Conference Report by Hailu Ni, Doctoral Candidate (University of Manchester)
Session Review by Evelyn Fong, MusM student (University of Manchester)
Report by Hailu Ni, Doctoral Candidate (University of Manchester)
The Manchester Music Analysis Conference 2025 (McrMAC25, 14-16 July 2025) brought together scholars with expertise in various aspects of music research from around the world for three days of presentations and discussions covering a broad spectrum of musical repertoire and analytical approaches. This was the first time in the society’s history that the Society for Music Analysis (SMA) held its annual conference in Manchester, and it was housed at the Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama at the University of Manchester and the Royal Northern College of Music. This conference featured a range of sessions, from traditional Western art-music analysis to contemporary and non-Western music studies, reflecting the evolving scope of the field. Each session was organised either as a collection of research papers or as a roundtable panel on a unifying topic, enabling focused dialogues on subjects as varied as classical form, popular music, contemporary composition, cross-cultural theoretical frameworks and interdisciplinary music studies.
From my seat in the theatre, lecture hall and conference room, the atmosphere was rigorous, lively, interactive and engaging. Papers attracted robust questions and generous cross-references. Even during coffee breaks and evening events, attendees engaged in enthusiastic discussions. The proceedings were professional and inclusive, with clear chairing and ample time for discussion – well done to all the chairs involved! Overall, McrMAC25 fostered academic exchange in an atmosphere of equality and openness.
The conference programme was organised primarily by analytical theme or concepts (e.g., ‘History of Music Theory’, ‘Rhythm and Metre’), with some sessions grouped by genre (e.g., ‘Opera, Theatre, Screen’, ‘Popular Music Analysis’), a small number by geographical region (e.g., ‘Russian Forms’, ‘Theorising Modern East Asian Music’), and several by historical period (e.g., ‘19th-and 20th-Century Music: Form and Topic’, ‘Analysing Contemporary Music’). In addition, the conference also featured a recital by Ian Pace, a workshop on publishing for ECRs by the editors of Music Analysis, Edward Venn and Anne Hyland, and two keynote speakers – Professor Robert O. Gjerdingen, the SMA Pascall Medal Prize winner, and Lauri Suurpää, Professor of Music Theory at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. The programme worked very well because it created cumulative discussions within sessions and productive interdisciplinary communication across sessions, making conversations both deep and well connected. This review, written from the perspective of an attendee and a rather busy conference assistant, focuses on three noteworthy sessions on performance practice, cross-cultural practices and musico-visual insights.
Session 2C ‘Analysis of Song 1’ featured three papers centred on vocal music across different eras, each introducing distinct analytical challenges. Ruixue Hu, ‘Understanding Non-Lexical Vocables in Music’, addressed a neglected facet of vocal practice: the use of non-lexical vocables. Hu defined a non-lexical vocable (NLV) as a significant and recognisable utterance that is not acknowledged as a word within its intended context. The presenter argued convincingly that, given their ubiquity and beingness, NLVs merit greater scholarly attention. NLVs pose a challenge for analysts precisely because they lack explicit semantic content. This paper helps to address this by proposing a framework for understanding the musical meanings and structural roles of these vocables. Hu outlined a preliminary four-part typology—mnemonic device, spontaneous expressivity, onomatopoeia, and phonetic manipulation, drawing on case studies from multiple countries and languages. The paper focused on the sonic properties and contextual meanings of NLVs, showing how artists articulate emotion, identity, and culture through them. Hu offered clear definitions, a systematic classification, and cross-cultural examples that yield new insights into the uses and meanings of NLVs for singers, composers, and scholars alike.
Emma Spinneli, ‘Analyzing Renaissance Vocal Music and Musical Performance by Looking at Lute Tablatures,’ adopted an innovative historical approach by using instrumental sources to inform vocal-music analysis. Spinneli showed that lute tablatures, especially those in sixteenth-century publications, offered reliable evidence about Renaissance vocal works, performance, and historical practice. Analysing lute tablature can help reconstruct compositional conventions and performance practice in Renaissance music, thereby mitigating the limitations of relying solely on vocal scores. Importantly, the paper underscored that the compositions in so-called ‘early music’ are not fully captured by the printed vocal part alone. Instead, combining vocal and instrumental sources yields a fuller picture of how the music sounded and how practitioners understood it.
