Conference proceeding
Pitch and Rhythmic Succession in German folksong, 19th-century art song, and classic rock melodies
Proceedings of the ICMPC-ESCOM 2018 Joint Conference, pp.284-287
2018
Abstract
As an increasing amount of music from diverse genres and epochs is encoded, the opportunity arises to identify and compare salient melodic characteristics in a variety of styles across time and place. Using European folksong from the Essen collection (Schaffrath, 1995), French and German art song from the 19th century (VanHandel, 2005), and rock melodies from the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Songs of All Time (de Clerq & Temperley 2011), we hypothesized that melodies from these historically distinct corpora would correlate significantly within the pitch-based parameters of interval content and first-order scale degree succession, but not in rhythmic content. Further, we hypothesized that more detailed comparison between the corpora would reveal salient stylistic differences that might reflect more complex relationships between melodic styles due to chronological evolution, high art vs. low art, the relationship of music to text, and the influence of non-western musical elements. While each melodic variable did show a significant main effect of corpus membership, pairwise comparisons were illustrative. For example, the rhythmic content of Essen and 19th-c. melodies correlated significantly with each other but not with Rolling Stone melodies, while Rolling Stone and 19th-c. melodies correlated more strongly with respect to intervallic content, possibly reflecting a common text-setting strategy less used in folksong.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Pitch and Rhythmic Succession in German folksong, 19th-century art song, and classic rock melodies
- Creators
- Peter Martens - Texas Tech UniversityJoshua Albrecht - University of Mary Hardin–Baylor
- Resource Type
- Conference proceeding
- Publication Details
- Proceedings of the ICMPC-ESCOM 2018 Joint Conference, pp.284-287
- Publisher
- Graz, Austria
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2018 the authors
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 2018
- Academic Unit
- School of Music
- Record Identifier
- 9985219827102771
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