The Illuminated Scores & The Architectural Design of Musical Form
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Date
2014-02
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Abstract
The Illuminated Scores are designed as scholarly editions for performing artists and educators, to portray the form and structure of a musical composition. They incorporate semiotic tools into the study of musical language intended to make the architectural design visible in a coherent format. The purpose of the study is to develop a method of representing music graphically that differs from the established score layout, reorganizing content in a manner that allows one to overcome the constraints under which musical skills are developed in the current model of publishing music. The motivation for such a study grew out of the need to enable students to experience an immediate representation of the overall formal design of a musical composition. It is the author’s hypothesis that this new perspective will impact the ways we learn and teach musical form and its structure. The goal is to portray music notation in a format similar to that of poetic verse, rather than that of continuous prose, where one measure follows another in no relevant way; phrase lengths, melodic relationships, harmonic structure, and the number of measures in a system will play a significant role in the visual layout of the work. Initially thought of as overlaying a Schenkerian analytical sketch over the published work horizontally aligned, the project has developed into a new publishing format containing the researcher’s analysis of examples of works by Bach, Mozart, Schubert and Schoenberg. In addition, diagrams and color-coding illustrate how mathematics and music are combined to explain the concept of balance in musical form, thereby revealing the inherent beauty of a composer’s cohesive thought process. The author points out mathematical concepts of Mersenne Primes, numerical sequences and other patterns in Bach, the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Proportion in sonata form movements of Mozart and in Schubert impromptus.
The current stage of this research is that of a scholarly work aiming to develop the representational method, using new engraving software programs capable of digitizing scores in a new format. Once this has been done we can implement the appropriate curriculum materials on a larger scale and measure its effect on students achievement through individual lessons and piano labs. Through this project, the author hopes to show the intrinsic beauty of form with the objective of impacting performance and music pedagogy. The objective of the Illuminated Scores is to present a practical holistic method that leaves students excited about the possibility of exploring the fascinating tools employed by the most brilliant minds in the world of music.
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The Arts: 3rd Place (The Ohio State University Edward F. Hayes Graduate Research Forum)