Music Theory Research Articles

Unique Vulnerabilities for the Musical Theatre Performer

Abstract: In this article, the author discusses a range of vulnerabilities unique to the development of the “triple threat” musical theatre performing artist, with particular emphasis on the athletic demands of modern musical theatre singing in its varied styles. Young musical theatre singers frequently begin undergraduate training with voice pathologies already present, while not every university program is equipped to identify and mitigate these injuries. Therefore, collaborations with professionals specializing in voice care are of tantamount importance. Educating students about these resources from their earliest time on campus may assist in injury prevention and destigmatize perceptions about voice disorders.

A Conversation with Michael Maliakel

Abstract: In a video interview with Journal of Singing Associate Editor Melissa Treinkman on March 29, 2024, Michael Maliakel discussed his career and his experience playing the title role in the Broadway show Aladdin . A first place winner of the 2014 NATS National Musical Theatre Competition, Michael talked about the impact of his classical voice training on his Broadway career, the constantly ascending tessitura of musical theatre roles, and why he believes representation matters. A QR code is included at the end of the article which contains the link to the recorded interview with Michael Maliakel, posted on the NATS YouTube channel.

Ernst Friedrich Richter and the Birth of Modern Music Theory Pedagogy

This article provides a detailed discussion of the pedagogy and legacy of Ernst Friedrich Richter (1808–79). A theory teacher at the Leipzig Conservatory since its founding in 1843, Richter is most famous for authoring one of the most enduring harmony manuals—the Lehrbuch der Harmonie (1853)—which, among other things, was instrumental in popularizing the use of Roman numeral analysis in harmony pedagogy. Gaining a hegemonic position in the Western music theory discourse of the late nineteenth century, he played a key role in shaping the common practice of modern music theory pedagogy. Richter’s legacy has been tainted by critiques from several later theorists. Applying a Foucauldian discourse-theoretical lens, this article attempts to look beyond this historically negative assessment by asking what enabled Richter’s work to become so influential. The article is structured in six sections. Following the introduction and a brief overview of E. F. Richter’s life and works, two sections discuss what characterizes “Richterian” pedagogy. As source material, these sections draw on Richter’s writings as well as the exercises of one of his most famous students, Edvard Grieg (1843–1907). The last section before the conclusion investigates Richter’s legacy, considering both his initial broad international success and later critiques of his influence on modern music theory pedagogy.

Here for the Hearing: Analyzing the Music in Musical Theater ed. by Michael Buchler and Gregory J. Decker (review)

Here for the Hearing: Analyzing the Music in Musical Theater ed. by Michael Buchler and Gregory J. Decker (review)

Formalized Harmony

Different theories have been proposed to explain the perception of a root in a pitch set, with Terhardt’s (1984) virtual pitch theory being the one generally considered most plausible, despite none of them having been confirmed empirically. Understanding the perceived root phenomenon is an essential component in explaining the origin of the major and minor triads as the most fundamental chords in twelve-tone equal temperament or 5-limit just intonation, as well as in proposing new chords for new tunings. This music perception study, in which 42 participants rated chords in 10 different tunings, empirically establishes harmonic dualism, negative harmony, and Barlow’s harmonicity as the key factors for the perception of the harmonic root and the origin of the major and minor triads, and proposes a model as a basis for a tuning-agnostic—trans-spatial—music theory.

A Study on Trends and Strategic Directions for the Growth of the Korean Musical Theater Industry : Focusing on SWOT-AHP Analysis

A Study on Trends and Strategic Directions for the Growth of the Korean Musical Theater Industry : Focusing on SWOT-AHP Analysis

Expansion and Audience Development Management of the Chinese Original Musical Theatre Market: A Case Study of the Small Theatre Musical “KING’S TABLE”

Expansion and Audience Development Management of the Chinese Original Musical Theatre Market: A Case Study of the Small Theatre Musical “KING’S TABLE”

I’ll figure it out myself! Musical theatre students’ enhanced knowledge of embodied learning processes through application of the Alexander Technique

This paper aims to show how Alexander Technique (AT) can serve as a tool in embodied learning processes. The use of AT was explored with a group of 21 students, seven teachers, and three AT teachers who were practicing and performing musical theatre repertoire. Principles of action research methodology informed the projects. The research found that AT offered increased awareness of connections between thoughts, body and environment. Knowledge in embodied learning processes empowered the students in terms of better observation and rehearsal routines. We argue that these results might have implications for the field of embodied teaching and learning. Furthermore, the results may offer an invitation towards increased focus on embodiment in learning experiences within other fields as well.

