Abstract
This article proposes a non-plural perspective on the analysis of triadic music, offering Sky Macklay’s Many Many Cadences as a case study. Part one is a discussion of the work’s harmony-voice leading nexus, followed by a discussion of the five conditions of correspondence as implied by this string quartet that articulate a single tonal identity. Part three focuses on a strictly kinematic analysis of the work’s harmonic progressions that evinces this identity and establishes its general applicability. In the final section, the data generated by this analysis conveys the inherent possibility of a single, all-encompassing kinematic, thereby pointing beyond the particularities of Many Many Cadences while informing my formal interpretation of the work.
Highlights
Background and IntroductionSky Macklay is an emerging, New York-based composer and oboist
Her music explores post-minimalist contrasts, audible processes, theatre, and the visceral nature of the cognition of sound. Her works have been performed by ensembles such as International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Yarn/Wire, Spektral Quartet, Mivos Quartet, Dal Niente, Da Capo Chamber Players, Firebird
This study proposes the hypothesis that the highly constrained, traditionally normative characteristics of Macklay’s neoconservative postmodern music avails itself of voice leading derived directly from certain post-tonal practices
Summary
Sky Macklay is an emerging, New York-based composer and oboist. Her music explores post-minimalist contrasts, audible processes, theatre, and the visceral nature of the cognition of sound. This music serves an expository function as the main idea and basic motivic pathway of the entire piece: the music that follows this excerpt introduces successive repetitions of this idea, each with its own time-span, rhythmic variances, and triadic transformations Several features of this quartet conspicuously harken back to common-practice or pre-modern tonality: tertian harmonies, triadic progressions, “teleological structural genesis”,2 traditional instrumentation, continual developing variation, and familiar formal designs. Macklay, he quartet noted that composer herselfof seemed averse to theshift in one must not failthe to consider the possibility this string maythe mark the beginning a primary stylistic the composer's work, an actual neoconservative postmodern phase, in which case, the future may allow the division of a discussion of Macklay’s music into two parts: her music up to 2014, and her music after 2014. In Part III, I will apply the model to an analysis of Macklay’s stylistically neoconservative postmodern music, and, in Part IV, I introduce a graphical and tabular means of surveying its supervenient metatonality
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