The last presenter of this session, Cathal Twomey, noted a general rule whereby musical settings of verse often disregard the actual stress within the lines, instead of pairing strong syllables with strong beats and weak syllables with weak beats. Drawing on Lawrence Earp’s concept of ‘declamatory dissonance’ and the notion of ‘basic rhythmic declamation’ by Harald Krebs, Twomey documented instances of declamatory dissonance in English Baroque vocal music and highlighted the ‘compressed triple upbeat’ formula, showing that composers deliberately employed such metrical subversions as part of their expressive vocabulary. The paper equips scholars with a way to recognise patterns and intention in these deviations and will have a major impact on the analysis of vocal music.
Session 4B was a roundtable discussion titled ‘Theorising Modern East Asian Music: A Dialogue on Shared Sounds, Imageries, and Heritage’. The session was notable for its collaborative format. Three analysts, trained in both East Asian and Western music, each presented a case study, followed by responses and an open discussion. The format was designed to elicit common strategies and concepts across the case studies. Each of the three papers examined a distinct work from a different East Asian context, offering rich comparative material. Kelvin H. F. Lee examined Idyll of the Fields (1935) by Chiang Wen-yeh, a twentieth-century Taiwanese composer, demonstrating how cultural philosophy and musical technique intertwine. Lee proposed a holistic analytic framework and identified four principal musical topoi derived from the piece’s pitch organisation and gesture. Although each topos carries distinct cultural resonances, together they cohere around the Confucian cosmological ideal of harmony between humanity and cosmos: tianren heyi (天人合一). Lee’s paper reveals how Confucian philosophy can be employed to understand East Asian music, the inherent logic of its organisational systems and contextualising extra-musical imagery and ideas.
Marina Sudo used Maki Ishii’s Sō-Gū II (1971) for gagaku ensemble and orchestra as a case study. She highlighted strands of modern Japanese music characterised by spatial density, energy and intensity, constructed from layered voices, rhythms and timbres. Sudo connected this phenomenon to cultural concepts—most notably the Buddhist intermingling of heaven and earth and Ishii’s notion of an ‘exchange between time and earth’. By invoking Buddhist concepts, Sudo reinforced how indigenous thought can inform analytical understanding, echoing Lee’s use of Confucian philosophy.
Anqi Wang’s paper, ‘Scent and Sound in Ye Xiaogang’s Scent of the Green Mango (1998)’, bears an unusual title that immediately captures the reviewer’s attention and prompts two questions: how music might express scent and, more broadly, how cross-sensory processes transform smell into sound. In vocal works, textual semantics, rhetorical figures and prosodic contour can cue vivid imagery that helps listeners interpret references to scent. By contrast, this work for piano and orchestra is textless and therefore relies on instrumental means. Specifically, it exploits parameters such as timbre, rhythm, pitch, key, dynamics, ornaments, and harmonic colour to project olfactory qualities in abstract form. Wang systematically classified a consensus set of cross-modal parameters—for example, ‘aromatic quality’ (fragrance types versus sonority) and ‘diffusion and motion’ (scent dispersion versus melodic flow) and concluded that Ye Xiaogang invoked the Chinese aesthetic yongwu yanzhi（咏物言志）, using the green mango’s scent to evoke nostalgia and cultural identity associated with south-eastern China. Wang connected a structured comparison (parameters of scent vs. sound) and the composer’s personal expression, providing a better understanding of the aesthetic ideals shared by East Asian music.
