Guest Speaker
Stan Kleppinger (profile)
Assistant Professor of Music Theory
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Location: Humanities 1641
A great deal of music written since the twilight of the tonal era projects into prominence a single pitch class above the others without attending to the other principles of harmonic progression and voice-leading typically associated with traditional tonality. Such music invites analysis that places pitch centers at the heart of a perspective of the music’s structure. But an appropriate analytical framework has proven difficult to come by. We have the intuition that at least some of this music has a sense of large-scale tonal coherence, but lack the means to articulate it.
This paper proposes an analytical model that begins by focusing upon the pitch classes and other pitch events that figure most prominently in aural perception of this repertoire. This gives rise to speculation about connections between these pitch elements and other aspects of the work. Investigation of these potential correlations may confirm their existence and significance or may lead to revision of the speculative ideas about such correlations. A perspective of the tonal principles (or tonal ambiguity) governing the music eventually emerges from this process.
Conditions of salience (adapted from Fred Lerdahl) and of “tonal residue” (evocation of tonic defining techniques from the tonal era) provide criteria by which we can describe how particular pitch classes are made prominent. Taking cues from David Epstein, I follow this exploration of perceptual criteria with a frank assessment of the roles of subjectivity and ambiguity in the perceptual and speculative aspects of this method. To demonstrate this approach, and its limits, I provide analyses of works by Ligeti, Carter, and Copland.
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