102: A Slow News Day

Where is Yoko? Jacksonville

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune is a Joey Special. Here’s your hint: This composer was known as a strict teacher. Good luck Googling that one!

As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at toneprose@substack.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing. 

Last Week’s Results
Tone Prose 101
Penderecki, Three Miniatures for Clarinet and Piano

Another no-win week: I guessed György Kurtag and Rodion Shchedrin (who did not die) and Listener Laurie guessed Morricone, Sondheim, and Saariaho, and all of our guesses were based on the clue.

People, I’m just gonna say it, we need more people to step up to the plate and contribute to the NTT pool. Listener Jeremy has way too much power, and we’re all subject to this madness on a near-constant basis. There’s only so much clarinet a (normal) person can take!

Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!

Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.

TIL

I (Will) stumbled upon this gem via the Depths of Wikipedia twitter:

Good news — we can hear it for ourselves!

A Check-in with Music Theory

I (Joey) am back again to strike fear into all Listeners’ hearts with a yearly update on the world of music theory. The Society for Music Theory recently released the full program for its annual meeting, hosted this year in Jacksonville, Florida. Sessions cover all conceivable repertoires, and are generally all over the map. It is difficult, therefore, to describe general trends in academic music theory based on this programming. But that won’t stop me from trying!

Taking a look at the session programming of only one day, Friday, November 8, gives us an insight into a few different streams:

• We can find several sessions grouped by traditional music theory concepts, but with a notably mixed repertoire of analysis: Extending Transformational Analysis – New Approaches, New Visualizations, New Repertoires examines modern prog rock, Brazilian composer Francisco Mignone, and jazz improvisation through the lens of transformational analysis. Hypermeter and Phrase Rhythm analyzes Bach, American artist Tyler Childers, and CBS’s Survivor themes. Temporality in Action surveys music by Tchaikovsky, Morton Feldman, and Joe Hisaishi.

• Popular music is … well, popular. We have sessions like Theorizing East Asian Pop; Form in Popular Music; Don’t Bore Us – Take it to the...Prechorus?; and Punk, Reggaeton, Rap.

• Film and, more nascently, video game music are popular sites of investigation.

• Don’t worry; traditional music analysis of ‘traditional’ repertoire is still going strong. Formal Frictions in Tonal Music analyzes Robert Schumann, 18th century opera, and Rachmaninoff. Sonata Theory and Formal Strategies looks at sonata form in late 18th century symphonies and early Romantic solo sonatas. There’s a session devoted to Bach and another to Saariaho. 

Many sessions reveal niche academic interests that don’t fall into streams at all. Understanding Music Theory Through Labor, Law, and Technologies explores music in society at large. Listening Trans and Trans Listening: Approaches to Music Analysis incorporates identity-based thinking into music analysis. Expanding How Music Means is a personal favorite; this session is clearly a catch-all, grouping papers on the Arabic musical concept of tarab, the topic of learnedness in a Haydn mass, and political meaning in 1940’s/50’s Italian art music. I do not envy the conference organizers who had to figure out how to group all these disparate interests.

Take a look at the full program if you’re interested. I attended last year, and had a blast — I bet some of you would too!

Tone Praise

Leoncavallo, I Pagliacci: “Vesti la giubba”

Tomorrow is my (Will’s) birthday and I’m going to see Pagliacci at the Seattle Opera. It’s probably not fair to the SO cast to spend the previous 48 hours listening to Pavarotti’s glorious interpretation, but can you blame me? He’s incredible!

Tone Prose is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)