a debt he acknowledges in his thoughtful opening gesture.The statement's tone is representative of the book as a whole: generous, warm, unfussy, and deeply substantive. What it is not is angsty. Steinbeck spends vanishingly little time fretting about the ethics of analyzing the AACM's music. Nor does he turn to high-flown critical theory to address thorny questions of race, representation, and the scholarly gaze. There are no citations of Hartman, Moten, Sharpe, Okiji, or even Baraka.2 There is instead page after page of closely heard, lovingly detailed analytical prose. Steinbeck writes as a practitioner—a performer within this tradition—who knows the major players well. Indeed, three of the AACM's biggest names blurb the book: Lewis, Roscoe Mitchell, and Wadada Leo Smith. Perhaps as a result, Steinbeck is less concerned about the ethics of analysis, as he has had ample opportunities to discuss his work with AACM members. Scholars who don't enjoy that proximity may well have appreciated some reflection on the matter.3Yet Steinbeck's approach of diving right into analysis without undue hemming and hawing has its virtues. It places the sounds of the AACM at center stage, lavishing on them the kind of analytical attention that elite white musics have long enjoyed. Moreover, his no-nonsense analytical description leaves ample space for readers to supplement it with their own theories, whether critical or musical. Crucially, the low theoretical load makes the book accessible to nonacademics, including AACM members. Steinbeck's demystifying, matter-of-fact narration of musical events will also be especially welcome to those new to the music. For these readers, the book amounts to something of a decoder ring: everything you ever wanted to know about the AACM but were afraid to ask.Steinbeck has done readers an enormous service in making the music discussed in the book available on his website in high-quality audio files (paulsteinbeck.com/av).4 Every reader—especially AACM neophytes—should navigate the text with the website open and headphones on. Indeed, Steinbeck recommends listening while reading the analyses (4). When I did, I often found my reading proceeding at about the pace of the music's in-the-moment unfolding, a felicitous coordination. At other times, I finished the prose before the relevant musical section ended, allowing me to pause reading and listen freely until the next timestamp, also felicitous. I nevertheless recommend that readers new to the AACM do some initial listening to the given chapter's music before digging into the analytical prose, getting the sounds in their ears and developing some first impressions before working through Steinbeck's moment-to-moment narrative. Such an initial “naive” listening can provide a holistic first encounter that Steinbeck's analytical narrative can then focus and shape, bringing local details into sharper relief.Steinbeck calls the book a “sonic history” (3). It is an apt locution: history taken in through the ears. Its nine chapters are arranged in chronological order, each one braiding historical context with analytical deep dives. Eight of the chapters are dedicated to a single work and/or album by one of the AACM's premiere artists or ensembles. The one exception is the first chapter, which focuses on early albums by Roscoe Mitchell and Muhal Richard Abrams. Table 1 reproduces the book's table of contents with years added in brackets.To get a sense of Steinbeck's approach, let's dip into the first analysis in the book, on Roscoe Mitchell 1966 track “Ornette.” Mitchell's debut album Sound features a sextet consisting of saxophonists Mitchell and Maurice McIntyre, trumpeter Lester Bowie, cellist Lester Lashley, bassist Malachi Favors, and drummer Alvin Fielder. I've identified these musicians by their primary instruments, but it is important to know that multi-instrumentalism has always been central to the AACM. Players regularly switch between different instruments within a single composition or improvisation, and the stage for AACM performances is typically arrayed with dozens of instruments large and small. Among these are countless “little instruments,” which include musical toys of various kinds, small percussion such as finger cymbals, harmonicas and slide whistles, and much else.Two of the three tracks on Sound feature little instruments prominently. The first track, though, does not, in part because it is an homage to free-jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman, following his traditional instrumentation of alto sax, trumpet, bass, and drums (to which the sextet adds a tenor sax and cello). Here is Steinbeck's prose description of the opening of the track. I've reproduced a significant chunk of it to give the reader a good sense of his analytical voice. To follow the discussion, I recommend that readers pull up the audio at paulsteinbeck.com/av.Steinbeck's plain-spoken prose has a way of making the unfamiliar approachable. He not only names what one can hear, he characterizes it. The opening fanfare is “startling,” McIntyre's interrupting “squall” is “shrill.” There is nothing fancy about these words, but they do important work, letting the reader know how one musician deeply involved in this tradition (Steinbeck) experiences the sounds in question. This can be affirming, especially for new listeners: “Ah yes, it is a startling fanfare! I wasn't wrong.” Or one might disagree: “Hmmm, doesn't sound very pointillistic