Steven Rings
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 5186378 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Steven Rings |
| PRENOMES | Steven |
| SOBRENOME | Rings |
| ASSINATURA | RINGS S |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Chicago |
| VERIFICADO | Não |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 32 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 5 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 5 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 27 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2012 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2020 |
| ÍNDICE H | 1 |
Timbre
Timbre, the distinctive quality of a particular sound, has become an increasingly critical analytical focus in recent music theory. Yet the sublinguistic nature of timbral cognition and the parameter’s inherent multidimensionality pose significant challenges to description and representation. This chapter examines four main approaches by which theorists have sought to understand timbre and employ it analytically: its ontology as a sonic object; i…
Tonic
This article proposes a general definition of tonic and explores its ramifications across repertories and intellectual traditions (cognitive, historical, ethnomusicological, music analytical, and phenomenological). The proposed definition admits of both wide and narrow applications: from broad conceptions that detect tonics in a wide range of world musics to a more narrow definition that limits the term (and its theoretical entailments) to bourge…
Melody
Melody is a fundamental concept in Western musical thought; it connotes the form and affective power of successive sounds in motion, perceived as an aesthetic unity. Yet for many writers, melody does not exist as an autonomous form, and for those who credit its existence, few agree on what it is, or how it functions in relation to harmonic voice leading and phrase rhythm. This chapter examines the historical emergence of a theory of melody in the…
Tonal Harmony
This chapter introduces a novel explanatory model for the tonal grammar of music from the thoroughbass era, encompassing baroque and galant practices. The framework models the internalized knowledge of a skilled continuo player improvising at the keyboard prior to Rameau’s invention of the fundamental-bass concept. It makes predictions about the tonal tendency of a chord based on the interaction of its constituent scale-degrees. The framework mod…
Beneath Improvisation
Improvisation has been construed as Western art music’s Other. This chapter urges music theorists to take the consequences of this configuration seriously. The decision to exclude improvisation as inherently unstable is not neutral, but is bound up with the endemic racism that has characterized social relations in the West and that is being brought to the fore in Black Lives Matter and other recent social and political movements. Traditional musi…
Texture
This chapter considers musical texture as an emergent property. The first section shows how the interplay of rhythm and pitch—specifically, degrees of synchrony and similar motion—produces basic textural categories (monophony, homophony, polyphony, and heterophony). These textural types may be transformed or hierarchically combined. The second section further argues that such textural structures are supplemented by textural materials, involving t…
Meter
This chapter presents a sketch of an analytical model of musical meter, focused on sound rather than notation. A meter is defined as a set of pulses, and classified as an ordered set of adjacent pulse pairs, or minimal meters. The model encourages a view of meter as ever-changing and form-shaping. Metric change is defined as pulse substitution. Scripts of metric change are illustrated through analyses of brief passages of Schumann, Glass, and Gha…
Expressive Timing
“Expressive timing” refers to variation in performed durations among notes represented in a musical score with a single rhythmic value. The principal findings of the field are that performers use unequal durations to communicate grouping and metric structure, but these findings pertain primarily to performances of European solo piano music written between 1775 and 1850. This article presents three case studies of timing in repertoires at ever gre…
Images, Visualization, and Representation
Visual images abound in music theory and analysis. From scores to voice-leading sketches, spectrographs to transformational networks, and through all kinds of other graphics, theorists use images to present and persuade. As music-theoretic discourse becomes increasingly multimodal, the differences between words and images as modes of expression, as well as the nature of the conceptual work that each does in a particular case, become critical conc…
Polyphony
This chapter situates the extensive phenomenon of musical polyphony globally, taking typological and historical/material approaches in turn, and interspersing applications of comparative method that crosscut both. The typological method involves first considering the elemental aspects of musical sounds and the ways they can be combined, individually and in sequences, to create patterns we recognize as belonging to one of several polyphonic catego…
Mode
This essay traces the development of “mode” in Western music from the early Greeks, through the transmission of Greek theory by Roman writers, the adaptation in the Middle Ages of aspects of this system for purposes of organizing liturgical chant, the changes made by Renaissance theorists to accommodate polyphonic composition, and the seventeenth-century transformation of modal practices into tonal procedures, to various uses of church modes in B…
Temporalities
This chapter examines the question of musical temporality in broad historical perspective. Through a series of reflections on the philosophy of time, theories of musical time, and the material history of time in the past 250 years, the chapter outlines the basic temporal antinomies of the West. This modern conception of temporality, broadly construed as a precisely-segmented linear time set against narratives of alternative, cyclical time, is sho…
