Interest Group Activities at the SMT 2011 Annual Meeting

For 2011 conference activities of standing committees such as the Committee on the Status of Women , the Committee on Diversity, and the Professional Development Committee, please see their individual webpages.

Analysis of World Music Group

The inaugural meeting of the Interest Group on Analysis of World Music will take place on Friday, October 28th from 7-9am in the Crystal Room of the Marriott Conference Center. The meeting will consist of four 20-minute presentations (see below) and conclude with a Discussion Panel featuring Jay Rahn (Chair), Michael Tenzer, John Roeder, Panayotis Mavromatis, and Lawrence Shuster.

• Michael Tenzer: Two World Music Typologies
• John Roeder: Asynchronous Streams in a Kiowa Song: A ‘World-Music’ Analysis Input to Theories of Meter
• Jay Rahn: Perceptually Based Theory for World Music Tunings
• Panayotis Mavromatis: Cognitive Schemata for Western and Non-Western Music: A Comparison and Some Preliminary Observations

Interest Group on Improvisation

The inaugural meeting of the Interest Group on Improvisation will take place on Saturday, October 29, 5:30–7:30 pm, at the 2011 SMT Annual Meeting in Minneapolis in the Crystal Room. All interested SMT members are invited to attend. The meeting agenda will include two presentations: one on Messiaen’s work as an improviser and another on music theory’s place in the emerging field of improvisation studies. We will also take time to plan the future activities of SMT Improvisation, with particular focus on the 2012 AMS/SEM/SMT conference in New Orleans and events to be produced in collaboration with our affiliate group, SEM Improvisation (see agenda posted on the google discussion group).

Jazz Interest Group (SMT-jz)

• SMT-jz Business Meeting: The 2011 business meeting in Minneapolis of the Jazz Theory and Analysis Special Interest Group (SMTJz) will take place Friday October 28 at noon. The primary focus will be a transcription seminar, with three participants (Rene Daley, Garrett Michaelsen, and Chris Stover) and one respondent (Robert Wason). The participants will discuss problems, issues, and motivations in jazz transcription, using Sonny Rollins’s improvisation from “All the Things You Are” (from the recording Sonny Meets Hawk). Participants will present and discuss their transcriptions for 10–15 minutes, followed by the response and then general discussion.
• Jam Session: The annual SMT-Jazz jam session is scheduled to take place Friday, 28 October, 8–11pm in the Calhoun Room at the Minneapolis Marriott. In order to pay the bassist and drummer that have been hired, there is a suggested donation of $5 to listen, $15 to play. All jazz instrumentalists or singers are welcome to sit in, and all SMT members are invited attend.

Mathematics of Music Interest Group

At the 2011 meeting, the group will host a workshop on Thursday, October 27, 8-11pm, on Computational Approaches to Music Theory and Analysis with workshop leaders Christopher Ariza, Michael Cuthbert, Morwaread Farbood, Panayotis Mavromatis, Richard Plotkin, and Kris Shaffer. The workshop will survey computational resources and applications available to music theorists, describe some general programming concepts, and provide hands-on tutorials to give participants some experience building on existing music-theoretic applications.

Also at the 2011 meeting, during the group's regular meeting time (Friday, October 28, 5-7pm), we will host three papers on current research in scale theory:

• Marek Žabka: "Hierarchy and Maximal Evenness in Two-Dimensions"
• Jonathan Wild: "Commensurability of Tone-System Generators"
• Norman Carey: "Rich Words and Musical Palindrome"

Music and Disability Interest Group

The Music and Disability Interest Group will meet on Saturday, October 29, 7-8:30am. All interested SMT members are invited to attend.

Music and Philosophy Group

1. Business meeting
   The business meeting of the Music and Philosophy Interest Group is to held on Friday, October 28, from 5-7pm. At the business meeting there will be a discussion of Veit Erlmann's new book, Reason and Resonance, in particular the chapters on Descartes and Helmholtz (Chapters 1 and 6). Two position papers will be presented:
   • Ben Steege (SUNY Stony Brook), "'Reasonating': reflections on Veit Erlmann's historiography of aurality"
   • Amy Cimini (NYU), ""Resonance, Friendship and Descartes' Musical Secret"

   All interested SMT members are invited to attend. If you want to read some relevant excerpts from Erlmann's book, email brian.kane@yale.edu for a pdf.

2. Special Evening Session
   The Music and Philosophy Interest Group is proud to sponsor an evening session entitled, "Voice: medium or mediation?" The session takes place on Friday, October 28 from 8-11pm and contains four papers which deal with various aspects of "the voice" in the history of music theory, analysis and contemporary critical theory:
   • Andre Redwood (Yale), "Beyond Mechanics: Voice as Mediator in the Harmonie Universelle"
   • Jonathan De Souza (U of Chicago), "Rousseau, Stiegler, and the Technical Mediation of Voice"
   • Christopher M. Barry (UW Madison), "A Cinematics of the Lyric Song-Subject"
   • Clara Latham (NYU), "Rethinking the Intimacy of Voice and Ear: Intimacy, affect, and pleasure in the discourse of hysteria"

Music Cognition Group

The Music Cognition Group will meet on Saturday, October 28, 12-2pm in the Pine/Cedar Room of the Conference Hotel. This year's focus will be corpus studies; what are they, what can they tell us, and why have they become so associated with music cognition research? Four presenters (see below) will address these issues, with a short Q&A after each speaker and a 30-minute open discussion to close the session. All interested SMT members are invited to attend.