to me.” But Steinbeck is a gentle guide, and such disagreements feel low stakes. Welcoming accessibility is the watchword.Higher stakes disagreements may arise with regard to Steinbeck's decision to produce all transcriptions in the instruments’ transposed keys. I suspect he may have done so to make the transcriptions accessible to the players themselves (including, in this case, Roscoe Mitchell, who is still active). It is hard to argue with this goal, especially given the book's status as an offering to the AACM. But it raises a barrier for readers who are not players of transposing instruments. Among other things, it makes it difficult to determine the intervallic relationships among the parts. Figure 1, for example, includes two B♭ instruments (trumpet and tenor) and one E♭ (alto). One has to transpose all three to concert pitch to figure out, for example, whether they are playing in unison or not; for what it's worth, the first system is entirely in unison except for the first note. Of course, our ears can tell us this too, but in music as potentially disorienting as this, any hurdles to comprehension are costly.For example, the transpositions disguise the fact that, on the third system (starting at 0:11), Bowie and Mitchell are playing in thirds. This delays recognition that the two of them are not merely playing in the style of Ornette Coleman here—their phrase begins as a near citation. Figure 2a shows Bowie's and Mitchell's parts renotated at concert pitch on a single treble clef. Figure 2b transcribes the second phrase (0:06–0:10) of Coleman's “Congeniality,” the penultimate track from his seminal 1959 album The Shape of Jazz to Come. The heads of both tunes are in B♭ major. In each, a jaunty unison phrase in that key is followed by a brief pause, and then a slower, quizzical passage in thirds. As the lines between the systems indicate, Mitchell and Bowie match the first two thirds in the Coleman exactly. Further, Coleman and trumpet player Don Cherry take the same lines as Mitchell and Bowie: alto below, trumpet above.5 Steinbeck doesn't mention the near citation between the two tunes, and it took me awhile to source it, in part because of confusion created by the transposing scores, which hid the thirds from my eyes (though my ears registered them). A concert-pitch transcription would have aided my rummaging through Coleman snippets in memory.One can of course quibble about other details in the transcription in Figure 1. For example, I hear the chromatic unison line at the end of the first system in the rhythm (16th–16th–8th), rather than triplets. But such disputes are, again, largely petty. Steinbeck's transcriptions are merely a point of reference—inexact, mnemonic, a placeholder for focusing hearing. And even when one disagrees with a transcription, that very disagreement can lead to sharper audition. At times, though, notation lags what we can hear considerably, leaving much for the reader to fill in. Figure 3 reproduces Steinbeck's example 1.4, a transcription of the opening of “The Little Suite,” track 2 on Sound. Here, as in his first book, Steinbeck uses triangles to indicate improvised sections. Just what is improvised in these passages is not specified, nor can conventional Western notation really do such sounds justice. This is a familiar shortcoming: staff notation is only useful when relatively discrete “notes” are involved. When the sounds are unpitched, or when the pitches are so blurred together or rapid as to be all but indistinguishable (think of Cecil Taylor at his densest), Western notation loses its efficacy. This is especially evident in the passages for “little instruments,” with their unpredictable play of sound and silence, their skittering caprice. In these cases, prose is far more versatile, and Steinbeck uses it deftly.But prose also has its limitations. Among other things, it can lead to play-by-play narration; Steinbeck's prose admittedly often proceeds in this inchworm fashion. The danger of this approach is of course a loss of the forest for the trees. It can also make for a tedious reading experience, though this greatly improves if one listens while reading. Steinbeck further ameliorates the tedium by perforating his analytical narrative with critical and historical asides, as well as by using formal tables such as that shown in Figure 4 below, which parses sections in three consecutive movements of Nicole Mitchell's Mandorla Awakening II. Tables like these are indispensable when listening to a large stretch of the music, helping the sonic forest to reassemble from the many local analytical trees.The play-by-play does, though, have one crucial virtue: it allows one to track the in-the-minute interactions of the performers—the fleeting contingency and dynamism of their decisions. Often in Steinbeck's book the result is a performer's-eye-view of the music: the perspective of an improviser listening intently to the other musicians and responding in real time. This performer-centric perspective is especially evident in the chapter on Anthony Braxton's Composition 76.6 The score of this piece consists of forty different notated modules arranged on twenty-seven cards that can be shuffled and played in any order. The modules vary in prescriptiveness: some are tightly composed with standard notation; others leave ample room for improvised realization; all can be traversed via multiple different paths (e.g., two notes from this system, three from