From 1990 to 1999 MTV promoted a series of 288 music videos called “Buzz Clips”, designed to highlight emerging artists and genres. Such promotion had a measurable impact on an artists’ earnings and record sales. To date, the kinds of musical and visual practices MTV promoted have not been quantitatively analyzed. Just what made some videos Buzzw…[Read more]

From 1990 to 1999 MTV promoted a series of 288 music videos called “Buzz Clips”, designed to highlight emerging artists and genres. Such promotion had a measurable impact on an artists’ earnings and record sales. To date, the kinds of musical and visual practices MTV promoted have not been quantitatively analyzed. Just what made some videos Buzzw…[Read more]

Shakespeare’s representations of history often have replaced history itself in the popular imagination: Julius Caesar, Margaret of Anjou, Henry V, Richard III — popular recollections of their lives and deaths are intimately linked with Shakespeare’s accounts of their stories, despite the playwright’s deviations from historical facts. In order t…[Read more]

Gendered night, or the nocturnal brightness of the early modern English stage
In French, critics speak of the night using feminine terms, but the term is grammatically neutral in English. Despite this neutrality, night may be gendered. In Romeo and Juliet, virgins hide their shame from their lovers by hiding in the dark. If night is consecrated…[Read more]

For poets like Sir Philip Sidney, the numerous incongruities found in Elizabethan drama fly in the face of Aristotelian theory. London audiences in 1580-1600 would have been hard pressed to recognize the time and place of the action represented on stage from one scene to the next. By comparing Greek theory and Elizabethan practice, this paper…[Read more]

What might strike some as Arden of Faversham’s faulty construction may perhaps be ascribed to the fact that Arden’s murderers, as well as the play’s audience, had to learn how to “temper poison” (i.229). Poison is not simply a means to commit murder, its use also requires great dexterity, one which must be interpreted within a historical and metat…[Read more]

A consideration of 14 collaborative music videos by Emil Nava and Calvin Harris, closing with a close analysis of their work on Rihanna’s “This is What You Came For” (2016).

A consideration of 14 collaborative music videos by Emil Nava and Calvin Harris, closing with a close analysis of their work on Rihanna’s “This is What You Came For” (2016).

The primary goal of this dissertation is to produce a rigorous methodology for distinguishing between the contrapunctus structure and its elaboration in performing structural analysis of fourteenth-century diminished counterpoint. This methodology is based on historical thought by carefully analyzing contemporaneous treatises and their musical…[Read more]

Recursion may have an important place in cognitive processes. Recursive theoretical models may also seduce the theorist to false abstractions and pseudo-explanations. This is observed in some versions of musical and linguistic formalism, which share a common rationalist-idealist background; paradigmatically, in Chomsky’s controversial M…[Read more]

Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s Generative Theory of Tonal Music (1983) is an attempt to transform music theory into a theory of musical understanding by adopting the formal method and psychological premises of Generative Grammar, along with some Schenkerian elements. It has failed to fulfil its promise mainly because, like Schenker theory, it is…[Read more]