I was in Canada last week for the annual meeting of the Society for Music Theory (as it turns out, maybe I should have stayed…). It was, overall, a pretty good meeting: I saw old friends, old teachers, and some good papers. More after the break.

The conference was in Vancouver, and getting out to the West Coast is always sort of a pain from here. I left the house Wednesday around 5:00 am, then flew to Atlanta, then Toronto, and on to Vancouver. I landed there around 4:30 pm (Pacific), and made my way by train through the rain to my hotel. From there, it was directly on to the dinner and the Networking committee meeting. (During which the Cubs won the World Series, and Sean made the ominously prescient observation that they had roughly the same chances of winning as Donald Trump.)

The conference proper started on Thursday afternoon, after a lazy morning spent acclimating to Pacific time. I saw more papers than I anticipated: most of them good. Here, for the record.

Papers/Sessions I saw

Thursday:

  • A special session: Music Theory, African Rhythm, and the Politics of Data: Three Analyses of a Corpus of Jembe Drum Music from Mali. I’m not particularly interested in music from Mali, but I do enjoy rhythm and meter. I caught Justin London’s talk, “Statistical Learning and Rhythm–Meter Relationships in Jembe Drum Ensemble Music from Mali” and Rainer Polak’s, “Non-Isochronous Beat Subdivision and Ensemble Synchronization in Jembe Drum Ensemble Music from Mali.” Both were interesting, and London seems to be backing off of his previous work on non-isochronous meters (at least in this repertoire), which was interesting to hear.

  • Two papers in the “Positional Listening/Positional Analysis” session, which was mostly good: John Covach’s A View from Guitar Land: Shifting Positional Listening in Complex Textures and Kevin Holm-Hudson’s Stratified Keyboard Harmony in the Music of Todd Rundgren.

  • Daniel Thompson, A Topical Exploration of the Jazz Messengers’ 1963 Recording “One by One”. I heard a shorter version of this talk last year at Music Theory Southeast, but the longer version was good too. I’m always happy to have more people talking about jazz, especially if (like me), they’re skeptical of Schenkerian analysis of it.

  • James Hepokoski, Shattering the Bonds of Nature: The Queen of the Night Invades Enemy Territory. This paper was very similar to a paper my friend Paul Sherrill gave at SMT 2013, but other than that it was fine.

  • Stephen Rodgers, Schubert’s Idyllic Periods. This paper was one of my favorites, not least because it talked about some of my favorite passages in Schubert. Stephen sang along with Harald Krebs at the piano, but this session was marred by the sound bleed issues at the Sheraton: it was difficult to hear Schubert over (I think) Elliot Carter coming in from next door.

Friday:

  • A special session, SMT Goes to High School: The AP Music Theory Outreach Project. If I’m being perfectly honest, I didn’t actually mean to go to this session, but it was enlightening! I was only dimly aware of AP music theory, but this session was a good introduction to how the exam is written and graded, along with some nice videos from high-school students who are taking theory now.

  • Rodney Garrison, Schenker’s Elucidations on Unfolding Compound Voices from Der Tonwille 6 (1923) to Der freie Satz (1935). This was a good overview of how Schenker treated unfolding throughout his career, though I was hoping for more analysis in the talk. (Side note: there seemed to be hardly any Schenker at all on the program this year.)

  • The Jazz Interest Group meeting, where we had lightning talks:

    • Daniel Blake, “Space Is The Place”: Composition In New York City’s Improvised Music Scene
    • Garrett Michaelsen, Interactional Listening: Between Atomism and Holism
    • Clay Downham, Collective Improvisational Schemata in Lennie Tristano’s Musical Community
    • Michael McClimon (that’s me!), Harmonic Interaction in Stitt & Rollins’s “The Eternal Triangle"
    • Paul Steinbeck, “Music is seen as well as heard”: Visible Interaction and Jazz Analysis

  • Chris Stover, Timeline Spaces: A Theory of Temporal Process in African Drum/Dance Music. This was a nice paper, although I’m not 100% sure I understood it all.

  • John McKay, Formalizing the Eroica: The E Minor Theme and the Structure of Analytical Revolutions. Also a nice paper, comparing historical approaches to the Eroica to Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Saturday:

  • Jeremy Smith, “I Know It’s Over”: Melodically-Established Keys and Tonal (Non-)Closure in Contemporary Popular Music. I try to go to a few pop music papers every year, since I have a passing interest. This one was pretty good, and if nothing else, we got a bunch of Katie Perry songs on Saturday morning.

  • Mary Ellen (Molly) Ryan, “Our Enemies Are Gathered Together”: The Politics of Motets in the Newberry Partbooks. The only AMS paper I went to, because Molly is a friend and we worked at CHMTL together. I didn’t understand every word of this paper, but it was well-presented (again, notwithstanding the sound bleed from next door).

  • Rich Pellegrin, Salience, Common Tones, and Middleground Dissonance in the Fourth Chorus of Brad Mehldau’s Improvisation on “All the Things You Are”. Another jazz paper: Rich is a nice guy and presents well, though I disagree with most of his theoretical work.

  • Scott Burnham’s keynote talk, Words and Music, which was incredible. The topic was great, and he nailed the format.

I think that’s all of them, though I may have missed one or two. Other highlights of my conference mostly included seeing old friends and colleagues. The conference hotel wasn’t great, but I’ll redirect you to my friend Megan’s post on more generalities, including a Twitter roundup.

Sunday we left the hotel about 6:00 am, and I got home about 10:30 pm, before beginning what has turned into one of the longest weeks in recent memory. But more on that next time.

Tagged: theory, travel