Please see http://www.sma.ac.uk/join/ for information on how to renew your SMA membership.

The programme committee has extended the call for papers deadline by one week. The closing date is now Monday 16th January.

Please send submissions to impconfsubmission@music.ox.ac.uk

For submission guidelines and more details on the conference, go to http://www.music.ox.ac.uk/research/cpccm/perspectives-on-musical-improvisation-conference.html

Michael Spitzer
SMA President

Their respective statements of candidature follow.

Michael Spitzer (President)

Nominated by William Drabkin and Kenneth Smith.

Statement of Candidature:

I would like to stand for a third 2-year term as SMA President. My time at the helm has seen the Society through quite a busy period of events: Music Analysis Roadshows; Summer Schools; a big conference on Music & Emotion; an expanded TAGS; and both CardiffMAC & LancMAC. There has been a re-boot of the SMA website; partnership with the IMR; and sponsorship of several external events, such as the King’s Tonality symposium, and next year’s Oxford improvisation conference, as well as a conference on contemporary British music at Canterbury. Plans are now in place for next September’s SMA/Music Analysis Anniversary Symposium at the IMR, with a stellar cast of speakers lined up. And, with the VP also at Liverpool, we are planning to hold the next MAC here, as well as a Summer School. None of this would have been possible without the support of the Executive Committee, and I have been extraordinarily lucky in having a succession of energetic and inspirational colleagues.

My term of service with the SMA has perhaps been unusual, since I have been simultaneously involved with the journal, both as Associate Editor and Guest Editor of the Special Issue on Music & Emotion (just out), based on selected proceedings from the conference. The mutual benefit of this association – a journal supporting a conference whose proceedings in turn support the journal – represents a healthy direction for the SMA, and one which I will continue to steer in the future.

Shay Loya (Information Officer)

Nominated by Shay Loya and Michael Spitzer.

Statement of Candidature:

I received my PhD at King’s College London in 2006. In 2007-8 I was a CETL Teaching Fellow at Durham University, and am currently dividing my time between teaching there and working as a freelance teacher and independent scholar. My research interests include Liszt, Hungarian-Gypsy music, transculturation and its application to music analysis, and other critical and aesthetic issues in music of the long nineteenth century. I have presented several papers in international conferences and my main publications include a recent book – Liszt’s Transcultural Modernism and the Hungarian-Gypsy Tradition (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2011) – and the article (2008) ‘Beyond the Stereotype: Harmonic and Structural Aspects of the Verbunkos Idiom’, Journal of Musicological Research, 27/ii, pp. 254-80. I have also been involved in music education since the late 1990s and in 2006-9 I directed the Kodály-based ‘Colourstrings Music School’ in Roehampton, London.

As stated in the recent SMA Newsletter editorial, I took on this role for two main purposes: “First, the SMA does a very good job at promoting what has effectively become an endangered discipline in the UK, and managing that without retreating into any kind of intellectual insularity or parochial self-regard. Secondly, this is probably one of the most student-friendly of musicological societies, investing much time and also money in nurturing future and emerging scholars.” These are the values I would like to continue to promote as part of the Executive Committee, and more specifically, in my editorship of the newsletter and website, as well as ongoing contact with the SMA’s members and associates.

Please visit our website – http://www.music.ox.ac.uk/research/cpccm/perspectives-on-musical-improvisation-conference.html – to get further details on the conference and how to submit proposals for papers, poster presentations and practical sessions. The website will go live in March 2012 for registration and programme details.

Contact Mark Doffman at mark.doffman@music.ox.ac.uk for any queries regarding the conference.

• President;
• Information Officer;
• Student Representative.

The elected candidates will work with the rest of the SMA Committee to represent and guide our activities over the next two years.

The President shall carry out the policies of the Executive Committee and shall chair all meetings of the Society and the Executive Committee. The President shall discharge such other duties as are customarily associated with the office, including attendance at meetings of the Editorial Board of the journal Music Analysis.

The Information Officer shall prepare the Society’s Newsletter and maintain the Society’s website; prepare publicity for the Society’s events; and take such additional steps as deemed necessary by the Executive Committee to publicise the Society’s work.

