Danuta Mirka: Harmonic Schemata and Hypermeter

Tue, November 16, 2021 12:45 PM at Zoom Webinar

Dr. Danuta Mirka, Professor of Music Theory and Cognition at Northwestern University, presents a guest lecture at Michigan State University. The event is free, open to the public, and will take place via Zoom Webinar. If you would like to attend, please register here. 

Lecture Abstract

The concept of hypermeter implies that perception of meter extends upon metrical levels not reflected in notation. This concept is thus predicated upon similarities between meter and hypermeter yet perception of hypermeter is conditioned by several factors not involved in perception of meter proper. According to Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, meter above the bar level is increasingly supplanted by grouping which, at higher levels, is equivalent to phrase structure. The eminent roles played by phrase structure and harmonic rhythm in perception of hypermeter were dubbed by William Rothstein, respectively, the “rule of congruence” and the “rule of harmonic rhythm.” The “rule of texture” was added by Eric McKee and the “rule of parallelism” reformulated by David Temperley. I will posit another preference factor for hypermeter: the hypermetrical profile of harmonic schemata. By contrast to other preference factors, which work “bottom-up” and cue single events as strong, this factor allows for “top-down” processing of hypermeter by mapping the hypermetrical profile of a given schema upon a span of time including several events which can be either strong or weak. I will concentrate on the cadential schema and illustrate its effect upon hypermeter with examples from Haydn’s and Mozart’s string quartets.

Bio

Danuta Mirka is Harry N. and Ruth F. Wyatt Professor of Music Theory at the Bienen School of Music, Northwestern University. Her main research interests include theory and analysis of meter and rhythm and study of musical communication in the late eighteenth century. She is the co-editor, with Kofi Agawu, of Communication in Eighteenth-Century Music and the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, which received the Citation of Special Merit from the Society for Music Theory in 2015. Her books include The Sonoristic Structuralism of Krzysztof Penderecki and Metric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart, which won the 2011 Wallace Berry Award of the Society for Music Theory. Her article “The Mystery of the Cadential Six-Four” received the 2017 Roland Jackson Award from the American Musicological Society and her most recent book, Hypermetric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart, was published this year.