[Smt-talk] Carl Vine's First Piano Sonata

[Stephen Soderberg]

Scott, you and others should think about keeping such a folder on line as a blog.

This is what I've been doing with Essays & Endnotes which I started back in March. The benefits of such a "miscellaneous" theory/philosophy blog are numerous. E.g., an entry on your interesting observations on the Vine sonata would be available to anyone searching Vine by simply using "Carl Vine" as a label. You might use a blog entry or series of entries as a w.i.p. drawing comments & resulting in a publishable work. Or you might make an observation that you immediately forget about but later stimulates an idea in someone else. Or it may be a thought that mercifully dies. Etc. etc. You can also control any comments made by readers, encouraging on-topic discussion & filtering out junk. Of course, as you can tell from E&EN, this sort of blog also gives you ample opportunity to make a fool out of yourself. I'm not sure why music theorists haven't taken advantage of the possibilities of "technical blogging."

Right now E&EN is on hold until I finish a major relocation, but will resume in late November or December.

Cheers!

Steve

Stephen Soderberg
Specialist in Contemporary Music (retired)
Music Division
Library of Congress

On Oct 24, 2013, at 03:16 PM, "Murphy, Scott Brandon" <smurphy at ku.edu> wrote:

You may be like this, too: tucked away, I have a little folder in which I store little analytical observations that, 1) in of themselves, seem not substantial enough to exclusively constitute the subject of a publishable piece, given the sizes of publication containers that appear to be currently available, 2) are enough different from what I typically do that I probably won't amass more similar observations to reach a publishable critical mass anytime soon (or, in some cases, within my lifetime), and 3) are interesting enough and, as best as I know or can guess, non-duplicative of current research that, despite instincts that insist I hoard them all, I think other scholars, even if just one other, in my discipline might appreciate knowing about them, and perhaps use them for greater gains. Of course, for any observation, I may be wrong on any or all of these three counts.

Here's a recent addition to that folder.

Australian composer Carl Vine's Piano Sonata from 1990 begins with the pianist silently depressing A0, C1, E1, G1, and B1 and keeping them undamped with the sostenuto pedal for the first 12 measures. In a very short preface, the composer tells the performer that the tempo markings are "not suggestions but indications of absolute speed." The first 103 measures of the work, before a "poco allargando" in m. 104 and "Poco meno" tempo change involving a factor of 11 in m. 105, establish various isochronous pulses with wavelengths slower than 250 ms. These pulses group into exactly five "tempo classes" by equivalence of 2:1 ratios. If the first "tempo class" in the work is represented as 1, then the other four tempo classes can be represented as 1.2, 1.5, 1.8, and 2.25.  If the frequency of the pitch class A is represented as 1, then the other four pitch-class frequencies in the opening "silent" chord can be represented in just intonation as 1.2, 1.5, 1.8, and 2.25. (Such an analogy could also be demonstrated using the method Lewin used in GMIT to analyze a passage from Carter's First String Quintet.)

Yours,

-Scott

--
Scott Murphy
Associate Professor, Music Theory
Director, Music Theory and Composition Division
University of Kansas School of Music
smurphy at ku.edu

P.S. Happy conferencing next week. I wish I were there.
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