Articles

Book Review

Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 5 by Marina Frolova-Walker and Jonathan Walker

When it comes to understanding the music of Dmitri Shostakovich, there is no battleground finer than that of the Fifth Symphony. Its position at the top of Socialist Realism’s encroachment upon the art of music, its status as a turning point in Shostakovich’s style, and its irresistible music have combined to make it a familiar friend on the stage and the page. Implicit in many anglophone writings of the last 45 years has been a “phantom program” of sorts, concerned with cleansing Shostakovich of the taint of the Soviet state. This most recent work by Marina Frolova-Walker and Jonathan Walker represents the most recent attempt to rise above the politically interested discourse of that “phantom program” and to instead place the Fifth in a properly historicised contextual nest.

Read the full review here.

The Sanguine Scholar: A Richard Taruskin Retrospective

It was my honor to have been asked by what is rapidly becoming my home journal — DSCH — to compose a retrospective on a man I believe to be the greatest musicologist ever to have breathed earthly air. Not that I am biased. Still, Richard Taruskin, it will be admitted, held a unique place in the hearts and minds of music scholarship junkies, whether that place was characterized best by love or by loathing.

In particular, my article (which came out this winter in issue 58 of DSCH) focuses on Taruskin’s fascinating and life-long relationship with Russian culture and music. In exploring the effect that Taruskin and Russian music had on each other, I hope to use Taruskin’s beloved technique of proklyatïye voprosï (“cursed questions”) to celebrate and inquire after his legacy as a musician, writer, teacher, and self-proclaimed “connoisseur of liberty.” What did he do for Russian music? What did Russian music do for him? What was his role in the “Shostakovich Wars,” and how many careers did he end before the peace treaty was signed?

Spotlight on the Music: The Journal of Dmitri Shostakovich (DSCH)

Beloved Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich once famously instructed an ensemble to play his last string quartet “so that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience starts leaving the hall from sheer boredom.” What on earth did he mean? Can that imperative give us some insight into the strange, twisting folds of the quartet?

Here is a short article with my analysis.

Q.v. my full length article on the same subject.

Song for a Lost Hero

When a player in a videogame enters a maze, what becomes of the music? How might music make a player feel lost? This paper proposes a theory of musical function in mazes through an analysis of music and play in the Lost Woods, a sylvan labyrinth that safeguards the almighty Master Sword in Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (BOTW) (Nintendo, 2017). The latest main entry in the Zelda series, BOTW follows the story of Link, an anointed knight of Hyrule who has awakened a century after a calamitous attack by the nefarious Ganon. For most of the game, the music that accompanies the player’s exploration is characterized by a relaxed tempo, sparseness (at times verging on silence), and lack of audible formal repetition.

The Lost Woods labyrinth bucks this trend entirely. So what does it do instead, and how can a deeper analysis help sound designers create a more immersive and powerful game experience?

Here is my analysis.

A Perceptual Theory of Cadential Strength

Behold, the labors of my many years of education (also called a master’s thesis).

In this paper I set out to ask and answer one stubborn question: what, really, gives a big cadence its power? The prevailing argument has to do with syntax and form, which are wonderful in close readings but don’t necessarily translate to a listening experience. Instead, I argue that the strength of a cadence has to do with the cognitive processes of prediction. In search of answers I subject Beethoven’s marvelous Opus 18 String Quartets to an exhaustive analysis.

If you’re interested, gird your loins for a lengthy and staunchly academic analysis here.