that, and an improvised flourish to wrap it up). Staves often lack clefs. Braxton also employs geometric shapes in various colors to indicate improvisational gesture of different lengths and subgroupings. Steinbeck describes how the players navigate the score, telling us who plays what and how it relates to the current module. The result is a kind of forensic music analysis; it reads like a whodunit. But such an approach tells us much more about the performer's perspective than that of the listener innocent of the score. For that listener, the experience can be of a constant flux of seemingly improvised sections, broken by moments of clear compositional coordination (say, via surprising unison lines). The analysis, like the book as a whole, tilts heavily toward the poietic side of Jean-Jacques Nattiez's (1990) semiotic tripartition—the side focused on creative activity—rather than the esthesic level (focused on listener response) or the niveau neutre (the sounding trace as immanent object).Steinbeck's prose narration is also well suited to documenting the interaction of performer and audience in a live context. His analysis of Roscoe Mitchell's performance of the piece Nonaah at a jazz festival in Willisau, Switzerland in 1976 is the most vivid example. Mitchell had been asked to replace headliner Anthony Braxton at the last minute, as Braxton was delayed in transit. Mitchell agreed—bravely—to play a solo concert. The audience was, at first, not happy, greeting Mitchell with hoots and catcalls. As Steinbeck puts it, “Mitchell came to the stage to play a solo concert, but he soon found himself in an unexpected showdown with Anthony Braxton's supporters” (43). As the belligerents hollered, Mitchell played the first phrase of his piece Nonaah, holding the last note a bit longer than expected. He then repeated the phrase, holding the note longer still, thus filling the sonic space and preventing further interjections from the hecklers. Then he repeated the phrase again. And again. And again. And on and on, for a total of ninety-six iterations. Steinbeck explores the play of difference and repetition among these iterations in exhilarating detail, his ear cocked as much for sounds from the audience—disapproval giving way to excitement—as for the subtle shifts in nuance from Mitchell's alto. Steinbeck offers here not an analysis of a piece, or even an analysis of a performance, but an analysis of a total social event involving player and audience. The music, from this perspective, is no mere aesthetic object of disinterested contemplation but a medium of social encounter and affective ricochet.To conclude, let's return to Steinbeck's light theoretical touch. As stated above, there is precious little critical theory in the book. I find this largely a fair trade, as Steinbeck provides such a wealth of engagement with the AACM's sounds in theory's stead. At only one point did I acutely miss a more critical-theoretical perspective: the chapter on Nicole Mitchell's Mandorla Awakening II. Steinbeck mentions Mitchell's status as one of the few prominent female musicians in the AACM—she would in fact become the organization's chair—but he does not dwell on the fact. Nor does he delve into the centrality of gender in the story behind Mitchell's album-length piece, an Afrofuturist parable that hovers somewhere between Octavia Butler and Black Panther. Since the advent of bebop in the 1940s, experimental jazz has been overwhelmingly male, riven with masculine competitive energy.7 The AACM in its first decades was sadly not much different; at one point the group even seated men and women on opposite sides of the audience for concerts. George Lewis has discussed the gender politics of the AACM in some depth (Lewis 2008: 203–4, 459–80), but I would have welcomed more explicit gender theorizing in Steinbeck's chapter, the only one to focus on music by a female composer and bandleader.8 This isn't just a matter of context, but of music analysis. For the music's fluctuating temporalities and enveloping sonics richly reward a gender-theoretical perspective.9There also isn't much music theory in Sound Experiments—or at least much of the will in for to or other In their is a wealth of plain-spoken description of musical events for and in Steinbeck leaves significant of the he only For example, his on the first track on and there are no and not much analysis. But a wealth of further detail to be in this track. might even into some of pitch to if it any of his which Steinbeck in an In this and many other the book further analysis and which will be especially welcome to those to what they at most For example, I have the book in analysis to Steinbeck's analytical as a point for their own analytical It has well. The often a of detail, which is as it be in a analysis as to a book at a I have also asked the not to Steinbeck's with analysis, but rather to his approach to musical of and the like has been a of in a all often by more time I with Sound the more I found it a book. It first of to the musicians of the AACM, with that opening sentence of the It is also Steinbeck has seemingly word ever about the AACM, and he and His is also evident in his voice. It after an of to and he does so on such writing, Steinbeck makes an of music accessible to a a both to the musicians who it, and to the readers who have a far to hear their sounds The very fact that there is more to more to more to not to lack but a of and about conditions of

