Toward a Quarter-Tone Syntax: Selected Analyses of Works by Blackwood, Hába, Ives, and Wyschnegradsky

UPDATE: It was brought to my attention that most of the links to my dissertation pages were not working. I have restored all of the content and most of the playable examples and will continue to patch up the remaining issues as I find them. I am also working on updating the images. Those ancient image files are starting to look fuzzy, especially on modern monitors.

This is where I am storing copies of my dissertation work. Although it is a web cliché to say that pages are under construction, I think it's fair to say that I still have a lot of work to do to get these pages quite where I want them. I did submit a final draft of my dissertation on Sept. 01, 2006, and defended successfully two weeks later. There were some corrections and improvements to be made, thanks to the probing questions of my committee. The PDFs on this website represent the final version of the dissertation, in the form accepted by the Graduate School at the University at Buffalo.

One of the problems that readers face when confronted with my material is that most will not have any convenient way to play the microtonal examples and so may not get a good sense of how the quarter tones actually sound. My original intent was to render as many of the musical examples (quarter-tone or otherwise) in MIDI format as is practical. At the time, I thought that most browsers would know what to do with .mid files well into the future. However, it turns out that all the competing implementations of browser MIDI playback did not converge with any sort of reliable web standard, and so instead I've converted the audio examples into short .mp3 files. The MP3s sound better than MIDIs anyway.

If you can find recordings, I'd urge you to go listen to performances of these pieces on real instruments. The electronic renderings will give accurate pitches, but you won't any of the resonance you'd get with acoustic instruments, so the MP3s on this site will always sound a bit dull when compared to a high-quality recording.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Pages

Acknowledgements, Table of Contents, List of Tables, List of Examples, Abstract, Foreword, and Preface.

Chapter 1: Introduction

The rudiments of music such as pitch, intervals, and scales incorporating quarter tones.

Chapter 2: Blackwood

Analysis of Easley Blackwood's 24 notes extending traditional models of strict counterpoint.

Chapter 3: Hába

Alois Hába's Suite für vier Posaunen, op. 72. Haba's trombone quartet employs consonant triads and numerous allusions to conventional tonal idioms.

Chapter 4: Ives

Charles Ives's Three Quarter-Tone Piano Pieces. I show how Ives leaves his stylistic fingerprints all over these little pieces.

Chapter 5: Wyschnegradsky

Ivan Wyschnegradsky's 24 Preludes. Starts out with some fairly straightforward scale-theory and morphs into a weird prolongational, quasi-Schenkerian kind of chapter. Very postmodern.

Chapter 6: Neo-Riemannian Transformations (NO AUDIO)

I make an analogy between Wyschnegradsky's quarter-tone tetrachord and Richard Cohn's parsimonious trichord, and attempt to find quarter-tone equivalents to the canonic neo-Riemannian transformations P, L, and R, with some interesting results.

Supplementary Materials

Appendices, Bibliography, and some bonus material that didn't make it into the actual dissertation.