Department of Music

Analysts of Cage’s music face many challenges. The rigorous use of chance procedures, multifaceted and multimodal nature of Cage’s creative work, indeterminacy of the score in relation to performance, and large scale of some of Cage’s works, all raise basic questions of analytic methodology. But even more fundamental is the need to articulate an ethic of music analysis appropriate for Cage’s music: not how one analyzes, but whether one can, or should, analyze it; who analyzes; and why. In “Asking Questions” (the first of two short papers), the focus is not on methodology but on these broader questions. Intention (especially the asymmetry of intention among composer, performer, and listener); the ecology of musical sound; and the politics, nature, and purpose of music analysis, are all considerations as an ethic of music analysis is developed as a non-reductive, transformative activity, a process of inquiry and discovery. Proceeding along these lines, in “Making Music,” the process of how two pianists and one reflective listener-analyst “make music” of a short excerpt from the sixth piece of Cage’s Etudes Australes (1974) is explored. The Etudes is a set of thirty-two pieces for piano solo composed using star charts and chance operations; two recordings will be referenced, by Grete Sultan (1978) and Sabine Liebner (2011).

Dora Hanninen is Associate Professor of Music Theory and Chair of the Theory/Composition Division at the University of Maryland. Her work engages broad issues in music analysis, such as the construal of repetition, rationales for segmentation, and aspects of categorization. Analytical writings have focused on the work of twentieth-century American composers, including Babbitt, Feldman, Morris, Nancarrow, Riley, and Wolpe. In 2010, Prof. Hanninen received the Society for Music Theory’s Outstanding Publication Award for “Associative Sets, Categories, and Music Analysis” (Journal of Music Theory 48/1). Her most recent publications include a tribute to Milton Babbitt, “What Words Cannot Express (Music Does),” published in Music Theory Spectrum 34/1 (Spring 2012) and her book, A Theory of Music Analysis: On Segmentation and Associative Organization, published by the University of Rochester Press, in December 2012.