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• Jankélévitch, Fauré, and the Thirteenth Nocturne

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Art
  • Art history

  Scholars of French music have long known the name Vladimir Jankélévitch, but it is only in recent years that he has captured the attention of musicologists more generally. This is due almost entirely to the efforts of Carolyn Abbate, whose much-debated 2004 essay “Music – Drastic or Gnostic?” gives Jankélévitch pride of place.1 A year before that essay, Abbate had published a translation of Jankélévitch’s 1961 book Music and the Ineffable, which was the focus of a special session at the 2010 annual meeting of the American Musicological Society and a subsequent colloquy in the Journal of the American Musicological Society.

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• 1. Speech and/in Song

  2020-12-31

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• What Makes a Song “Songy”

  Portable Gray · 2019-03-01

  article
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• Music’s Stubborn Enchantments (and Music Theory’s)

  Music Theory Online · 2018-03-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In 1917, Max Weber (paraphrasing Schiller) famously proclaimed modernity’s “disenchantment of the world.” Weber was speaking specifically about the waning of belief in the cold light of science, secularism, and rationalized, bureaucratic capitalism, but his dictum has proven remarkably resonant beyond the social science quad. Indeed, disenchantment in various forms arguably pervades the postmodern humanities, as both diagnosis and method: the critical theorist disenchants, unmasks, demystifies. Most music theorists, it need hardly be said, do something quite different. As the SMT celebrates its 40th year, music theory—with its wide-eyed enthusiasms and unapologetic close readings, its loving attention to the sonic and the aesthetic, its frequent aloofness from the social and political—remains a discipline apart, a sort of blissed-out, sylvan glade within the Left-melancholic academy. Depending on one’s intellectual commitments this may be cause for celebration or withering critique. But before we exult or condemn, we should try, once again, to understand why , as music theorists, many of us are so prone to enchantment (despite frequent admonishments from our academic neighbors), and what this might mean for our discipline’s future, its place in the academic ecology, and its ethical commitments. This paper considers these questions in connection with the song “Poor Places” by the band Wilco, using it as a case study to stage a fictive encounter between (unabashedly enchanted) music analysis and more critically wary perspectives. I end with broader ethical considerations about enchantment’s potential to effect social change, drawing on the work of political theorist Jane Bennett.

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• On Bob Dylan’s Nobel speech: sound, medium and genreBob Dylan, 2016, Noble Lecture in Literature, https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2016/dylan-lecture.html

  Sound Studies · 2018-01-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  To the surprise of exactly no one, Bob Dylan took his time responding publicly to the news that he had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The announcement – delivered by Sara Danius, then the Perma...

