UCLA

My dissertation examines several interconnected binaries in music theory: flat/sharp, subdominant/dominant, and minor/major. Traditional theory positions the marked member of each pair (flat, subdominant, and minor, respectively) conceptually LEFT, DOWN and OUTSIDE of the privileged term (sharp, dominant, and major), leading to further marginalization. In my theoretical, historical, analytical and aesthetic inquiry into the ‘musical left,’ I take on Riemannian dualism, mirroring, flat side transformations, stacked fourths, and the pentatonic scale.

My deconstruction of 19th century major-minor dualism reveals the surprising “Othering” of the minor mode. Mirroring—from fugues to Riemannian dualism—cannot fully integrate with a ground-up, hierarchical practice like tonality; twentieth-century atonal musics constitute better vehicles for sustained, pure inversions.

Unlike ‘structural’ authentic cadences, the subdominant is analyzed by Schenkerians as ‘surface-level’ embellishment, but I assert that composers use autonomous applied plagals to go the ‘wrong way’ around the circle of fifths. In contrast to applied dominants, secondary subdominants—the flatted seventh double plagal, the triple plagal “backdoor” cadence, and the flatted sixth quadruple subdominant—have rarely been studied. For composers of these structures, going flat serves revolutionary ends.

Stacked fourths—commonly misinterpreted as purposeless for their tendency to “plane” non-functionally—are used by McCoy Tyner in “Blues on the Corner” to target the subdominant in what I term a “trapdoor cadence.” My taxonomy of stacked fourth chords leads to an analysis of Paul Hindemith’s ic-5 crossing over in Mathis der Maler. Motion in the flat direction is usually right to left—that is, it represents tracking back to the tonic-in-the-past, but by traveling 23 steps into the flatside, Hindemith transforms the past into the future. Quartals are the ideal vehicle for this kind of time travel, for they represent both the past (rustic antiquity) and the future (technological progress).

Some theorists and composers have treated the ic-5/7 pentatonic scale as ‘incomplete’ or primitive, but I present compositions, such as John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, that use segmented pentatonics as building blocks for ic-5 cyclic completion. Since pentatonic melodies are commonly accompanied by non-pentatonic harmonies (the so-called “melodic-harmonic divorce”), I propose a system of melodic-harmonic differentiation, as practiced by African-American musicians. I believe that this refusal to succumb to organic unity mimics heterophony, in which the individual stands out from the group.