Another highlight of the conference was Session 9B, ‘Musico-Visual Representations and Reflections’. Of the four papers presented, this review focuses particularly on the first. In ‘The Marriage of Art Forms: a Panofskian Iconological Reading of Liszt’s Sposalizio’, Yan Zou applied Panofsky’s iconology to construct cross-media parallels between Raphael’s painting and Liszt’s composition, arguing that art-historical interpretation and musical analysis share a fundamental methodological consistency. In Liszt’s Sposalizio (a solo piano work), Zou treated musical motifs as analogues of pictorial symbols or figures, and identified three motifs corresponding to three figures: the Virgin Mary, Joseph and the priest. Zou catalogued musico-visual correspondences, mapping ‘harmonies-colours, melodic figures-visual lines, registers-spatial dimensions’ and combined whole-work coverage with note-level precision, presenting an analysis that spans the entire piece while scrutinising local events, particularly showing that at the work’s golden-section point a flourish of ornament coincides with the painting’s depiction of the wedding ring. Through this case study, Zou demonstrated the intricate interplay between music and the visual arts and showed how iconological methods can rigorously inform musical interpretation. This paper inspires us to interpret connections between other forms of music and visual art, offering a methodology for analysing specific musical elements and their visual counterparts.
This conference featured numerous other outstanding papers that left a profound impression on this reviewer, particularly those by Anne Hyland, Ardi Echevarria, Daniel Elphick, Elizabeth Hepach and Julian Horton. Due to space constraints, a detailed discussion of these is, however, not possible here though hopefully we can look forward to reading their work in publication. Overall, the conference showcased a discipline in vibrant expansion, both in terms of subject matter and analytical approaches. From this attendee’s perspective, its most striking achievement was the blend of breadth and depth. It encompassed a wide array of musical genres, periods and cultural contexts, while addressing specific analytical problems with rigour and creativity. The SMA’s annual MAC is significant not only for presenting scholarly achievements and facilitating the dissemination of research findings, but also for establishing a sustainable platform for academic exchange and offering access to cutting-edge music-analytical resources. Long may this continue.
Session Review by Evelyn Fong, MusM student (University of Manchester)
The Manchester Music Analysis Conference 2025 (McrMAC25) organised by Drs Anne Hyland and Sarah Moynihan on behalf of the Society for Music Analysis took place at the University of Manchester and the Royal Northern College of Music from Monday 14 July to Wednesday 16 July. The conference represented a broad range of papers and delegates from across different interdisciplinary fields and countries. Alongside the perhaps more familiar papers on topics such as Mozart, sonata form, rhythm, phrase types, harmony, tonality, history of music theory, and dance, there were also creative and interdisciplinary approaches to analysing music presented, such as musico-visual interactions, music analysis and psychology, song analysis looking at instrumentation and Non-Lexical Vocable, and new approaches to the concerto and concertino forms.
For example, Christopher Tarrant’s (Newcastle University) paper presented a compelling synthesis of music analysis and Jungian psychology through a study of Carl Nielsen’s Second Symphony, The Four Temperaments (1902). Moving beyond a common interpretation of the work as four isolated character vignettes, Tarrant argued for a holistic, homeostatic reading of the symphony. He posited that while each movement embodies an unbalanced psychological type (choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic, sanguine), their integration within the symphonic structure creates a balanced musical whole, mirroring Jung’s model of a healthy psyche. In so doing, Tarrant effectively bridges theoretical analysis (sonata and schema theory) and psychological concepts, pinpointing how musical devices articulate Jungian functions like extraversion, introversion, judgment, and perception. This approach not only offers a fresh analytical lens for Nielsen’s work but also provides valuable insights into how art can manifest complex psychological states. As someone deeply interested in Jungian typology, I find this interdisciplinary framework promising and am keen to see how Tarrant’s research further develops the correlation between musical structures and cognitive functions.
