Thesiss

In the late 1970s and 1980s, composer-pianist Easley Blackwood wrote a series of microtonal compositions exploring the tonal and modal behavior of a dozen non–twelve-tone equal temperaments, ranging from 13 to 24 tones per octave. This dissertation investigates a central paradox…

In music both popular and classical since the nineteenth century, one finds everywhere chord progressions that alternate between two harmonies in ways that deviate from conventional “textbook” tonality. This thesis aims to answer the following questions: are there meaningful gen…

This dissertation investigates the history of Western European tonality through the prism of the Phrygian cadence and the Phrygian mode. It takes as its starting point the question of how a note that was expressly a final according to medieval and Renaissance modal theory was ab…

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, harmonization of plainchant melodies had become a trend among church organists. In their harmonizations, many of these organists freely applied the harmonic conventions of what may be characterized today as common-practice tonality, su…

That mid-to-late nineteenth-century chromatic tonality challenges diatonic-based prolongational models of tonality is a well-known assertion. Recently, the field has embraced alternative frameworks, especially neo-Riemannian and transformational approaches, to account for cohere…