“Awful Skinny Boys” – Male Musical Theatre Performers’ Experiences of Body Image: A Reflexive Thematic Analysis

Body dissatisfaction is likely to be particularly salient in aesthetically focused professions, including the performing arts. However, there is a paucity of research involving male theatre performers. This study addressed this omission by exploring how male musical theatre actors experience body image. Interviews were conducted with 7 male performers and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Findings illustrate the lasting influence that instructors and the training environment have upon the participants’ perceptions of their bodies, participants’ desire to appear masculine through greater muscularity, and the dissatisfaction that occurs when they perceive that their bodies do not conform to rigid notions of gender and body ideals. This study also provides insight into the nuanced experience of existing within a body of worth, often commodified and sold to audiences. These findings highlight the importance of facilitating a supportive training environment and opening up conversations about body dissatisfaction among male performers.

Learning Difficulties in General Music Theories for Students of Fine Arts Institutes

Learning Difficulties in General Music Theories for Students of Fine Arts Institutes

Poder de la expectativa en la fórmula armónica del placer musical

Why does music move us? What harmonic resources manage to cause a greater pleasant experience in listeners? The aestheticity of music lies in the repetition of forms, in the recognition of patterns. Composers take advantage of that predictability to play with listeners' expectations. Mastering the technique to cause sweating and piloerection in response to a musical stimulus is of great interest to creatives. Based on the publications of the musical theorist Frank Lehman, specialized in the harmony of the soundtracks of epic millennial cinema, this article analyzes some harmonic cadences present in different audiovisual formats to agree that it is in the violation of expectations through chromatisms and after their subsequent diatonic realignment where the astonishment of the spectators occurs. This research connects classical aesthetics with the psychology of music.

Score Images as a Modality: Enhancing Symbolic Music Understanding through Large-Scale Multimodal Pre-Training.

Symbolic music understanding is a critical challenge in artificial intelligence. While traditional symbolic music representations like MIDI capture essential musical elements, they often lack the nuanced expression in music scores. Leveraging the advancements in multimodal pre-training, particularly in visual-language pre-training, we propose a groundbreaking approach: the Score Images as a Modality (SIM) model. This model integrates music score images alongside MIDI data for enhanced symbolic music understanding. We also introduce novel pre-training tasks, including masked bar-attribute modeling and score-MIDI matching. These tasks enable the SIM model to capture music structures and align visual and symbolic representations effectively. Additionally, we present a meticulously curated dataset of matched score images and MIDI representations optimized for training the SIM model. Through experimental validation, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in advancing symbolic music understanding.

A Conceptual Framework for Curriculum Development Utilizing the FCM Module in a Flipped Classroom for Music Theory

A Conceptual Framework for Curriculum Development Utilizing the FCM Module in a Flipped Classroom for Music Theory

The Effect of Music Theory in Hollywood Film Scoring

The Effect of Music Theory in Hollywood Film Scoring

Technology and Interspecies Musical Practice

This case study on the work of interspecies musician David Rothenberg explores how engaging with the songs and rhythms of other species continues to challenge his musical practice and aesthetic. Technology, science and art come together in an artistic and research practice, which is grounded in the belief that technologies can bring us closer to nature. The article outlines how Umwelt theory, enactive music cognition, biosemiotics and the phenomenology of human-technology relations are engaged in the perception and creation of musical experiences. It also looks at how interdisciplinary research practices that traverse zoomusicology, the visual and performing arts, and data visualisation contribute to interspecies music theory and practice. The article concludes by presenting four interspecies auditory dispositives as a guide to how knowledge, tools and practice are entangled in concrete examples from Rothenberg’s musical collaborations with nightingales, humpback whales, periodical cicadas and pond life.

RL-Chord: CLSTM-Based Melody Harmonization Using Deep Reinforcement Learning.

Automatic music generation is the combination of artificial intelligence and art, in which melody harmonization is a significant and challenging task. However, previous recurrent neural network (RNN)-based work fails to maintain long-term dependency and neglects the guidance of music theory. In this article, we first devise a universal chord representation with a fixed small dimension, which can cover most existing chords and is easy to expand. Then a novel melody harmonization system based on reinforcement learning (RL), RL-Chord, is proposed to generate high-quality chord progressions. Specifically, a melody conditional LSTM (CLSTM) model is put forward that learns the transition and duration of chords well, based on which RL algorithms with three well-designed reward modules are combined to construct RL-Chord. We compare three widely used RL algorithms (i.e., policy gradient, Q -learning, and actor-critic algorithms) on the melody harmonization task for the first time and prove the superiority of deep Q -network (DQN). Furthermore, a style classifier is devised to fine-tune the pretrained DQN-Chord for zero-shot Chinese folk (CF) melody harmonization. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model can generate harmonious and fluent chord progressions for diverse melodies. Quantitatively, DQN-Chord achieves better performance than the compared methods on multiple evaluation metrics, such as chord histogram similarity (CHS), chord tonal distance (CTD), and melody-chord tonal distance (MCTD).