The drive to refine and expand formal theory was further exemplified in Dominik Mitterer’s (Durham University) paper, ‘Moving Towards a Theory of Romantic Concertino Form’. Mitterer addressed a significant gap on concertino forms, which has largely overlooked the early Romantic concertino despite its historical prevalence through drawing from a corpus of violin works from Vormärz Leipzig (1815–1849). He demonstrated how its characteristic features, such as cyclical elisions between movements and a radically compressed sonata form that concludes at the end of the solo exposition, were not anomalies but deliberate innovations. His research crucially shows how these techniques of formal compression and balanced solo-tutti interaction in the concertino prefigured and influenced the development of the larger Romantic violin concerto, offering vital insight on how composers created dramatic and emotional effects in the concerto through form. This focus on formal nuance was also complemented by Caitlin Martinkus’s (Cleveland Institute of Music) compelling paper on Louis Spohr’s Violin Concerto No. 10. Martinkus championed a dynamic view of analysis, arguing that rather than seeking a single ‘solution,’ we should embrace the tension that arises when a musical passage simultaneously suggests multiple formal processes (two-part transition, trimodular block, etc.). Her approach positions analytical models as a means to explore creative ambiguity, not just to assign definitive labels. Further expanding the scope, Peter H. Smith’s (University of Notre Dame) analysis of the finale of the Dvořák Violin Concerto demonstrated how formal and tonal analysis remain potent tools for interpreting expressive narratives. Smith framed the concerto’s three-movement cycle as a journey from the ‘tonal-formal incompletion’ of the first movement, through the compressed Adagio, to the ‘plenitude’ and transcendent resolution of the A-major finale, offering a robust defence of hermeneutic, Schenkerian-informed analysis. Together, these presentations demonstrated that scholars should treat musical form as a creative approach rather than a solid form, showcasing the vibrant state of concerto studies, ranging from the recovery of forgotten genres and the philosophy of analysis to the interpretation of the expressiveness of large-scale concertos.
As a postgraduate student working in Henry Purcell’s theatre songs and gender, I was also deeply impressed by session 2C, ‘Analysis of Song 1’ on 14 July and the remainder of my review offers some reflections on that session. Since my Master’s dissertation focuses on the representation of gender ideologies and their related anxieties in Purcell’s composing techniques such as tonality, musical keys, and rhythms, this session provided me with some new insights which shaped my thinking. This session featured three distinct but complementary papers that explored the intersection of music, language, and text. Ruixue Hu’s (Eastman School of Music) presentation focused on how non-lexical vocables in popular songs contribute to their overall mood and emotional effects as well as how artists use onomatopoetic words with multivalent logographic meanings beneath the phonetic surface in various songs, such as traditional Chinese opera, Chinese pop songs and Bulgarian songs, etc. He showed how non-texted elements such as onomatopoeia, spontaneous expressivity and phonetic manipulations contributed to the creation of certain moods for songs in different languages to enhance their emotional effect. It was fascinating to learn how non-lexical vocables allow listeners to experience the emotional ups and downs of a song without knowing the meaning of the lyrics or understanding the language of the lyrics. Although my research is not on non-lexical vocables, Ru’s presentation reminded me to look beyond texts when analysing the mood and emotional effects of theatre songs (such as some ‘Ah’ moments in Purcell’s laments and passionate airs). I had previously considered these moments primarily as melodic or harmonic events, but Hu’s paper compels me to analyse them as gendered vocal gestures. His observations can be further developed in this direction.
To offer an example, in Dido’s lament (‘When I am laid in earth’), Dido expresses her lovesickness and excessive sadness on the abandonment of Aeneas before her death. In terms of lovesickness in theatre songs, Amanda Winkler observed that ‘composers assigned music to lovesick women aesthetically marked as emotionally excessive and created laments using devices that focused attention on the spectacularly obsessive, overly passionate quality of female love, accentuating the misogynist notion that women were irrational and emotionally volatile,’ so those female characters were usually silenced through dying at the end of the play or opera. Therefore, in a character like Dido, these NLVs are not merely expressive; they are the sonic embodiment of a specifically feminine emotional excess—a vocalisation of a grief that words cannot capture.
