Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Search: "Ascending Urlinie"

All this long while it never occurred to me to do a simple internet search on "Ascending Urlinie." Having now done same, I have a couple comments about entries and their position in the list; and I will publish posts about some new items found through the search. NB: The search was done on 16 January 2017. As little as a week later, I noticed several changes in the search results, especially after page 1.

(Like everyone else, of course, I do occasionally check my name; recently, an internist from Burlington, Massachusetts, and a lawyer from Virginia ousted me from my longstanding top spot on a Google search, but I'm retired and they're welcome to it.)

Not surprisingly, my JMT article from 1987 came up first--that's due, no doubt, to a combination of longevity and the fact that it continues to show up on course syllabi. I do find it odd that JStor has altered the title to The Ascending "Urlinie" -- quotes rather than italics for the second word. That seems to be the rule for articles--I note that Steve Helfing's article on Quantz in the same issue has "Versuch" and not Versuch. Yet book titles in the reviews are italicized. Something clumsy left over from old library database programs?

The second entry in the search results is the first in a long series of posts responding to Carl Schachter's criticisms of the ascending Urlinie: link to that post. As I explain there, the opportunity for personal engagement on the question was cut short by the coincidence of my being out of the country when he delivered a talk at my home institution, Indiana University, and by the fact that I was already becoming heavily involved with film and film music studies; although I did publish a few things in the 1990s, including one of the first articles to focus on ideology in Schenkerian theory and practice, my mind was on Max Steiner, not Mozart. I am glad to see that readers do go to that page. Also, after two irrelevant entries (they find "ascending" and "Urlinie" separately) there appears my PDF essay that gathers all the posts in the series: link to that essay.

The sixth entry is this blog. [place pleasantly smiling emoji here] The seventh is my post giving title and abstract for Michael Buchler's SMT paper from 2015: link. I have no idea why that particular post should appear so early, but if it gives attention to Michael's work, I am pleased with that.

The last three entries on the first search page are a citation to the JMT article from one of those useless "open library" sites, then a citation to a book chapter by Schachter, and a citation to a footnote in an early article on Richard Strauss by Timothy L. Jackson.

Page 2 in the search has items 11-20. Among these are mentions in two research guides (by Benjamin Ayotte and David Carson Berry), two citations in work I have discussed elsewhere on the blogs (Schachter on Chopin E-Major Prelude; Matthew Brown on Schenkerian theory), PDFs of William Drabkin's chapter on Schenker from the Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (presumably meant for class use--I hope they were cleared).

On this and subsequent pages (I only went as far as page 6), there appeared links to several items that are of interest to us here: among them, a passage from Suzannah Clark's book on Schubert, Channan Willner's essay "The Polyphonic Ursatz," and articles on Sergeant Pepper and on jazz. In subsequent, if occasional, posts, I will have comments on these, as well as on Michael Buchler's published articles about popular music (but also the SMT paper examples).