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Fwd: Re: The Bach Choral Dilemma
Title: Fwd: Re: The Bach Choral
Dilemma
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 2003 17:50:27 -0500
From: Eliot Handelman <eliot@generation.net>
X-Accept-Language: en
To: Piet Vos <vos@NICI.KUN.NL>
Subject: Re: The Bach Choral Dilemma
Status:
Piet Vos wrote:
> A nice
> and unfortunately rather underexposed form of the ambiguity
in
> question concerns the so called overlap phenomenon. It refers to
the
> fact that a certain tone,more precisely interval, (chord,
or chord constituent) functions both
> as the END of a phrase / theme / motive, and simultaneously as
the
> BEGINNING of the next phrase etc.
Another extremely simple example of non-hierarchical structure in
music
is the modulation (ie, change of key). A common way to do this is
to go through a zone which is interpretable in both keys (the
so-called
"pivot"). A smooth modulation is one where the "pivot"
acquires its
identity
as pivot only by reinterpretation, after it's been heard. So there
are
in this case two listening processes at work -- one anticipatory
(ie,
the sense we will persist in this key) and another
retro-interpretative,
each with its own dynamic segmentation or parsing. The interplay
of
these
two processes is (if I may just say so apodictically) clearly part
of
what
music is all about.
You are right with your modulation example as another
ubiquitously present manifestation of nonhierarchical structure in
(Western tonal) music. Modulation is a "piece de resistance"
for key-finding models: at one hand, such a model has to be stable in
face of "pseudomodulations" like chromaticisms and on the
other, it should be sensitive to true modulations. The Vos & van
Geenen (1996) Parallel processing Key-finding model (PPM) proved
rather succesful in dealing with the tonal interpretation dilemma in
question.
--
Piet G. Vos
section Perception NICI, U. Nijmegen
P.O.Box 9104
6500 HE Nijmegen NL
tel: +31 24 36126 31/20; fax: +31 24 361 60 66; vos@nici.kun.nl
home-page: http://www.nici.kun.nl/~vos
et altissimus humilissimum facere debet