GENRE-STYLE AND SPIRITUAL-ETHICAL METAMORPHOSIS OF FRENCH MUSICAL THEATER OF THE 17TH-20TH CENTURIES

The purpose of the work is to identify the genre-stylistic and spiritual-meaning specifics of the French musical theater of the New Age and its evolutionary paths in the European culture of the 17th-20th centuries. The historical paths of the development of French musical theater of the 17th–20th centuries reveal its genre and stylistic diversity, represented by the typologies of “lyrical tragedy”, “salvation opera”, Empire opera, “grand” French opera, lyric opera and numerous varieties of samples of experimental musical theater and synthetic genres formations of the 20th century. The timbre-intonational and dramaturgical palette of the mentioned genres is organically inscribed in the stylistic priorities of French culture and music of the New Age Baroque, Classicism, Empire, Romanticism, Biedermeier, etc. At the same time, the mentioned typologies of the French musical theater combine a number of common features, among which we single out the essential role of its cult-mysterious primary basis, the corresponding types of imagery and their leading features, oriented to the cultivation of Christian virtues, the idea of spiritual transformation, the harmonious union of the earthly and sacred worlds. The appeal to educational and didactic, as well as spiritual and ethical factors in French opera (even at the level of biblical thinking of own history) conditions its appeal to large-scale bright spectacular performances with a large number of mass and ballet scenes, the genesis of which went back to the spiritual traditions of the culture of French absolutism in its historical development The specified genre metamorphoses of modern French opera at the level of “genre memory” focused the attention of the listener-spectator first of all on the original manner of conveying the poetic Word, its spiritual and ethical meaning, which went back to the “mysterious mode” of the French musical theater, on a clear fixation of dance-plastic movement-gesture, which collectively retained its significance at all stages of its historical existence.

From Music Scores to Audio Recordings: Deep Pitch-Class Representations for Measuring Tonal Structures

The availability of digital music data in various modalities provides opportunities both for music enjoyment and music research. Regarding the latter, the computer-assisted analysis of tonal structures is a central topic. For Western classical music, studies typically rely on machine-readable scores, which are tedious to create for large-scale works and comprehensive corpora. As an alternative, music audio recordings, which are readily available, can be analyzed with computational methods. With this article, we want to bridge the gap between score- and audio-based measurements of tonal structures by leveraging the power of deep neural networks. Such networks are commonly trained in an end-to-end fashion, which introduces biases towards the training repertoire or towards specific annotators. To overcome these problems, we propose a multi-step strategy. First, we compute pitch-class representations of the audio recordings using networks trained on score–audio pairs. Second, we measure the presence of specific tonal structures using a pattern-matching technique that solely relies on music theory knowledge and does not require annotated training data. Third, we highlight these measurements with interactive visualizations, thus leaving the interpretation to the musicological experts. Our experiments on Richard Wagner's large-scale cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen indicate that deep pitch-class representations lead to a high similarity between score- and audio-based measurements of tonal structures, thus demonstrating how to leverage multi-modal data for application scenarios in the computational humanities, where an explicit and interpretable methodology is essential.

Redefining Catholic Sisterhood: Intersections of Autonomy and Religion in Sacrilege and Nunsense

Feminist Catholic sisters epitomize progressive and autonomous women who defy the stereotyped sisterhood, confronting the gender hierarchy within the patriarchal Catholic Church. The religious reforms post-Vatican II and the desideratum of inclusivity for avowed women in decision-making roles have contributed to the emergence of a feminist theological movement that thwarts the erasure of women from religious histories. Delving deep into the feminist theological tenets mirrored in Diane Shaffer’s Sacrilege: A Drama in Two Acts and Dan Goggin’s Nunsense: A Musical Comedy, the present study aims to examine the thespian representation of religious reforms post-Vatican II, exploring the strategies Catholic sisters adopt in their struggle for autonomy. The study contends that the representations of the radical and feminist sisters in the plays potentially challenge the rigid ecclesiastical hierarchy and uphold the deconstruction of sisterhood.

From ‘musique concrète’ and Acousmatic Art to the ‘New Music Theater’. The Austrian Composer Dieter Kaufmann

This article follows the way the Austrian composer Dieter Kaufmann has gone with his conceptions taken from musical and extra-musical domains, as literature, visual arts, religion and politics, describing some of his theatrical works. For him the function of music is to improve the society and therefore his works are a critic to politics or to religion. Having studied in Paris by Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Schaeffer, François Bayle and René Leibowitz, he contributed to the development of the electronic music in Austria with his creation and his teaching of electroacoustic composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. He went further than the Parisian ‘musique concrète’, which worked with sound objects, and consciously selected and worked with objects of sound ambient in order to manage the sound environment, to musically shape it. The acousmatic art deals with sound objects, which are recorded and projected in another space, the theatre scene being an ideal space of it. A large part of his works are included in the genre of New Music Theater of the 20th and 21st century, where sound (tone and word) and movement come together, each of them having the same weight. Keywords: musique concrète, sound object, acousmatic art, multimedia, electroacoustic composition