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The fictional Dr. Strabismus sets out to write a new comprehensive theory of music. But music's tendency to deconstruct itself combined with the complexities of postmodernism doom him to failure. This is the parable that framesThe Sense of Music,a novel treatment of music theory that reinterprets the modern history of Western music in the terms of semiotics. Based on the assumption that music cannot be described without reference to its meaning, Raymond Monelle proposes that works of the Western classical tradition be analyzed in terms of temporality, subjectivity, and topic theory. Critical of the abstract analysis of musical scores, Monelle argues that the score does not reveal music'ssense.That sense--what a piece of music says and signifies--can be understood only with reference to history, culture, and the other arts. Thus, music is meaningful in that it signifies cultural temporalities and themes, from the traditional manly heroism of the hunt to military power to postmodern \"polyvocality.\" This theoretical innovation allows Monelle to describe how the Classical style of the eighteenth century--which he reads as a balance of lyric and progressive time--gave way to the Romantic need for emotional realism. He argues that irony and ambiguity subsequently eroded the domination of personal emotion in Western music as well as literature, killing the composer's subjectivity with that of the author. This leaves Dr. Strabismus suffering from the postmodern condition, and Raymond Monelle with an exciting, controversial new approach to understanding music and its history.

The segmentation of symbolic music phrases is crucial for music information retrieval and structural analysis. However, existing BiLSTM-CRF methods mainly rely on local semantics, making it difficult to capture long-range dependencies, leading to inaccurate phrase boundary recognition across measures or themes. Traditional Transformer models use static embeddings, limiting their adaptability to different musical styles, structures, and melodic evolutions. Moreover, multi-head self-attention struggles with local context modeling, causing the loss of short-term information (e.g., pitch variation, melodic integrity, and rhythm stability), which may result in over-segmentation or merging errors. To address these issues, we propose a segmentation method integrating local context enhancement and global structure awareness. This method overcomes traditional models’ limitations in long-range dependency modeling, improves phrase boundary recognition, and adapts to diverse musical styles and melodies. Specifically, dynamic note embeddings enhance contextual awareness across segments, while an improved attention mechanism strengthens both global semantics and local context modeling. Combining these strategies ensures reasonable phrase boundaries and prevents unnecessary segmentation or merging. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for symbolic music phrase segmentation, with phrase boundaries better aligned to musical structures.

In her new book, Carolyn Abbate considers the nature of operatic performance and the acoustic images of performance present in operas from Monteverdi to Ravel. Paying tribute to music's realization by musicians and singers, she argues that operatic works are indelibly bound to the contingency of live singing, playing, and staging. She seeks a middle ground between operas as abstractions and performance as the phenomenon that brings opera into being. Weaving between opera's \"facts of life\" and a series of works includingThe Magic Flute, Parsifal, andPelléas, Abbate explores a spectrum of attitudes towards musical performance, which range from euphoric visions of singers as creators to uncanny images of musicians as lifeless objects that have been resuscitated by scripts. In doing so, she touches upon several critical issues: the Wagner problem; coloratura, virtuosity, and their critics; the implications of disembodied voice in opera and film; mechanical music; the mortality of musical sound; and opera's predilection for scenes positing mysterious unheard music. An intersection between transcendence and intense physical grounding, she asserts, is a quintessential element of the genre, one source of the rapture that operas and their singers can engender in listeners. In Search of Operamediates between an experience of opera that can be passionate and intuitive, and an intellectual engagement with opera as a complicated aesthetic phenomenon. Marrying philosophical speculation to historical detail, Abbate contemplates a central dilemma: the ineffability of music and the diverse means by which a fugitive art is best expressed in words. All serious devotees of opera will want to read this imaginative book by s music-critical virtuoso.

Deciphering the structural hierarchy of musical compositions is indispensable for a range of music analysis applications, encompassing feature extraction, data compression, interpretation, and visualization. In this paper, we introduce a quantitative model grounded in fractal theory to evaluate the significance of individual notes within a musical piece. To analyze the quantized note importance, we adopt a rhythm-based approach and propose a series of detection operators informed by fundamental rhythmic combinations. Employing the Mamba model, we carry out recursive detection operations that offer a hierarchic understanding of musical structures. By organizing the composition into a tree data structure, we achieve an ordered layer traversal that highlights the music piece’s multi-dimensional features. Musical compositions often exhibit intrinsic symmetry in their temporal organization, manifested through repetition, variation, and self-similar patterns across scales. Among these symmetry properties, fractality stands out as a prominent characteristic, reflecting recursive structures both rhythmically and melodically. Our model effectively captures this property, providing insights into the fractal-like regularities within music. It also proves effective in musical phrase boundary detection tasks, enhancing the clarity and visualization of musical information. The findings illustrate the model’s potential to advance the quantitative analysis of music hierarchy, promoting novel methodologies in musicological research.