• Joshua Albrecht (Ohio State) - A brief demonstration of the Humdrum toolkit, followed by "Mode-finding algorithms and the emergence of tonality"
• Leigh VanHandel (Michigan State) - "Data studies and music theory: not mutually exclusive after all"
• Ian Quinn (Yale) - "A corpus-based approach to tonality"
• Vasili Byros (Northwestern) - "Quo vadis corpus?"

This promises to be a stimulating two hours; to help maintain stimulation, attendees are welcome to bring lunch into the session (box lunches will be available, or you may bring in food from outside the hotel).

Music Informatics Interest Group

During the 2011 SMT conference in Minneapolis, the SMT Music Informatics Group will meet on Saturday October 29, 5:30–7:30pm in the Birch/Maple Rooms of the conference hotel. All interested SMT members are invited to attend.

Music Theory Pedagogy Interest Group

1. The annual business meeting of the Music Theory Pedagogy Interest Group will be held on Friday, October 28, 2011, 12-2pm in the St. Croix 2 room of the conference hotel. All interested SMT members are invited to attend.
2. The Music Theory Pedagogy Interest Group also is sponsoring a special session, "Beyond the Blackboard: Technology in the Music Theory Classroom," to be held on Friday, October 28th, 8-11pm in the Marriott Minnesota room of the conference hotel. The session, chaired by Daniel B. Stevens (University of Delaware), is as follows:
   
   

   Papers:

   • Mark Lochstampfor (Capital University)
     Embracing Cloud Technologies: Preparing the Classes of Digital Natives
   • Susan Piagentini (Northwestern University)
     ‘Drawing’ Our Students In: Applications of the Graphic Tablet in the Music Theory Classroom

   Hands-On Demonstrations:

   • Brent Auerbach (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
     Modernizing Classroom Music Theory Instruction with SMART Boards
   • Philip Duker (University of Delaware)
     Engaging and Assessing Students with the Click of a Button: Clickers and the Theory Classroom
   • Brendan McConville (University of Tennessee)
     Facebook + Noteflight: Collaborative Web 2.0 Applications for the Theory Pedagogy
     Classroom
   • Jena Root (Youngstown State University)
     Designing Engaging Music Fundamentals Assignments in the Online Environment
   • Gilbert DeBenedetti (University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg)
     Apple Apps for Practicing Listening Skills
   • Stephanie Lind (Queen's University)
     Wikis and Blogs as Learning Tools in Undergraduate Music Theory Courses

Performance and Analysis Interest Group

PAIG’s annual gathering in Minneapolis will take place on Saturday, October 29, 2011, 12-2pm. It will feature a discussion centering on a recently published and thought-provoking book chapter, "Motive, Gesture, and the Analysis of Performance," by John Rink, Neta Spiro, and Nicolas Gold, from New Perspectives on Music and Gesture, ed. A Gritten and E. King (Ashgate, 2010). The chapter, which probes a Chopin mazurka and its realization in numerous recorded performances, proposes a novel concept of musical motive, deriving from analysis of gestures created through performance.

John Rink has graciously provided PAIG with a review copy of the chapter, which may be downloaded here. A public-domain score of the mazurka is available here. Images of the first editions of the mazurka may be viewed at www.cfeo.org.uk .

Popular Music Interest Group

1. Special Session At the 2011 Annual SMT Meeting in Minneapolis, the Popular Music Interest Group will co-sponsor, along with the Committee on Diversity, a session devoted to the work of Minneapolis-native Prince. The session is entitled "Your Old-Fashioned Music, Your Old Ideas: Prince, Minneapolis, and the Sounds of Diversity," and will take place on Friday, October 28, 9am-12pm. The chair of the session will be Christopher Doll (Rutgers University); the presentations in the sessions are as follows:
   
   
   • Griffin Woodworth (MakeMusic, Inc.): Uptown Controversy: Genre, Location, and Confrontation in Prince’s Early Guitar Music
   • Matthew Valnes (University of Pennsylvania): "If You Can Describe It, It Ain't Funky": Prince, Improvisation, and the Concept of "Genre Works" in Musical Performance
   • Dana Baitz (York University, Toronto): Let a Woman Be a Woman and a Man Be a Man: On the Conditions Facilitating Liberatory Themes in Prince’s Music
   • Emily M. Gale (University of Virginia):Prince and the Postmodern Politics of Stylistic Promiscuity in "Willing and Able"
2. Discussion and Organizational Meeting The Popular Music Group will hold its annual organizational meeting on Saturday, October 29, 5:30–7:30pm in the Pine/Cedar Room of the Conference Hotel. All interested SMT members are invited.

   
   This meeting will feature the discussion, "Metric Fake-Outs and Surprises in Popular Music," led by Justin London (Carleton College). Popular music is rich with instances of withholding, denying, and fulfilling listeners’ expectations, and Prof. London will present examples collected from numerous scholars and lead a discussion regarding the processes underlying the music’s rhythmic, metric, and harmonic effects. "Metric Fake Outs" and "Pop Music Harmonic Surprises" spreadsheets containing the examples can be found at http://people.carleton.edu/~jlondon/ , and all are encouraged to bring more examples to add to the lists.

   Following the discussion, the PMIG will hold its business meeting, in which it will nominate a new president and discuss plans for the 2012 conference in New Orleans.

Queer Resource Group

The Queer Resources Group will meet on Friday, October 28, 12-2pm, in the Lake Harriet Room of the conference hotel.