Le 29 juin 2017
de 12h00 à 12h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3203
Séance - Leaving – and Regaining – the Shores of Tonality
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Zane Gillespie
Around the turn of the century, neo-Riemannian theory underwent considerable expansion. Emerging composer Sky Macklay has written a string quartet entitled Many Many Cadences (2015) which seemingly demands a renovation of neo-Riemannian theories concerning triadic transformations and voice leading (e.g., Parallel (P), Leading-tone (L), Relative (R), SLIDE, etc.). Predominant- dominant-tonic, dominant-tonic, deceptive, and plagal progressions, and expected resolutions of active scale degrees (e.g., the leading tone) in the standard cadential formulae of Many Many Cadences are overwhelming. Macklay’s parsimonious voice leading is a systematic consequence of her transformational operations. As an expansion of Lewinian triadic transformation, Macklay’s harmonic use of ic1/2 voice-leading parsimony may often implicate a contextually fluid voice-mapping involving a dual-process of inversion. However, the single tonal/post-tonal identity this suggests is, unlike Lewin’s, a straightforward model of tonality: a relatively simple model of local, event-to-event harmonic phenomena, as they exist as part of the quartet’s superstructure, and systematized into ordinary language, quantitative measures, and/or diagrams. Drawing from Iannis Xenakis’ Markovian stochastic music theory, this study proposes a kinematic diagram indicating that Macklay’s return to pre-modern tonal expectations is both a literal return to common-practice tonality as well as a triadic post-tonality. Detailed analysis explores the premises of Macklay’s atypical neo- Riemannianism and its relevance to understanding the relationship between statistical empiricism and twenty-first-century musical discourse.