In this bold recasting of operatic history, Gary Tomlinson connects opera to shifting visions of metaphysics and selfhood across the last four hundred years. The operatic voice, he maintains, has always acted to open invisible, supersensible realms to the perceptions of its listeners. In doing so, it has articulated changing relations between the self and metaphysics. Tomlinson examines these relations as they have been described by philosophers from Ficino through Descartes, Kant, and Nietzsche, to Adorno, all of whom worked to define the subject's place in both material and metaphysical realms. The author then shows how opera, in its own cultural arena, distinct from philosophy, has repeatedly brought to the stage these changing relations of the subject to the particular metaphysics it presumes. Covering composers from Jacopo Peri to Wagner, from Lully to Verdi, and from Mozart to Britten, Metaphysical Song details interactions of song, words, drama, and sounds used by creators of opera to fill in the outlines of the subjectivities they envisioned. The book offers deep-seated explanations for opera's enduring fascination in European elite culture and suggests some of the profound difficulties that have unsettled this fascination since the time of Wagner.

Before the nineteenth century, instrumental music was considered inferior to vocal music. Kant described wordless music as \"more pleasure than culture,\" and Rousseau dismissed it for its inability to convey concepts. But by the early 1800s, a dramatic shift was under way. Purely instrumental music was now being hailed as a means to knowledge and embraced precisely because of its independence from the limits of language. What had once been perceived as entertainment was heard increasingly as a vehicle of thought. Listening had become a way of knowing. Music as Thought traces the roots of this fundamental shift in attitudes toward listening in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on responses to the symphony in the age of Beethoven, Mark Evan Bonds draws on contemporary accounts and a range of sources--philosophical, literary, political, and musical--to reveal how this music was experienced by those who heard it first.

Derived from the colorful traditions of vaudeville, burlesque, revue, and operetta, the musical has blossomed into America's most popular form of theater. Scott McMillin has developed a fresh aesthetic theory of this underrated art form, exploring the musical as a type of drama deserving the kind of critical and theoretical regard given to Chekhov or opera. Until recently, the musical has been considered either an \"integrated\" form of theater or an inferior sibling of opera. McMillin demonstrates that neither of these views is accurate, and that the musical holds true to the disjunctive and irreverent forms of popular entertainment from which it arose a century ago. Critics and composers have long held the musical to the standards applied to opera, asserting that each piece should work together to create a seamless drama. But McMillin argues that the musical is a different form of theater, requiring the suspension of the plot for song. The musical's success lies not in the smoothness of unity, but in the crackle of difference. While disparate, the dancing, music, dialogue, and songs combine to explore different aspects of the action and the characters. Discussing composers and writers such as Rodgers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Kander and Ebb, Leonard Bernstein, and Jerome Kern,The Musical as Dramadescribes the continuity of this distinctively American dramatic genre, from the shows of the 1920s and 1930s to the musicals of today.

This book may well become the next big statement on nineteenth-century music as a cultural phenomenon. Many will argue with it and, indeed, argue passionately--this is, after all, the proverbial problem that arises when one brings up religion and politics!--but that is precisely what is wanted and valued now. Moreover, it is not only accessible but will be vastly rewarding to music scholars, general and cultural historians, cultural theorists, and even many people who would simply describe themselves as music lovers.

It has long been argued that opera is all about sex.Siren Songsis the first collection of articles devoted to exploring the impact of this sexual obsession, and of the power relations that come with it, on the music, words, and staging of opera. Here a distinguished and diverse group of musicologists, literary critics, and feminist scholars address a wide range of fascinating topics--from Salome's striptease to hysteria to jazz and gender--in Italian, English, German, and French operas from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. The authors combine readings of specific scenes with efforts to situate these musical moments within richly and precisely observed historical contexts. Challenging both formalist categories of musical analysis and the rhetoric that traditionally pits a male composer against the female characters he creates, many of the articles work toward inventing a language for the study of gender and opera. The collection opens with Mary Ann Smart's introduction, which provides an engaging reflection on the state of gender topics in operatic criticism and musicology. It then moves on to a foundational essay on the complex relationships between opera and history by the renowned philosopher and novelist Catherine Clément, a pioneer of feminist opera criticism. Other articles examine the evolution of the \"trouser role\" as it evolved in the lesbian subculture offin-de-siècleParis, the phenomenon ofopera seria's\"absent mother\" as a manifestation of attitudes to the family under absolutism, the invention of a \"hystericized voice\" in Verdi'sDon Carlos,and a collaborative discussion of the staging problems posed by the gender politics of Mozart's operas. The contributors are Wye Jamison Allanboork, Joseph Auner, Katherine Bergeron, Philip Brett, Peter Brooks, Catherine Clement, Martha Feldman, Heather Hadlock, Mary Hunter, Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, M.D., Lawrence Kramer, Roger Parker, Mary Ann Smart, and Gretchen Wheelock.

The American musical has long provided an important vehicle through which writers, performers, and audiences reimagine who they are and how they might best interact with the world around them. Musicals are especially good at this because they provide not only an opportunity for us to enact dramatic versions of alternative identities, but also the material for performing such alternatives in the real world, through songs and the characters and attitudes those songs project.