Cadence
This article treats cadences as stopping conventions in music that were first developed in medieval counterpoint, setting into music scholastic ideas about motion. These conventions continued to be influential well beyond that period and are the reason for making distinctions between perfect and imperfect consonances. Cadences can conclude entire works, movements, sections, phrases, and even smaller units. The mainstay of higher formal analysis, …
Phrase
Like so many foundational music-theoretical terms, “phrase” has been adopted in divergent ways, sometimes unreflectively. Notions of phrase are necessarily contingent upon styles, genres, historical and cultural contexts, social functions, and ties to syntax, cadence, and form. Although no global definition is feasible, commonalities among appropriations of the term emerge. This chapter explores the ineluctable association of phrase with text and…
Interval
In the Western music-theoretical tradition, intervals are basic and foundational. They are also transhistorical, occupying theorists continually from classical origins to the present. Considering their foundational position, one might assume that intervals have a primitive, elementary character with little ideational content, and that the relevant literature is weakly innovative. Intervals appear within systems that reflect certain styles of thin…
Key and Modulation
What harmonic features are involved when a musical passage, or a work, is in a particular key? How is balance achieved between modulations that reinforce the home key and those that supplant it altogether? The chapter starts by analyzing “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” the opening song in Robert Schumann’s song-cycle Dichterliebe . It considers the criteria for identifying keys and provides a brief history of the role of closure in the definition o…
Repetition
Repetition lies at the core of musical practice, yet resists easy characterization. This chapter takes a perceptual approach to understanding its function, distinguishing acoustic repetition from notated repetition from perceived repetition, and exploring the paradoxical way that repeating sounds can give rise to perceptions of difference. Relying on analytic examples, it outlines three standard functions for musical repetition. First, repetition…
What Is Music, Anyway?
Definitions of music are contested, not least because the notion of definition itself is contested. Rather than define music, it can be more productive to trace how the use of the term has shifted historically. However, this approach may fail to explain why it matters whether something is music or not. Music itself can question the exclusive concentration on discursive understanding of the world. The reasons for this relate to differences between…
Analytical Relationships
This paper examines some ways in which analysts create relationships with musical works, based on evidence provided in music-analytical and other writing. The relationships that are considered extend from those of analysts who articulate an entirely aural relationship with the music analyzed, through those who hear movement and action in the sounds, to those who project tension and affect into the music based on an analogy with interpersonal empa…
Sequence
This article examines the musical sequence as a nexus of melodic, linear, and harmonic processes commonly found in tonal music from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. It locates sequential repetition as a problematic concept within the history of tonal music, considering the various controversies it has sparked in both its critical reception and the competing models advanced throughout the history of tonal theory. The article also …
Musical Grammar
This article discusses musical grammar and the factors that shape it, including the psychological abilities and constraints that determine what humans can learn, remember, and reproduce. It illustrates the notion of musical grammar by imagining how music works and is explained in a fictional world—the land of Bijou. Bijouan music has similarities to an artificial music used in a recent empirical study of how listeners can learn a musical grammar …
Consonance and Dissonance
Despite their fundamental importance to music theory, consonance and dissonance are surprisingly slippery concepts. They cannot unequivocally be identified as acoustical, aesthetic, physiological, psychological, or cultural-historical. This chapter examines a wide range of approaches to consonance/dissonance, focusing on four debates: the age-old sensus/ratio discussion, contrapuntal treatises, non-Western evidence from cognitive science, and evo…
Form
Form is one of the most foundational concepts in music theory, but identifying a suitably precise and meaningful definition of the term proves challenging. This essay does not attempt to offer a singular definition, but rather seeks to explore aspects of the term’s history and origin, exemplifying its usage (and its implications for writing on music) across a broad repertoire from Machaut to Miles Davis. Form is predictive, regulative, and heuris…
Groove
This chapter provides an overview of the concept of groove, investigating musical and sonic components of grooves as well as aspects related to pleasure, process, and affect. It starts out by addressing three distinct general understandings of groove: (1) pattern and performance; (2) pleasure and “wanting to move”; and (3) a state of being. The authors then propose a set of typical (rhythmic) features that seem to be common to a wide range of gro…
Scale
