Research vita

I retired from The University of Texas at Austin in May of this year. Since then I have "cleaned up" and stopped maintaining my personal web page, which had information on publications. To compensate, I have created a PDF file called "Research Vita" that can be accessed through this link: Vita.

Administrative post, part 1

Many links to my own external files were broken when a server was decommissioned last year. It has taken me a long time to find a suitable alternative. I have recently posted a set of PDF files to the Texas Digital Repository (TDR) and list all the links below.

Files most relevant to this blog are listed in this post. Several of these are compilations of posts from my Schubert blog and from a defunct website. Others will appear in a subsequent post.

Rising Lines in the Tonal Frameworks of Traditional Tonal Music

This article supplements, and provides a large amount of additional data for, an article I published nearly thirty years ago: "The Ascending Urlinie," Journal of Music Theory 31/2 (1987): 275-303. By Schenker's assertion, an abstract, top-level melody always descends by step to ^1. I demonstrated that at least one rising figure, ^5-^6-^7-^8, was not only possible but could be readily found in the repertory of traditional European tonal music.


Table of Compositions with Rising Lines

A table that gathers more than 900 examples of musical compositions with cadences that use ascending melodic gestures.

Complex upper-voice cadential figures in traditional tonal music

Harmony and voice-leading are integrated in the hierarchical networks of Schenkerian analyses: the top (most abstract) level of the hierarchy is a fundamental structure that combines a single upper voice and a bass voice  in counterpoint. A pattern that occurs with increasing frequency beginning in the later eighteenth century tends to confer equal status on two upper voices, one from ^5, the other from ^3. Analysis using such three-part voice leading in the background often provides richer, more complete, and more musically convincing analyses.

Buelow Contredanses: Rising Lines

Bülow, court musician in Copenhagen in the late 18th century. This file surveys all seven collections (more than the article “Rising Lines in Tonal Frameworks of Traditional Tonal Music”).


Kingsbury Hymns of Praise: Rising Lines

Pieces with rising cadence gestures in Hymns of Praise: For the Church and Sunday School. Compiled by F. G. Kingsbury. Chicago: Hope Publishing Co.,c1922. A hymn book from my father's collection. Because of their largely 19th c origins, it seemed reasonable to think that hymns in the evangelistic tradition would be more likely than older tunes to have rising cadence gestures.

Tonal Frames in 18th and 19th Century Music

Tonal frames are understood here as schemata comprising the "a" level elements of a time-span or prolongation reduction in the system of Lerdahl and Jackendoff, Generalized Theory of Tonal Music (1983), as amended and extended by Lerdahl (Tonal Pitch Space (2001). I use basic forms from these sources as a starting point but call them tonal frames in order to make a clear distinction, because I have a stricter view of the role of register.


John Playford Dancing Master: Rising Lines

Musical examples with rising cadence gestures from John Playford’s Dancing Master (1651). This set was extracted from the article “Rising Lines in Tonal Frameworks of Traditional Tonal Music.”

Carl Schachter's Critique of the Rising Urlinie

A detailed critique of two articles by Carl Schachter (1994; 1996), this study is concerned with some specific issues in traditional Schenkerian theory, those connected with the rising Urlinie—these can be roughly summarized  as the status of ^6 and the status of ^7. Sixteen of twenty three chapters in this file discuss Schachter’s two articles directly, and the other seven chapters (2, 4, 5, 17-20) speak to underlying theoretical problems.

Analyses of Schubert, Waltz, D.779n13

This article gathers a large number of analyses of a single waltz by Franz Schubert: the anomalous A-major waltz, no. 13 in the Valses sentimentales, D 779. The goal is to make more vivid through examples a critical position that came to the fore in music theory during the course of the 1980s: a contrast between a widely accepted “diversity” standard and the closed, ideologically bound habits of descriptive and interpretative practice associated with classical pc-set analysis and Schenkerian analysis.