Dr. Kristen Wallentinsen, Assistant Professor of Music Theory

“Repeat and Repeat Again”: 

A Reexamination of Fuzzy Contour in Steve Reich’s The Desert Music

Steve Reich’s The Desert Music employs a key aspect of Reich’s compositional philosophy: melodic phasing. The phasing process places the theme against itself at various levels of metric displacement (Cohn 1992, Roeder 2003), creating regions of multilinear melodies that challenge listeners to understand melody in different ways. Contour plays a significant role in the perception of these melodic processes. Ian Quinn’s (1997) analysis of fuzzy contour relations in The Desert Music provides quantitative evidence regarding the contour similarity of Reich’s melodies, but does not address the complexity with which this melodic similarity is experienced in the context of Reich’s phased musical fabric. 

This paper expands upon Quinn’s analysis, using a new model of fuzzy familial contour membership to analyze complex multilinear melodies that result from Reich’s phasing technique. I model the emergent melodic possibilities within the multilinear pattern by mapping the contour motions (ascent, descent, or plateau) of each melody in each passage onto a Contour Adjacency Grid that is framed on the total number of attack points in the passage. The resulting composite representation captures the probability of divergent contours as they occur throughout the passage, allowing for exploration of experiential possibilities afforded by the musical fabric.

These affordances suggest further connections with phenomenological and cognitive theories of multistability (Idhe 2012, Karpinski 2012). By examining relationships between melodies in terms of these multistable possibilities, I offer a more sensitive account of the contour relations listeners may perceive within the music, providing a better understanding of Reich’s minimalist process.

Christie Lutz and Frank Bridges

Presentation on the New Brunswick Music Scene Archive

In recent years, numerous local music scene archives have been established to document the music of locations as diverse as Washington, D.C., Louisville, Kentucky, and Southern Illinois. The New Brunswick Music Scene Archive (NBMSA) is unique in its collaborative founding, having originated with a curator of New Jersey collections looking to diversify holdings and build popular culture collections, and an academic looking to research the vast number of record labels of a music scene that has not been documented. These two trajectories merged in fall 2015 to establish the NBMSA at Rutgers University’s Special Collections and University Archives.

This talk presents the history of the scene and demonstrates how a local music archive, through development and outreach work, can serve as a cultural space not unlike performance venues or record stores, where individuals can join to make meaning and articulate links between the past and present. Such a space of meaning can drive future collecting; provide a new opportunity for learning and engagement through creating diverse community programming; support the undergraduate curriculum and graduate student and faculty scholarship; and demonstrate the value of a local music archive as a site of participation and belonging, as well as resistance. The presentation also addresses practical challenges from preservation and access to creating an inclusive archive.