Equally remarkable was Emma Spinneli’s (Sorbonne Université, Paris) presentation addressing the modern separation of vocal and instrumental music from the Renaissance period. Spinneli analysed lute intabulations (arrangements for lute) of vocal works through exploring how the analysis of lute tablatures in 16th-century vocal works contributed to the study of Renaissance music performance and practice, and how vocal parts and instrumental parts were intertwined. Through presenting a comparative analysis, juxtaposing the written vocal scores of madrigals (e.g., Anchor che cal partire) with their intabulated versions for lute by specific musicians, such as Jean-Paul Paladin, Spinneli reveals practical aspects of performance, including: the use of accidentals and musica ficta, practices of ornamentation and diminution (melodic elaboration) and the process of instrumental arrangement and variation. This presentation inspired me to investigate how common instrumental practices in Purcell’s theatre songs reflect and create emotional effects which related to the portrait of gendered dynamics and stereotypes.
Most significantly, Cathal Twomey’s (NUI Maynooth) analysis of declamatory dissonance provided a precise theoretical framework for a phenomenon I have elsewhere observed but been unable to articulate. His presentation provided a focused analysis of a specific rhythmic-metric phenomenon (‘declamatory dissonance’) in English Baroque vocal music, where the musical stress contradicts the natural stress of the text. While some music scholars blame this on musical insensitivity or borrowing, Twomey argues that this ‘dissonance’ is often a deliberate, standardised formula used to bend text-setting rules for musical effect. He used various Baroque songs by composers such as Purcell and Handel, showing how they create musical effects with musical notes and rhythms alongside different ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ syllables, providing a poetic perspective on viewing the meaning of Baroque songs. This framework offers a new tool to articulate how Purcell uses musical stress to subvert poetic stress for dramatic purpose.
For example, the dissonance on the word ‘laid’ in Dido’s Lament (‘When I am laid in earth’), is not an error or insensitivity; it is a calculated compositional device. As Bonne J. Blackburn explored the use of B flat in feminine context in her study of early modern erotic music, drawing on treatises that reveal that by the sixteenth century in Italy, B-flat had acquired a charged, sexual meaning. Therefore, when Purcell used dissonance on a B flat which was associated with eroticism and emotional excess on a strong beat and a ‘strong’ syllable to present the lovesickness and excessive sadness of Dido, it sonically ‘lays’ her down with a weight of finality and despair, magnifying the emotional impact far beyond what the text alone could achieve. Twomey’s paper gives me the vocabulary to argue that Purcell uses such metrical dissonances systematically to sonify the anxieties and disruptions inherent in his era’s gender ideologies.
In conclusion, the Manchester Music Analysis Conference 2025 (McrMAC) served as a vibrant testament to the evolving and interdisciplinary nature of the field. Through this conference, I have come to realise that music analysis does not only comprise of traditional analytical concerns (which remain vibrant areas of scholarship), but also creative and innovative approaches that push the boundaries of what music analysis can be. This spirit of inquiry was represented by the keynote address from Pascall Medal Recipient, Robert Gjerdingen (Northwestern University). Gjerdingen masterfully surveyed the long-standing symbiosis between music analysis and cognitive science through tracing a lineage from Rameau’s acoustics to his own foundational work in schema theory, firmly grounding the analysis of musical patterns in the modern understanding of human memory. It suggested that to analyse music is, in many ways, to analyse the architecture of human cognition itself, which draws the relationship between music, emotion, and human cognitive functions. Moreover, Lauri Suurpää’s (Sibelius Academy, Helsinki) keynote address reminded us of the new and rich insights that arise from novel combinations of existing analytical approaches, and how the interpretation of Mozart’s music, though familiar, calls for such methodological dexterity.
Ultimately, this conference did more than present a series of isolated papers; it showcased a discipline in dynamic conversation both with itself and with other fields. It highlighted that the future of music analysis lies in its ability to be both deeply historical and fearlessly interdisciplinary, embracing everything from psychology and performance practice to the nuances of the human voice. The insights I have gained have not only broadened my perspective, but have fundamentally refined my analytical approach, providing me with innovative strategies to decode the intricate ways music composes not just sound, but identity, emotion, and ideology. Congratulations to all involved!