There are two SMA student representatives, and one of these posts is due for election. Student Representatives help the committee as a whole discover what sort of workshops, seminars, conferences etc. are of interest to the younger generation, and who might be able to take part in the way of organizing and/or making contributions to the programmes.

Members of the Executive Committee are expected to attend committee meetings, which take place two or three times a year, usually in conjunction with SMA events. There is also an Annual General Meeting of the Society, again timed to coincide with one of our events. Travel expenses to these meetings are reimbursed.

Terms of office are two years in the first instance, with the possibility for re-election. Interested candidates are welcome to contact the current SMA President, Michael Spitzer, for an informal chat (Michael.Spitzer@liverpool.ac.uk).

Please send all nominations and seconded nominations, along with a statement of candidature, to David Bretherton (treasurer@sma.ac.uk) by Friday, 2 December 2011. E-mail ballot papers for the election and statements of candidature will be issued immediately afterwards, and the result of the election will be announced in mid-December.

In the past, SMA members have enquired as to whether current office holders intend to stand for re-election, and so (without prejudice) we report that Michael Spitzer intends to stand for re-election as President and Shay Loya intends to stand for election as Information Officer. Michelle Phillips will shortly be completing her studies and therefore will not stand for re-election as a Student Representative.

The SMA Committee.

Contents:

Michael Spitzer, Guest Editorial:
The Emotion Issue

Derek Matravers:
Recent Philosophical Work on the Connection between Music and the Emotions

John Butt:
Emotion in the German Lutheran Baroque and the Development of Subjective Time Consciousness

Lawrence Zbikowski:
Music, Emotion, Analysis

Robert Gjerdingen:
Mozart’s Obviously Corrupt Minuet

Robert Hatten:
Aesthetically Warranted Emotion and Composed Expressive Trajectories in Music

Marcel Zentner:
Homer’s Prophecy: An Essay on Music’s Primary Emotions

Max Paddison:
Mimesis and the Aesthetics of Musical Expression

Michael Spitzer:
Mapping the Human Heart: A Holistic Analysis of Fear in Schubert

Tuomas Eerola:
Analysing Emotions in Schubert’s Erlkönig: A Computational Approach

Kenneth Smith:
A Science of Tonal Love? Drive and Desire in Twentieth Century Harmony: The Erotics of Alexander Skryabin

Tom Cochrane:
Using the Persona to Express Complex Emotions in Music

Simon Mills:
The Tale of the Three Young Brothers: An Analytical Study of Music and Communal Joy (Hŭng) in Korean Folk Culture

Giorgio Biancorosso:
The Shark in the Music

Patrik Juslin and Erik Linström:
Musical Expression of Emotions: Modeling Listeners’ Judgments of Composed and Performed Features

• Daisy Fancourt, to study at King’s College London;
• Penny Miller, to study at the University of Nottingham;
• Richard Powell, to study at the University of York.

Congratulations to all three!

A centrepiece of the first full day was the lively plenary session on metaphor comprised of six probing engagements with the concept from the perspective of performance, analysis, theory, philosophy and linguistics. Paul Archibold’s contribution focused on metaphors of physicality associated with playing in or experiencing a musical performance, and this set the stage aptly for Christopher Redgate’s examination of the ‘living metaphor’ inherent in the titles of his improvised Transcendental Etudes, which act essentially as guidelines for the performer. Redgate’s use of metaphor as the instigator of the creation of a musical idea – rather than as a tool for its explanation – formed a common thread with Michael Spitzer’s paper, which was founded on Ricoeur’s idea of metaphor as a creative act. Spitzer discussed the metaphor of nostalgia in Schubert’s music via an exploration of the use and manipulation of time in the Lieder. He argued that in this music, the frequent use of repetition and return of earlier material within a largely forward trajectory signals a moment of nostalgia or ‘distal reflection’, in which present anguish is heightened by reflecting on past joy. This was superbly illustrated in his readings of ‘Morgengruß’ (following David Lewin [2006]), and ‘Trockne Blumen’ from Die schöne Müllerin.