The word “scale” in English today is used both by practicing musicians to denote musical exercises or runs, and by theorists to denote abstracted, ordered collections of pitches. Although these ideas are closely related, they also seem partially separable. Their fusion in conception and terminology is the legacy of Latin treatises on the gamut, Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment empiricism (including an interest in what came to be called “compa…
A Foreign Sound to Your Ear
This article presents a "longitudinal" study of Bob Dylan's performances of the song "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" over a 45-year period, from 1964 until 2009. The song makes for a vivid case study in Dylanesque reinvention: over nearly 800 performances, Dylan has played it solo and with a band (acoustic and electric); in five different keys; in diverse meters and tempos; and in arrangements that index a dizzying array of genres (folk, b…
Riemannian Analytical Values, Paleo- and Neo
This article considers Riemann's analysis of Schubert's triadic but highly chromatic Gb-major Impromptu. This article compares Riemann's own analysis of the work with neo-Riemannian view inspired by the writings of Richard Cohn, assessing the differences in analytical methodology and technology, and locating those differences with the divergent ideologies of the two approaches. In this article, the central focus is not on the analytical technolog…
A Foreign Sound to Your Ear
This article presents a "longitudinal" study of Bob Dylan's performances of the song "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" over a 45-year period, from 1964 until 2009. The song makes for a vivid case study in Dylanesque reinvention: over nearly 800 performances, Dylan has played it solo and with a band (acoustic and electric); in five different keys; in diverse meters and tempos; and in arrangements that index a dizzying array of genres (folk, b…
Music’s Stubborn Enchantments (and Music Theory’s)
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 cri…
On Bob Dylan’s Nobel speech
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
Timbre
Timbre, the distinctive quality of a particular sound, has become an increasingly critical analytical focus in recent music theory. Yet the sublinguistic nature of timbral cognition and the parameter’s inherent multidimensionality pose significant challenges to description and representation. This chapter examines four main approaches by which theorists have sought to understand timbre and employ it analytically: its ontology as a sonic object; i…
Tonic
This article proposes a general definition of tonic and explores its ramifications across repertories and intellectual traditions (cognitive, historical, ethnomusicological, music analytical, and phenomenological). The proposed definition admits of both wide and narrow applications: from broad conceptions that detect tonics in a wide range of world musics to a more narrow definition that limits the term (and its theoretical entailments) to bourge…
Melody
Melody is a fundamental concept in Western musical thought; it connotes the form and affective power of successive sounds in motion, perceived as an aesthetic unity. Yet for many writers, melody does not exist as an autonomous form, and for those who credit its existence, few agree on what it is, or how it functions in relation to harmonic voice leading and phrase rhythm. This chapter examines the historical emergence of a theory of melody in the…
Tonal Harmony
This chapter introduces a novel explanatory model for the tonal grammar of music from the thoroughbass era, encompassing baroque and galant practices. The framework models the internalized knowledge of a skilled continuo player improvising at the keyboard prior to Rameau’s invention of the fundamental-bass concept. It makes predictions about the tonal tendency of a chord based on the interaction of its constituent scale-degrees. The framework mod…
Beneath Improvisation
Improvisation has been construed as Western art music’s Other. This chapter urges music theorists to take the consequences of this configuration seriously. The decision to exclude improvisation as inherently unstable is not neutral, but is bound up with the endemic racism that has characterized social relations in the West and that is being brought to the fore in Black Lives Matter and other recent social and political movements. Traditional musi…
Texture
This chapter considers musical texture as an emergent property. The first section shows how the interplay of rhythm and pitch—specifically, degrees of synchrony and similar motion—produces basic textural categories (monophony, homophony, polyphony, and heterophony). These textural types may be transformed or hierarchically combined. The second section further argues that such textural structures are supplemented by textural materials, involving t…
Meter
This chapter presents a sketch of an analytical model of musical meter, focused on sound rather than notation. A meter is defined as a set of pulses, and classified as an ordered set of adjacent pulse pairs, or minimal meters. The model encourages a view of meter as ever-changing and form-shaping. Metric change is defined as pulse substitution. Scripts of metric change are illustrated through analyses of brief passages of Schumann, Glass, and Gha…
Expressive Timing
“Expressive timing” refers to variation in performed durations among notes represented in a musical score with a single rhythmic value. The principal findings of the field are that performers use unequal durations to communicate grouping and metric structure, but these findings pertain primarily to performances of European solo piano music written between 1775 and 1850. This article presents three case studies of timing in repertoires at ever gre…
Images, Visualization, and Representation
Visual images abound in music theory and analysis. From scores to voice-leading sketches, spectrographs to transformational networks, and through all kinds of other graphics, theorists use images to present and persuade. As music-theoretic discourse becomes increasingly multimodal, the differences between words and images as modes of expression, as well as the nature of the conceptual work that each does in a particular case, become critical conc…
