These readings focus on Western orchestral instruments and are thus perhaps more traditional representations of organology.

Week 3

Reading due Wed, Sep 10

  • Le Guin, Elisabeth. 2006. “‘Cello-and-Bow Thinking’: The First Movement of Boccherini’s Cello Sonata in E♭ Major, Fuori Catalogo.” In Boccherini’s Body: an Essay in Carnal Musicology. Berkeley: University of California Press. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb06338.0001.001.
  • De Souza, Jonathan. 2017. “Beethoven’s Prosthesis.” In Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition. Oxford Studies in Music Theory. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    • Discussion leader: Yechan

Homework due Sun, Sep 14

Revisit a piece you’ve performed in the past, and see if you can identify passages of music where the technical physical execution of the music reveals different connections than a more traditional analysis would. Explain those physical sensations. Screenshot or photograph relevant passages of the score and include them in your response.

If you try for a while but don’t succeed at finding anything interesting, you could write about that too. Do you think the physical execution is coordinated with the motives? Or is there some other hypothesis you can come up with?

Week 4

Reading due Wed, Sep 17

  • Gotham, Mark R. H., and Iain A. D. Gunn. 2016. “Pitch Properties of the Pedal Harp, with an Interactive Guide.” Music Theory Online 22 (4). https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.22.4.3.
    • Discussion leader: Victoria
  • Cole, Christa. 2024. “Hands, Fingers, Strings, and Bows: Performance Technique and Analysis in J.S. Bach’s Largo for Solo Violin.” Music Theory Online 30 (3). https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.30.3.1.
    • Discussion leader: Matthew

Homework due Sun, Sep 21

In last week’s assignment, many of you investigated a piece of music with particular technical difficulties. I’d like you to expand on these anaylses by incorporating more traditional music analysis: things like phrase analysis, hypermeter, harmonic analysis, form analysis, etc. that you may have learned in other theory classes. How does your technical analysis align with your music-theory analysis?

[If you did not engage in that kind of resposne last week, instead, submit a reading response in whatever format you like.]

Save as a PDF, begin your filename with 04, and upload to homework submit.