In the same session, Joshua Banks Mailman and Anthony Gritten investigated the ramifications of the ubiquity of ‘structure’ and ‘problem solving’ as metaphors in analytical parlance. Mailman reasoned that the architectural approach to form inherent in the metaphor ‘structure’ (which is fundamental to our thinking about music), does not take into account the inherent duality of metaphor, nor its role as vessel for modelling the diversity of flux (or change) in dynamic form. Taking this duality into account, he suggested that the traditional dichotomy of temporal time (the time-moving metaphor) and spatial time (the subject- or ego-moving metaphor) could more appropriately be understood as a spatio-temporal reciprocity, which permits a more fluid approach to the notion of musical structure. Helen Thomas of the home institution, whose work framed the session, took her starting point from linguistics, and her paper offered a fitting amalgamation of the ideas of metaphor as both an intra-musical entity and also as a tool, or vessel, for its understanding.

David Bretherton opened Saturday’s parallel session on form and tonality with a detailed rehabilitation of Schenker’s ‘Essay on a New Theory of Form’ (Der freie Satz [1935]), which has been partially neglected save for its comments on sonata form. Bretherton presented a careful outline of Schenker’s developing theories of from, focusing, in particular, on the correlation between voice-leading structure and architectural form therein, and Schenker’s comments on (or neglect of) certain composers and formal types. This was followed by Ya-Hui Cheng’s broadly Schenkerian account of the dramatic transformation of the central character in Puccini’s eponymously titled Turandot, which incorporated structural augmented chords and Chinese pentatonicism. Despite the fact that Puccini never completed the music for the opera, Cheng demonstrated that the nascent stages of this transformation are detectable in the existing music. The final paper in this session, from Julian Horton, sparked a considerable amount of interest and debate. Horton presented a refined and convincing reading of the mediant ritornello second-theme presentation in Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, which Tovey memorably referred to as an ‘error’. Using analysis as a springboard for an investigation of the notion of canon formation, and its (circular) relationship to theory, Horton challenged the validity of any theory which is circumscribed by sample repertoire (in this case, Mozart’s concerti), and its attendant historical boundaries. Taking into account that Mozart’s concerti were not disseminated until the 1820s, and thus were a negligible model for Beethoven, Horton offered instead a comprehensive overview and categorisation of the modulating ritornello in the post-classical piano concerto, taking examples from Moscheles, Bennett, Henselt and Cramer.

Saturday’s ‘computational approaches to music analysis’ was another thought-provoking and varied session, headed by Alan Marsden’s marvellous exposition of a complex and comprehensive computational system for unveiling the fundamental commonalities between a theme and its subsequent variations in variation form. This system, which he applied to Mozart’s variations for piano, isolates similarities and patterns in voice leading (much in the manner of Schenkerian analysis), and produces empirical data which, it was suggested in the question session, could be used to reappraise our existing theories for analysing variations. Keith Potter and Marcus Pearse staged an impressive, and fast-moving double act, with Potter presenting a semiotic reading of Debussy’s Syrinx (after Nattiez), and Pearse relating this to the results of their computational analysis. Their basic principle, that a computer program ‘learns’ the fundamentals of (in this case) Western musical culture, such as pitch and duration, and is then trained to predict human responses to the music provoked a heated debate on whether what we expect in a piece of music really is based on what we have already heard. Mailman, in his second contribution to the conference, continued his theory of form from flux, rather than form as architecture, in a formal analysis of the first movement of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Quartet of 1931.

There were many more individual papers which remain high points of the conference for this reviewer, especially those by René Rusch, Courtney L. Harter, Emma Gallon, and Neil Newton, but space does not permit a full engagement with them here (keep eyes peeled for future issues of Music Analysis or Twentieth-century Music). Their breadth reflects the richness and diversity of the conference, as did the two keynote lectures. Even Henry Klumpenhouwer’s fascinating address consisted of three individual topics which he maintained, when probed by Charles Wilson from the floor, did not have an underlying coherence (a remark which surely would have incited a storm of controversy at an analysis conference a decade ago). Philip Bohlman’s stirring lecture analysed the borders between the known and the unknowable, which he explored via three case studies, dealing with the binary metaphors of fullness/emptiness, time/timelessness, and life/death respectively. Temporality was therefore central to the ontological borders depicted in this lecture, as it had been for so many of the papers at the conference. Bohlman left his audience entranced with his final remark that ‘analysis enables us to enter the border zones together’, a provocative ending to a conference situated on the border (now largely obsolete?) between music analysis and music since 1900.