Due to changing needs and technologies, the SMT Executive Board has decided to retire SMT Discuss (effective Nov. 9, 2021). Posts will be preserved for archival purposes, but new posts and replies are no longer permitted.
Nicolas
About
- Username
- Nicolas
- Joined
- Visits
- 2,775
- Last Active
- Roles
- Guest
- First Name
- Nicolas
- Last Name
- Meeùs
- Affliation or Location
- University Paris-Sorbonne (emeritus)
- Website
- http://nicolas.meeus.free.fr
Comments
-
It may be useful for SMT, in order to take the best decision for the future of SMT Discuss, to know that contrarily to what they seem to believe, Vanilla forums by no means is "no longer supported." See https://vanillaforums.com/en/ for more informa…
-
Nate, you are perfectly right and I should have looked further. Yet, as Scott indicates, such statistics are meaningless. Ewell goes on showing that the situation is worse among "full-time employees in music theory" and even worse among "associate a…
-
Philip Ewell writes (MTO 26.2, [1.1]): "Music theory is white. According to the Society for Music Theory’s “Annual Report on Membership Demographics” for 2018, 84.2% of the society’s membership is white (Brown 2018, 5)." He does not say how he defin…
-
Stephen Soderberg's message above prompted me to reread ancient issues of MTO, among which Kofi Agawu's "Analyzing Music Under the New Musicological Regime" (MTO 2.4, 1996), which seems to me to answer several of the criticisms raised anew by Philip…
-
Nate, the whole matter probably deserves being treated more seriously. When I mentioned the history of music composition after Beethoven, I obviously meant Western music composition. If we were to cut hairs in four, I'd add 1) that Beijing opera (ji…
-
Nate, to speak of "the whole history of music composition" as you do, merely reflects a Western supremacism (if you allow me to speak like Ewell). Why do you mention "composers of Beijing opera in the 19th century"? Do you know of any name of 19th-c…
-
Devin, yes, I read Ewell's work. And I make very few claims in the above. I merely mean that if Ewell's arguments were clearer (they are not to me), it would be good to further discuss them. I have been repeating since a year that the whole matter s…
-
Ewell wrote (Ewell 2020): “Master,” and its derivatives (masterwork, masterpiece, masterful), carries both racist (master/slave) and sexist (master/mistress) connotations. In music theory “masterwork” is generally applied to compositions by white m…
-
Can you share an example where "the dominant (chord) of the dominant (key)" does not work? What I mean merely is that in a progression like II#–V–I, if you write it as V/V–V–I, there is (or there should be) no modulation involved. In V/V–V, V is n…
-
In How to Modulate, Shepard also speaks of "attendant keys" (pp. 57, 61), which are already mentioned and discussed by Banister, Music (1873), p. 160 etc. Banister spears of "intermediate chords," for instance "the dominant of a relative minor key".…
-
Néstor, the question of the origin of "tonicization" is complex because it is rather heavily dependent on language. The German Tonikalization appears to be one of the few terms coined by Schenker himself, at a time when even words such as Tonika or …
-
Having read your question and the answers provided here, I still don't quite understand what all this is about. Consonance and dissonance are mainly acoustical phenomena. 'Quantifying' them seems to me to mean numerically defining a level of consona…
-
Néstor, this is – or, better said, these are most interesting questions. I have elements of answer to the first one. There are cases of using Arabic numerals to denote roots in the first half of the 18th century, e.g. in Quirinus van Blankenburg, …
-
@ Mark and all, Schenker indeed comments the return from II# to I in Beethoven's op. 109, second movement (the return is at mes. 105, not 109). He stresses the exchange of I and II starting from mes. 93 and writes: The succession that follows, part…
-
Many thanks to Nathan Martin for the information on modalité. Choron obviously was less successful with it than with tonalité. Thank you also for your comments on Fétis. I think it extremely important to discuss these matters – this is, after all, t…
-
In my opinion, one main difference between Fetis' and Riemann's conceptions of "tonality" is that while Riemann is speaking of Western harmonic tonality exclusively, Fetis half a century before had considered all "tonalities" in the world and throug…
-
I note that Jason Yust envisages a course about "Persian (or possibly Arab or Turkish) modal theory". Let me remind you that Harold Powers wrote, about 30 years ago, that "our 20th-century notion of something called "modality" as a widely applicable…
-
Carson Farley wrote: I am not seeing the relationship to the harmonic series in Tonnetz yet. There is no relationship to the harmonic series in the Tonnetz, Carson. Euler proposed it to demonstrate some properties of the musical system. He conside…
-
Jason Yust wrote But there appears to be no such preference for prograde motions in, e.g., rock music, and it would seem arbitrary to exclude rock music from tonality. My colleague Philippe Cathé, of Sorbonne University, wrote several papers about…
-
Jason Yust considers that if centricity is meant to refer to something more specific, involving notions [of] relative stability, resolution, and/or implication, then tonality may reduce to centricity. The problem to me, however, is not about that …
SMT Discuss Manager: smtdiscuss@societymusictheory.org