Publications on form in popular music have largely assumed the formal sections germane to pop-rock to be the formal designs of “popular music.” But the most popular music of our time—music charting on the Billboard Top-40—has absorbed the influence of electronic dance music (EDM) in a way that has fundamentally changed its formal structu…[Read more]

Tritones sounding over subdominant harmony, either as suspensions, accented passing tones, or incomplete neighbors, constitute a class of sonorities regularly heard in film and television music. I collectively refer to these phenomena as “subdominant tritones” (SdTT), and theorize a link between the SdTT and emotions it engenders. The article pre…[Read more]

Eighteenth-century Spanish music experienced a golden age thanks, especially, to the proliferation of centers such as the chapels, which articulated and structured the musical life of our cities: the main sound activity was centered on ecclesiastical music, both liturgical and paraliturgical, with which religious festivities were solemnized.…[Read more]

‘There is no truth, only perception of truth’, and that perception too changes with time. Lysistrata is one such text where this difference of perception prevails. Written by Aristophanes in 411 BCE, Lysistrata is one of the eleven Old Greek Comedy plays surviving out of forty-two. The play revolves around the Peleponnesian war, when women hav…[Read more]

In lieu of an abstract, here is the beginning of the article… One of the most striking things about speculative literature of the twenty-first century has been its increasingly focussed interest in imagining impending disaster: from the escalating likelihood of biblical deluge on a planetary scale to looming ecocatastrophes of drought and…[Read more]

This article explores an emerging cluster of ecocatastrophe narratives that locate utopian possibility within the Earth’s sub-crustal lithosphere. Texts such as N. K. Jemisin’s “Broken Earth” trilogy (2015–2017), J. G. Ballard’s The Crystal World (1966), Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011), Irene Solà’s Catalan novel When I Sing, Mountains…[Read more]