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In this boldly innovative book, renowned musicologist Susan McClary presents an illuminating cultural interpretation of the Italian madrigal, one of the most influential repertories of the Renaissance. A genre that sought to produce simulations in sound of complex interiorities, the madrigal introduced into music a vast range of new signifying practices: musical representations of emotions, desire, gender stereotypes, reason, madness, tensions between mind and body, and much more. In doing so, it not only greatly expanded the expressive agendas of European music but also recorded certain assumptions of the time concerning selfhood, making it an invaluable resource for understanding the history of Western subjectivity.Modal Subjectivitiescovers the span of the sixteenth-century polyphonic madrigal, from its early manifestations in Philippe Verdelot's settings of Machiavelli in the 1520s through the tortured chromatic experiments of Carlo Gesualdo. Although McClary takes the lyrics into account in shaping her readings, she focuses particularly on the details of the music itself-the principal site of the genre's self-fashionings. In order to work effectively with musical meanings in this pretonal repertory, she also develops an analytical method that allows her to unravel the sophisticated allegorical structures characteristic of the madrigal. This pathbreaking book demonstrates how we might glean insights into a culture on the basis of its nonverbal artistic enterprises.

Music has existed in human societies since prehistory, perhaps because it allows expression and regulation of emotion and evokes pleasure. In this review, we present findings from cognitive neuroscience that bear on the question of how we get from perception of sound patterns to pleasurable responses. First, we identify some of the auditory cortical circuits that are responsible for encoding and storing tonal patterns and discuss evidence that cortical loops between auditory and frontal cortices are important for maintaining musical information in working memory and for the recognition of structural regularities in musical patterns, which then lead to expectancies. Second, we review evidence concerning the mesolimbic striatal system and its involvement in reward, motivation, and pleasure in other domains. Recent data indicate that this dopaminergic system mediates pleasure associated with music; specifically, reward value for music can be coded by activity levels in the nucleus accumbens, whose functional connectivity with auditory and frontal areas increases as a function of increasing musical reward. We propose that pleasure in music arises from interactions between cortical loops that enable predictions and expectancies to emerge from sound patterns and subcortical systems responsible for reward and valuation.

Hierarchical structure with nested nonlocal dependencies is a key feature of human language and can be identified theoretically in most pieces of tonal music. However, previous studies have argued against the perception of such structures in music. Here, we show processing of nonlocal dependencies in music. We presented chorales by J. S. Bach and modified versions in which the hierarchical structure was rendered irregular whereas the local structure was kept intact. Brain electric responses differed between regular and irregular hierarchical structures, in both musicians and nonmusicians. This finding indicates that, when listening to music, humans apply cognitive processes that are capable of dealing with long-distance dependencies resulting from hierarchically organized syntactic structures. Our results reveal that a brain mechanism fundamental for syntactic processing is engaged during the perception of music, indicating that processing of hierarchical structure with nested nonlocal dependencies is not just a key component of human language, but a multidomain capacity of human cognition.

Music moves us. Its kinetic power is the foundation of human behaviors as diverse as dance, romance, lullabies, and the military march. Despite its significance, the music-movement relationship is poorly understood. We present an empirical method for testing whether music and movement share a common structure that affords equivalent and universal emotional expressions. Our method uses a computer program that can generate matching examples of music and movement from a single set of features: rate, jitter (regularity of rate), direction, step size, and dissonance/visual spikiness. We applied our method in two experiments, one in the United States and another in an isolated tribal village in Cambodia. These experiments revealed three things: (i) each emotion was represented by a unique combination of features, (ii) each combination expressed the same emotion in both music and movement, and (iii) this common structure between music and movement was evident within and across cultures.

Analysis of 18th- and 19th-Century Musical Works in the Classical Tradition is a textbook for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in music analysis. It outlines a process of analyzing works in the Classical tradition by uncovering the construction of a piece of music-the formal, harmonic, rhythmic, and voice-leading organizations-as well as its unique features. It develops an in-depth approach that is applied to works by composers including Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms. The book begins with foundational chapters in music theory, starting with basic diatonic harmony and progressing rapidly to more advanced topics, such as phrase design, phrase expansion, and chromatic harmony. The second part contains analyses of complete musical works and movements. The text features over 150 musical examples, including numerous complete annotated scores. Suggested assignments at the end of each chapter guide students in their own musical analysis.

Analyzing Classical Form offers an approach to the analysis of musical form that is especially suited for classroom use at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Students will learn how to make complete harmonic and formal analyses of music drawn from the instrumental works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

Musical form can be conceptualized in two basic ways, temporally or spatially. The temporal approach conceives of form diachronically, as a series of events that unfold through time, whereas the spatial approach conceives of form synchronically, as a synoptic design in which the relationship of the individual parts to the whole is apparent at once. These two modes are interdependent and by no means mutually exclusively. Indeed, virtually every account of musical form—either in the abstract or as applied to a specific work—draws on both concepts to varying degrees. Narrative accounts that relate a series of events often rely on spatial imagery, and the formal diagrams that are a standard feature of analytical discourse nowadays almost invariably reflect the progression of music through time. Not until 1825, however, did any critic or theorist attempt to represent musical form in an essentially spatial, synoptic manner. Antoine Reicha's diagrams of binary, ternary, and rondo forms in hisTraité de haute composition musicale, moreover, found little resonance among his contemporaries. Even the simplest formal diagrams would remain a rarity for another seventy-five years and would not become a standard element of theoretical accounts of form until the early twentieth century. Spatial representations of form were slow to emerge and gain acceptance, at least in part because of a broader reluctance to accept the premise of depicting linear time in two-dimensional space.

Music theorists often presumethat the sections of a musical masterwork match organically, enhancing unity and value. This \"inner form\" should be distinguished from coherence associated with inter-opus constraints, such as conventional forms. Studies indicate that violating inter-opus constraints hardly affects listeners' aesthetic judgments. Here we examine how violating inner form affects such judgments. Musically trained and untrained listeners heard the intact opening movements of Mozart's piano sonatas, K. 280 and 332, as well as hybrids mixing sections from these two movements while maintaining overall form and tonal structure. Participants rated originals and hybrids on aesthetically relevant scales (e.g., liking, coherence, interest), after a single hearing and following extended exposure. Results show no significant preference for originals, even after repeated hearings. Music training tended to enhance preference for hybrid over original. Thus, inner form and its supposed organic unity, presumed tenets of musical genius, may not affect listeners' evaluation.

This article presents an ecological theory of musical preference. A core idea of the theory is that musical forms depend on people for their existence. The theory argues that people are a resource for types of music; musical forms compete for the time, energy, and preferences of individuals. Musical types carve out niches in different sociodemographic segments of society. According to the theory, the niche pattern develops because musical preferences are transmitted through homophilous social network ties; similar people interact with each other and develop similar musical tastes. The article develops six hypotheses that relate individuals' social positions to their musical preferences. Tests with 1993 General Social Survey data support these hypotheses.