Johanna Frymoyer (University of Notre Dame)
Modernist Movements: A Book Talk
SMA Zoom Colloquium, 27 February 2025, 6.00-8.00pm GMT
Meeting ID: 990 9618 5672 Passcode: 707021
Abstract:
Modernist Movements: Listening for Topics in Schoenberg and Stravinsky (forthcoming spring 2025, Oxford University Press, Studies in Music Theory) is the first single-author, monograph-length study of topic theory and its applications to modernist repertory. The book explores fundamental methodological questions of if, why, and how analysts ought to apply topic theory—a method tailored to eighteenth-century historical and aesthetic contingencies—to modernist repertory.
In this colloquium, author Johanna Frymoyer will share her reorientation for topic theory as (1) mental categories governed by categorization and prototypicality effects, and (2) mnemonics for culturally-meaningful patterns of movement. Focusing on several analyses from the book, Frymoyer will demonstrate one of the central problems for topical analysis in modernist music, namely, how do listeners identify topics whose features are dependent on common-practice tonal and metrical features in repertory that is atonal and/or metrically irregular? The analyses will illustrate how topics interact closely with other key features of modernist style, notably partitioning and invariance in Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music and determinant motives that support metrical phase shifting in Stravinsky’s music. The talk will highlight the bidirectional benefits of topical analysis in twentieth-century repertory. On the one hand, twentieth-century repertory has much to offer for the refinement of topic theory itself. On the other, topic theory breathes new life into the expressive significance of well-trodden analytical concepts in modernist repertory and challenges us to rethink established interpretive tropes in modernist music such as stylistic rupture, inexpressivity, and the subhuman.
Bio:
Johanna Frymoyer is assistant professor of music theory at the University of Notre Dame. Her research interests explore musical meaning through the lenses of semiotics, cognitive linguistics, and embodiment with particular emphasis on the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. She earned her Ph.D. in musicology from Princeton University.