Dr. Yayoi Uno Everit
Professor of Music, University of Illinois-Chicago
Location: Humanities 2441
The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory (2014) provides a comprehensive historical and theoretical framework for understanding musical topics in the 18th century. Yet the identification of topics in the 19th century and beyond remains provisional. How stable are the lexicon of musical topics (styles and genres) introduced by Leonard Ratner, Kofi Agawu, Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Raymond Monelle, and others? How do analytical approaches informed by Sausserian semiology and Peircian semiotics generate competing strains of topic theory? The first part of this paper examines these questions as they relate to the classification and practicum of topic theory. The second part is devoted to an exploration of the pianto motif (otherwise known as Seufzer or “sigh” motive) in historical and contemporary musical contexts. Reframing topic as a specific intertext, an idealized type instanced by tokens (after Michael Klein), my inductive model analyzes the pianto motive as a type of musico-semantic unit (MSU). In the identification stage, the shared syntactic and expressive attributes are mapped onto a musical corpus. In the evaluation stage, the intertextual associations established at the poietic (author-based) and esthetic (reader-based) levels determine the MSU’s range of signification as a cultural unit. I will use this exploratory model to gauge the topical inflection of the pianto motif in contemporary operas by John Adams, Kaija Saairaho, and film music by Toru Takemitsu.
Posts
