Over approximately the last decade, the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI), has become a recognized international community-driven effort that has developed and maintains the MEI schema, standards, and shared documentation. The potential of machine-readable music data that can be reused, rendered, shared, or analyzed using a computer, is quite…[Read more]

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]

Materials created for a Music Encoding Pedagogy Workshop facilitated at the American Musicological Society virtual conference on November 7, 2020. Workshop presents MEI use cases and approaches; pedagogical approaches; an MEI workflow; and options to publish MEI.

Presentation given as part of the session “Music encoding use-cases in US libraries: aims, pedagogy, and workflows” at the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML) Congress held virtually on July 26-30, 2021.

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 basic introduction to what XML is, to provide context for discussing MEI.

A guide to getting started with Notepad++ as an XML editor for MEI.

A brief discussion of how MEI works, with an introductory encoding exercise.

A basic overview of MEI for beginners.

A cheat sheet of basic code structures created for grad students working on a local project.

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.