Bücher der Reihe OXFORD STUDIES IN MUSIC THEORY

Combining David Lewin's articles on song and opera with chapters on songs of Brahms, Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann, and Milton Babbitt, this collection constitutes a statement concerning the methodological problems associated with interpretation of texted music.

Tonality and Transformation employs transformational music theory to illuminate diverse aspects of tonal hearing-from the infusion of sounding pitches with familiar tonal qualities to sensations of directedness and attraction. The book introduces many new analytical techniques, which are employed in vivid interpretive set pieces treating music from Bach to Mahler.

Focusing on the period of most intense metric experimentation in the work of both Haydn and Mozart, author Danuta Mirka presents here a systematic discussion of the composers' metric strategies. Combining historical music theory with the cognitive study of music, Mirka's award-winning book sheds new light on this repertoire and redefines the role of meter and rhythm in Classical music.

Kofi Agawu's Music as Discourse has become a standard and definitive work in musical semiotics. Working at the nexus of musicology, ethnomusicology, and music philosophy and aesthetics, Agawu presents a synthetic and innovative approach to musical meaning which argues deftly for the thinking of music as a discourse in itself-composed not only of sequences of gestures, phrases, or progressions, but rather also of the very philosophical and linguistic propsthat enable the analytical formulations made about music as an object of study.

This philosophically-inspired approach to the perception of form in early nineteenth-century music invites listeners and especially performers to assess and participate in the interpretation of transformative formal processes as they unfold in time. It proposes new ways of hearing beloved works of the romantic generation as representative of their striving for novel, intensely self-reflective modes of communication.

Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era chronicles the interdependent theories of time and meter that prevailed in the fields of music and science between 1500 and 1830. It examines the dramatic shift in the conceptualization of time that took place during the eighteenth century, and explains the profound impact this had on the ways in which musicians understood meter, character, and tempo, as well as the ways in which this change forms thebasis for the modern conception of time in music.