Musical Motives

The da-da-da-DUM motive from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is an undeniably evocative moment for any music fan. Whether it be a first foray into classical music, childhood piano lessons, or the soundtrack to a beloved movie scene, this is a moment not easily forgotten. So what makes this andother musical motives so memorable? In Musical Motives, author Brent Auerbachs look at the ways that motives - or the small-scale pitch and rhythm shapes ever-present in music - tie musical compositions together, and why we remember some more than others.Musical motives function like motifs in visual art, tying together sonic space. They repeat frequently, either as perfect copies or with slight variation. With presence in all musical genres from classical and popular to jazz and world music, motives are ideal tools for musical analysis. Openingwith an introduction to motives, Musical Motives offers a new and universal system of motivic nomenclature, then demonstrates how motives - both in small and in expanded forms stretching over many measures - help explain the structure and drama of musical works. Taking amateurs and experts alikeinto consideration, Auerbach provides two tiers of analytic method: Basic and Complex Motivic Analysis. To illustrate these methods, he offers large-scale analyses of pieces by Handel, Beethoven, Mozart, Chaminade, Radiohead, and others.

This book shows how recent work in cognitive science, especially that developed by cognitive linguists and cognitive psychologists, can be used to explain how we understand music. The book focuses on three cognitive processes--categorization, cross-domain mapping, and the use of conceptual models--and explores the part these play in theories of musical organization. The first part of the book provides a detailed overview of the relevant work in cognitive science, framed around specific musical examples. The second part brings this perspective to bear on a number of issues with which music scholarship has often been occupied, including the emergence of musical syntax and its relationship to musical semiosis, the problem of musical ontology, the relationship between words and music in songs, and conceptions of musical form and musical hierarchy. The book will be of interest to music theorists, musicologists, and ethnomusicologists, as well as those with a professional or avocational interest in the application of work in cognitive science to humanistic principles.

The first thorough theoretical study of Janácek's compositions, focusing on motivic and rhythmic structure and identifying elements that give the music coherence, character, and interest.

Definitions -- Transformations -- Assimilative allusions -- Contrastive allusions -- Texting -- Inspiration -- Naming -- Allusive traditions and audiences -- Motives for allusion.

The first edition of Ernst Kurth’s Musikpsychologie appeared in 1931, and was regarded by contemporaneous psychologists as no less than the foundation for a new systematic approach to the perception and cognition of music. Time has hardly diminished Kurth’s standing as an original scholar with a distinctive point of view. Music theorists, both in Europe and North America, regard him as an important figure in the history of music theory. Daphne Tan and Christoph Neidhöfer’s first full translation provides English-speaking theorists the opportunity to delve deeper into his ideas. Indeed, Kurth’s concerns – listening habits and habituation, metaphorical language, the limits of memory, and the role of the body in music experience, to name a few – are shared by many in the field today, especially scholars who work at the intersections of music theory, psychology, linguistics, and related disciplines. And while Kurth’s approach lacks the scientific rigour of modern-day empirical musicology, Musikpsychologie nevertheless presents a source of testable hypotheses for those working in the area of music perception and cognition. This translation of Musikpsychologie also has the potential to inspire a new generation of composers, especially through the topics in the second section (energy, force, space, and matter) and, given the inherently interdisciplinary nature of this book and the number of philosophical and scientific sources Kurth incorporates, it will appeal to those interested in the history of science and particularly in the emergence of psychology as an academic discipline in the early 20th century.