Polyphony
This chapter situates the extensive phenomenon of musical polyphony globally, taking typological and historical/material approaches in turn, and interspersing applications of comparative method that crosscut both. The typological method involves first considering the elemental aspects of musical sounds and the ways they can be combined, individually and in sequences, to create patterns we recognize as belonging to one of several polyphonic catego…
Mode
This essay traces the development of “mode” in Western music from the early Greeks, through the transmission of Greek theory by Roman writers, the adaptation in the Middle Ages of aspects of this system for purposes of organizing liturgical chant, the changes made by Renaissance theorists to accommodate polyphonic composition, and the seventeenth-century transformation of modal practices into tonal procedures, to various uses of church modes in B…
Temporalities
This chapter examines the question of musical temporality in broad historical perspective. Through a series of reflections on the philosophy of time, theories of musical time, and the material history of time in the past 250 years, the chapter outlines the basic temporal antinomies of the West. This modern conception of temporality, broadly construed as a precisely-segmented linear time set against narratives of alternative, cyclical time, is sho…
Cadence
This article treats cadences as stopping conventions in music that were first developed in medieval counterpoint, setting into music scholastic ideas about motion. These conventions continued to be influential well beyond that period and are the reason for making distinctions between perfect and imperfect consonances. Cadences can conclude entire works, movements, sections, phrases, and even smaller units. The mainstay of higher formal analysis, …
Phrase
Like so many foundational music-theoretical terms, “phrase” has been adopted in divergent ways, sometimes unreflectively. Notions of phrase are necessarily contingent upon styles, genres, historical and cultural contexts, social functions, and ties to syntax, cadence, and form. Although no global definition is feasible, commonalities among appropriations of the term emerge. This chapter explores the ineluctable association of phrase with text and…
Interval
In the Western music-theoretical tradition, intervals are basic and foundational. They are also transhistorical, occupying theorists continually from classical origins to the present. Considering their foundational position, one might assume that intervals have a primitive, elementary character with little ideational content, and that the relevant literature is weakly innovative. Intervals appear within systems that reflect certain styles of thin…
Key and Modulation
What harmonic features are involved when a musical passage, or a work, is in a particular key? How is balance achieved between modulations that reinforce the home key and those that supplant it altogether? The chapter starts by analyzing “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” the opening song in Robert Schumann’s song-cycle Dichterliebe . It considers the criteria for identifying keys and provides a brief history of the role of closure in the definition o…
Repetition
Repetition lies at the core of musical practice, yet resists easy characterization. This chapter takes a perceptual approach to understanding its function, distinguishing acoustic repetition from notated repetition from perceived repetition, and exploring the paradoxical way that repeating sounds can give rise to perceptions of difference. Relying on analytic examples, it outlines three standard functions for musical repetition. First, repetition…
What Is Music, Anyway?
Definitions of music are contested, not least because the notion of definition itself is contested. Rather than define music, it can be more productive to trace how the use of the term has shifted historically. However, this approach may fail to explain why it matters whether something is music or not. Music itself can question the exclusive concentration on discursive understanding of the world. The reasons for this relate to differences between…
Analytical Relationships
This paper examines some ways in which analysts create relationships with musical works, based on evidence provided in music-analytical and other writing. The relationships that are considered extend from those of analysts who articulate an entirely aural relationship with the music analyzed, through those who hear movement and action in the sounds, to those who project tension and affect into the music based on an analogy with interpersonal empa…
Sequence
This article examines the musical sequence as a nexus of melodic, linear, and harmonic processes commonly found in tonal music from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. It locates sequential repetition as a problematic concept within the history of tonal music, considering the various controversies it has sparked in both its critical reception and the competing models advanced throughout the history of tonal theory. The article also …
Musical Grammar
This article discusses musical grammar and the factors that shape it, including the psychological abilities and constraints that determine what humans can learn, remember, and reproduce. It illustrates the notion of musical grammar by imagining how music works and is explained in a fictional world—the land of Bijou. Bijouan music has similarities to an artificial music used in a recent empirical study of how listeners can learn a musical grammar …
Art (26 obras) · Philosophy (24 obras) · Musicology and Musical Analysis (23 obras) · Musical (21 obras) · Computer Science (17 obras) · Diverse Musicological Studies (17 obras) · Literature (17 obras) · Epistemology (16 obras) · Linguistics (16 obras) · Psychology (16 obras)