Without fail a study in any depth of our fondness for music must eventually address the issue of consonance and dissonance. Past approaches to this issue have been bounded by a limited knowledge base and, further, marred by logical flaws, occasional hand waving, and the myopia of reductionism. Despite the explosion of progress in the last few…[Read more]

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]

After the period of splendour experienced by the musical chapel of the Collegiate Church of Santa María la Mayor in Talavera de la Reina during the 18th century, we witnessed a period of decline, which was part of the crisis experienced by Spanish religious music during the 19th century. The effects of the War of Independence, the successive…[Read more]

This article focuses on Spanish music in the 18th century, which experienced one of the most brilliant periods in its history. This was undoubtedly due to the splendour achieved by keyboard music, which reached an extraordinary level of development after the arrival in Spain of the Neapolitan composer Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757), harpsichord…[Read more]

The musical chapel of the Collegiate Church of Santa María la Mayor in Talavera de la Reina is a significant case of how an ecclesiastical institution articulates the musical life of a city: in this sense, it can be stated that the main musical activity in the aforementioned Toledan city has revolved around the chapel of the Collegiate Church…[Read more]

The publication of Cervantes’ Don Quixote served as inspiration from the very moment of its creation for a whole series of artistic manifestations, among which those related to the art of sound stand out. Among the famous Spanish composers of Romanticism, the Sevillian composer Manuel del Pópulo García shines and stands out with his own light. H…[Read more]

This article focuses on the personal and artistic career of one of the most representative composers of Spain in the second half of the 18th century and the first third of the 19th century. Ramón Garay, born in 1761 in Asturias, held the post of Chapel Master of Jaén Cathedral for 36 fruitful years, which saw the birth of an extraordinary p…[Read more]

This article focuses on the decline of Spanish ecclesiastical music from the beginning of the 19th century, coinciding with the outbreak of the War of Independence. This decline worsened as a result of the application of successive disentailments by the various liberal governments and the signing of the Concordat of 1851. To remedy this situation,…[Read more]

This article focuses on the decline of Spanish ecclesiastical music from the beginning of the 19th century, coinciding with the outbreak of the War of Independence. This decline worsened as a result of the application of successive disentailments by the various liberal governments and the signing of the Concordat of 1851. To remedy this situation,…[Read more]

The music chapel of the Cathedral of Segorbe has historically played a primordial role in the history of Spanish music, constituting a focus of musical activity that attracted a numerous group of singers, instrumentalists, organists and chapel masters who formed part of the aforementioned chapel, whose antecedents date back to the mid-13th…[Read more]