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]

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]

Journal of the Royal Musical Association 140.2 (2015): 417-443 (published by the UK musicology society). Robert Casteels (b. 1958, Belgium), Singapore citizen, migrated in 1995, L’(autre) fille aux cheveux de Bali (2002).

Music Analysis 38.3 (2019): 316-357 (published by the UK Society for Music Analysis)

As Anne Sauvagnargues suggests, in Gilles Deleuze thought “every[-thing] is defined as an assemblage of movements and affective vibrations.” Interestingly, Sauvagnargues’ proposition aligns neatly with Tim Ingold’s idea of correspondence, where things perdure, “carry on together, and answer to one another,” and where the additive ‘and…and.…[Read more]

This paper considers Rudolf Reti’s The Thematic Process in Music in the context of Arnold Schoenberg theoretical writing.

Review of a collection of essays by Carl Dahlhaus, translated by Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton and entitled Schoenberg and the New Music.

Review of the Lippman and Rahn books, both devoted to music aeathetics.