Department of Music

The Music Department is a community of creators and thinkers who explore worlds of music, sound, and performance. Students learn to make and engage with a wide range of music and sonic cultures, from medieval songs to viral TikToks, from birdsongs to electronic music. We offer a music major and two minors, and students from across the university have access to first-rate faculty and to performance opportunities in a wide range of ensembles. In our undergraduate courses and ensembles, we aim to provide an integrative context within which performance is seen as an integral part of our academic pursuits. Our graduate programs in music studies (musicology, ethnomusicology, theory) and composition are known for fostering creativity and rigor, thanks to the high degree of interaction and collaboration among students and faculty. We also listen to and engage with the vibrant cultural lives of Philadelphia, seeking to foster relationships with the wider communities in our city.

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Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
  • Publication
    Harmonic Closure: Music Theory and Perception
    (1992) Rosner, Burton S.; Narmour, Eugene
    Music theorists have often disagreed about the material variables that determine the perception of harmonic closure. To investigate this controversial topic, we presented subjects with pairs of selected two-chord progressions. The subjects judged which member of each pair seemed more closed. Preferences varied across pairs of cadences and generally obeyed transitivity. Quantitative reformulation of theoretical harmonic variables permitted correlational analysis of the results. Three or four variables, including one or two that reflect learned stylistic structures, best explained our findings. Conventional harmonic factors of scale step, soprano position, and root position demonstrated surprisingly little explanatory power.
  • Publication
    Music Expectation by Cognitive Rule-Mapping
    (2000-01-01) Narmour, Eugene
    Iterative rules appear everywhere in music cognition, creating strong expectations. Consequently, denial of rule projection becomes an important compositional strategy, generating numerous possibilities for musical affect. Other rules enter the musical aesthetic through reflexive game playing. Still other kinds are completely constructivist in nature and may be uncongenial to cognition, requiring much training to be recognized, if at all. Cognitive rules are frequently found in contexts of varied repetition (AA), but they are not necessarily bounded by stylistic similarity. Indeed, rules may be especially relevant in the processing of unfamiliar contexts (AB), where only abstract coding is available. There are many kinds of deduction in music cognition. Typical examples include melodic sequence, partial melodic sequence, and alternating melodic sequence (which produces streaming). These types may coexist in the musical fabric, involving the invocation of both simultaneous and nested rules. Intervallic expansion and reduction in melody also involve higherorder abstractions. Various mirrored forms in music entail rule-mapping as well, although these may be more difficult to perceive than their analogous visual symmetries. Listeners can likewise deduce additivity and subtractivity at work in harmony, tempo, texture, pace, and dynamics. Rhythmic augmentation and diminution, by contrast, rely on multiplication and division. The examples suggest numerous hypotheses for experimental research.
  • Publication
    Our Varying Histories and Future Potential: Models and Maps in Science, the Humanities, and in Music Theory
    (2011-09-01) Narmour, Eugene
    Part 1 briefly recounts the influence of social unrest and the explosion of knowledge in both psychology and the humanities circa 1970-1990. As the sciences rely on explicit top-down theories connected to bottom-up maps and models, and whereas the humanities build on bottom-up differences within malleable top-down “theories” (approaches, themes, theses, programs, methods, etc.), the changes in the sciences during this period contrasted sharply with the changes in the humanities. Part 2 discusses in detail how these two social transformations affected the histories of music theory and cognitive music theory. The former fractiously withdrew from its parent organization (AMS), whereas the latter was welcomed into SMPC. Inasmuch as both music theory and cognitive music theory rely on maps and models, Part 3 examines the metatheoretical importance of these terms for music cognition, music theory, and cognitive music theory. Part 4 speculates about the future—how music cognition, cognitive music theory, and music theory contribute to the structure of musical knowledge. The intellectual potential of this unique triadic collaboration is discussed: psychology provides a commanding empirical framework of the human mind, while music theory and cognitive music theory logically model moment-to-moment temporal emotions and the auditory intellections at the core of musical art.
  • Publication
    Some Major Theoretical Problems Concerning the Concept of Hierarchy in the Analysis of Tonal Music
    (1983) Narmour, Eugene
    Level-analysis in the field of music theory today is rarely hierarchical, at least in the strict sense of the term. Most current musical theories view levels systemically. One problem with this approach is that it usually does not distinguish compositional structures from perceptual structures. Another is its failure to recognize that in an artifactual phenomenon the inherence of idiostructures is as crucial to the identity of an artwork as the inherence of style structures. But can the singularity of an idiostructure be captured in the generality of an analytical symbol? In music analysis, it would seem possible provided closure and nonclosure are admitted as simultaneous properties potentially present at all hierarchical levels. One complication of this assumption, however, is that both network and tree relationships result. Another is that such relationships span in both "horizontal" (temporal) and "vertical" (structural) directions. Still another complication is the emergence of transient levels. In this paper, a tentative solution to these problems is offered by invoking a hypothetical theory that relies on the cognitive concepts of return, reversal, and continuation (i.e., similarity) as regards the parameters of melody, harmony, and duration. Applied to the theme of Mozart's Piano Sonata, K. 331, this analytical theory is contrasted with several systemic analyses of the same theme by the theorists DeVoto, Lester, Schenker, and Meyer. In conclusion, the hierarchical analysis of the Mozart theme gives way to a synthesis as the melody's various levels are rendered into rankings of pitch shown on one level only.
  • Publication
    The Top-Down and Bottom-Up Systems of Musical Implication: Building on Meyer's Theory of Emotional Syntax
    (1991) Narmour, Eugene
    The implication-realization model hypothesizes that emotional syntax in music is a product of two expectation systems—one top down, the other bottom up. Syntactic mismatch or conflict in realizations can occur either within each system or between them. The theory argues that interruption or suppression of parametric expectations generated separately by the two systems explains certain types of recurrent aesthetic strategies in melodic composition and accounts for the most common kinds of musical forms (AAA, AAB, ABB, ABC, and ABA).
  • Publication
    Toward a Unified Theory of the I-R Model (Part 1): Parametric Scales and Their Analogically Isomorphic Structures
    (2015-09-01) Narmour, Eugene
    By extensively revising the I-R model of by melody (Meyer, 1973; Narmour, 1984, 1989, 1990, 1991a, 1991b, 1992, 1996, 2000) we can explain the structural functions of many musical parameters. Here I will deal with melodic interval, registral direction, pitch height, scale-step (major and minor), duration (interval, length, rate, speed, and pace), tempo, dynamics (loudness), and texture (saving the other parameters for a later essay). By reconceptualizing the model’s core concept of functional directionality within parametric scales, only three isomorphic structural analogues become cognitively necessary, namely, process (and its variant duplication), reversal, and return. Attached signs (0, ~, - , +) augment the main symbols (P, D, and R) so as to track strength of implication, realization, and denial. A new theory of rhythmic structure is put forth. And with an aim toward theoretical unification, the reconfigured model confronts the combinatorial complexities of parametric interactions and offers convincing interpretations of congruence and noncongruence— the primary sources of musical affects. Works of Brahms, Debussy, Mussorgsky-Ravel, and Schoenberg are analyzed.