This is a companion piece to an essay on Jerome Kern’s “All the Things You Are,” where an alternative ending with a rising melodic gesture is written into the published sheet music. The survey of Gershwin’s “Embraceable You” here was inspired by a similar figure in an early recorded performance by Sarah Vaughan.

Some cadences in European and European-influenced tonal music show a contradiction in direction between registral stasis and linear movement, the example being alternative endings written into a song by Jerome Kern. The topic is explored through analysis of 51 recorded performances.

In 2021, SMT-V, an online journal of the Society for Music Theory, published a video essay by Michael Buchler, Professor of Music in the College of Music, Florida State University. It’s titled “I Don’t Care if I Never Get Back: Optimism and Ascent in ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’.” In this essay I examine similar songs from the era: Charles K. Ha…[Read more]

According to conventional literary theory, when we interpret the text of a poem or work of fiction as a condensed or represented speech act, this implies a hypothetical speaker. The speaker may be a well-defined narrator who may also be a participant in the action. Often, however, the text offers few or no clues as to who is ‘speaking’. In suc…[Read more]

Reich’s Violin Phase has been mired in questions of time since its inception. In this article I present a theory of time in process music based on the notion of kinesthetic knowledge, and the synthesis of musical temporality through the generative (chronopoietic) and transformational (chronopraxial) acts of the body. I illustrate this theory w…[Read more]

Review of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis.

A number of recent music videos by women subvert the male gaze (Mulvey) through a number of techniques I construe as “resistance gazes.” These videos subvert the hypersexualization, infantilization, objectification, and victimi- zation regularly seen in music videos using imagery that resonates with broader cultural movements such as #metoo and #timesup.

Article on Wagner’s 1847 arrangement of Gluck’s _Iphigénie en Aulide_; adapted from, and may be read in conjunction with, Chapter 3 of Jeremy Coleman, _Richard Wagner in Paris: Translation, Identity, Modernity_ (The Boydell Press, 2019).

In this talk, presented at the Plenary Session of the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory, I examine the relationship between time, embodiment, and affectivity in music. I argue that music is temporal not because it unfolds in time, or because it takes time as its vector, or even because it has the capacity to alter our sense of…[Read more]

In 1970, a television-show dance contest in a small California town ended abruptly when the studio was briefly plunged into darkness because of an apparent power failure. The media coverage of the event eventually helped uncover criminal activity at the studio; over the course of this reporting, the narrative was accompanied by select genres of…[Read more]

Review of _Analyzing Schubert_ by Suzannah Clark. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. x, 290 pp. ISBN: 978-0-521-84867-1.