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• Lourenço, Transfigured Night, and Musical Writing

  Revista portuguesa de musicologia · 2016-10-27

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht had a privileged place in Eduardo Lourenço’s personal musical canon. He referred to it, along with Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, as his sonic ‘true soul’ (alma verdadeira), and he cites the work multiple times in his refractory ‘musical diary’, the recently published Tempo da música, música do tempo. While Lourenço’s discussions of Schoenberg’s sextet are highly poetic and elusive, the present essay approaches the work from the opposite direction, deploying the technical discourse of transformational music theory. The article as a whole explores the methodological dialectic that Lourenço outlines between comprehension (compreender) and feeling (sentir) in musical experience, relating these ideas to recent debates in Anglo-American music scholarship regarding musical ineffability and the efficacy (or inefficacy) or talk about music. The article ultimately argues that talk about music—whether in Lourenço’s poetic vein, or in the more technical terms of recent music analysis—is best understood as a product of the encounter between the interpreting subject, music, and language, rather than as a rationalist explanation of musical experience.

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• Why Voice Now?

  Journal of the American Musicological Society · 2015-01-01 · 40 citations

  article

  Research Article| December 01 2015 Why Voice Now? Martha Feldman, Martha Feldman Convenor MARTHA FELDMAN is Mabel Greene Myers Professor of Music and Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. Her books include The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds (University of California Press, 2015), based on the Bloch Lectures at Berkeley, Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2007), and City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (University of California Press, 1995). She is currently at work on a book on the end and afterlife of the castrato phenomenon in modern Rome. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Emily Wilbourne, Emily Wilbourne EMILY WILBOURNE is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her book Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell'Arte is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. In 2015 she guest-edited a special issue of Women and Music in honor of Suzanne G. Cusick. She has published on the commedia dell'arte and seventeenth-century music in this Journal, Women and Music, Recercare, and Teatro e storia; an article is forthcoming in Italian Studies. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Steven Rings, Steven Rings STEVEN RINGS is Associate Professor of Music and Chair of the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago. His book Tonality and Transformation (Oxford University Press, 2011) was awarded the Society for Music Theory's Emerging Scholar Award, and his article "A Foreign Sound to Your Ear: Bob Dylan Performs 'It's All Right, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding),' 1964–2009" (2013) received the Outstanding Publication Award from the SMT Popular Music Interest Group. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Brian Kane, Brian Kane BRIAN KANE is Associate Professor on Term in the Department of Music at Yale University. His research explores the intersection of philosophy, music studies, and sound studies. He is the author of Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (Oxford University Press, 2014). His current project, entitled Hearing Double: Jazz, Ontology, Auditory Culture (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), considers the phenomenon of jazz standards from philosophical and aesthetic perspectives. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar James Q. Davies James Q. Davies JAMES Q. DAVIES is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of Romantic Anatomies of Performance (University of California Press, 2014) and coeditor with Ellen Lockhart of Sound Knowledge: Music and Science in London, 1789–1851 (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). James grew up in Johannesburg. Before arriving in California, he was a Junior Research Fellow in Music at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2015) 68 (3): 653–685. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2015.68.3.653 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Martha Feldman, Emily Wilbourne, Steven Rings, Brian Kane, James Q. Davies; Why Voice Now?. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 December 2015; 68 (3): 653–685. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2015.68.3.653 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search Try to imagine a zone without clear boundaries or strict divisions. Were we able to strip away speech, poetry, phonetics, morphology—all of language, in short—we might have the pure terrain of the thing we call voice. For what would we be left with? Resonance, timbre, phonation. The vocalise, the vowel, the scream, the sigh, the cry, the gasp, the om. Whether such an extraction is in fact reducible to voice is a matter for debate. In what follows we negotiate this question in different ways, thinking of voices of different kinds: theoretical, pragmatic, psychic; linguistic, sonic, physical. Whatever congeries of things we may find voice to be, it remains various and refractory to explanation. A minor literato named Enrico Panzacchi constructed a useful parable of these voices in a bizarre exercise in autobiographical fiction of 1889. In the following scene he stages himself in an approach to the Sistine Chapel,... Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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• Michael J. Puri

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• Brian Kane

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• Theodore J. Gordon

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• James Q. Davies

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• Brian Kane

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• James Currie

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• Judy Lochhead

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• Michael Gallope

  University of Minnesota System

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Awards & honors

• Outstanding Publication Award from the Society for Music The…