Evolving Content and Design

Abstract

Example 1a. John Covach, Destructuring Cartesian Dualism in Musical Analysis (1994)Example 1b. Richard Littlefield, of the Frames (1996)Example 1c. Elizabeth Sayrs, Narrative Metaphor, and Conceptual Blending in 'The Hanging Tree' (2003)Example 1d. Richard cohn, Tetrahedral Graph of Tetrachordal Voice-Leading Space (2003)Example 1e. William Rothstein, Like Falling off a Log: Rubato in Chopin's Prelude in A-flat Major (op. 28, no. 17) (2005)Example 1f. John Covach, or Not To MOOC (2013)[1] In this essay, I will discuss how topical areas and presentational strategies have evolved as authors leverage the technological capacities of MTO. With the capacity to make articles and critical commentaries widely available in a short amount of time, MTO has attracted writers interested in articulating new methodologies, forging new interdisciplinary connections, and reevaluating our evolving identity as a scholarly society. Changes from fixed texts to multimedia and interactivity have evolved together with shifts in values and ideology. Examples 1a-f provide a sampling of article views representative of MTO's evolving design. A broadening in musical repertoires and analytical approaches has paralleled developments in digital media design, fostered by the flexibility MTO offers as an open-access medium for publication authored and produced by scholars. In this brief retrospective view spanning the history of MTO, it is inevitable that I will barely scratch the surface in commenting on a few articles while leaving other important contributions unmentioned. For this, I apologize in advance.Web Environments, Musical Worlds, and the Silence of the Frames[2] Several of the most prolific MTO authors have written thoughtfully on the changing landscape of music theory as it relates to other disciplines. Janet Schmalfeldt's six articles in MTO published between 1998 and 2010 (1998, 2004, 2005, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c) articulate a growing awareness of how musical analysis can be informed by performance and enriched through consideration of broader cultural and historical contexts. Patrick McCreless, in five articles spanning 1996 to 2011 (1996a, 1996b, 1998, 2000, 2011), traces how our Society grappled with the New Musicology critique in the late 1990s and continued to evolve in relation to other musical and scholarly communities. A wide range of studies in musical meaning can be traced from phenomenological approaches (Covach 1994, Littlefield 1996) and critical theory (Killam 1994, Krims 1994) to cognitive theory (London 1993, Zbikowski 1995) and semiotic approaches (Agawu 1996, Roeder 1993, Monelle 2000). The first writers for MTO formulated positions on future directions for music theory and recognized MTO as a logical platform for articulating those positions. These early articles were rich in philosophical introspection. Interestingly, MTO writers were directly concerned with syntactic, semantic, and intertextual issues in music often described through words that would also come to be understood as the stuff of HTML web design: network, frame, code, text, image. Engaged in the substance of their discussions, they did not always exhibit self-awareness as creators of the newly emerging phenomenon of hypertext. But now, the body of work from the early years of MTO forms a powerful example of evolving web-based scholarship.[3] There was urgency during MTO's first decade to repond to the challenges posed by new musicologists, to show that analysis of a musical work's internal relationships was compatible with investigations of larger contextualizations of musical meaning. In his 1996 article, Analyzing Music Under the New Musicological Regime, Kofi Agawu explored connections and mutual compatibilities in theory and musicology, citing examples from a vast range of innovative music-theoretical inquiries already under way that could not be dismissed as a merely formalist enterprise. …