Form and Process in Music, 1300-2014

Book excerpt: Form and Process in Music, 1300–2014: An Analytic Sampler draws together papers delivered at the 2014 meeting of the West Coast Conference of Music Theory and Analysis. The conference spanned an unusually wide spectrum of musical styles, including papers on European twelve-tone music after the Second World War, fourteenth-century music, pop music and jazz, the music of living composers, narrative and characterization, and the history of music theory. The title of the book reflects the large span of musical cultures that are represented within, but also accounts for the common thread through all of these essays, a strong emphasis on understanding the forms and processes of music through analysis. The reader will find within it a compendium of analytic techniques for numerous musical styles.