28 March | 14:30 | Seminar Room, CEIS20
Richard Cohn (Yale University), music theory teacher at Yale University and next guest at the Axes of Interdisciplinary Knowledge – Keynote Series of the Doctorate in Contemporary Studies (DEC), will give a talk on “Ancient Theories of Poetic Meter Distort Modern Conceptions of Musical Meter”.
The session will be held in English and will also be streamed via Zoom and the CEIS20 Youtube channel.
Abstract
Western musicians have a standard way of talking about the organization of musical time, via meter signatures, beats, accents, groupings, etc. These discursive modes, universally promoted in music textbooks, are in many ways estranged from musical experience, and from scientific knowledge about neurocognitive responses to music. In this talk, I argue that these disjunctions between discourse, experience, and knowledge can be traced back to theories of poetic meter in ancient Greece, in three stages moving forward: 1) the late-Renaissance revival of classical theories of poetry, and their application to contemporaneous poetry in modern languages; 2) the search for a new theory of musical meter in response to 17th-century changes in music notation, and the resulting appropriation of metric theories from poetry into music; 3) the classical status of 18th-century music theory, as a foundational basis for the treatment of both harmony and meter in the modern textbook, and in the modern discourse of musicians, even those with no interest in historical repertories or in active rebellion against its claims to authority. Each of these three stages introduced corrupting elements, as theorists placed prestigious classical authority ahead of introspective experience and scientific knowledge.
Biography
Richard Cohn is Battell Professor of Music Theory at Yale University. His research on 19th-century harmony culminated in Audacious Euphony: Chromaticism and the Triad’s Second Nature (Oxford University Press, 2012).
He is currently working on a monograph, An Analytical Model of Musical Meter. A recent article on “Meter” in the Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory previews the model. He is also completing a book for MIT Press, Mathematical Models of Musical Systems. Cohn was Founding Editor of Oxford Studies in Music Theory, and currently serves as Executive Editor of the Journal of Music Theory.