Voice-leading schemata in theory, corpus research, and practical composition (Compose your own Chopin!)
Digital and Cognitive Musicology Laboratory (DCML)
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Lausanne, Lake Leman, 18-20 September, 2018
Voice-leading schemata are fundamental building blocks of Western tonal music across historical periods and styles. They played a major role in the training of 18th- and 19th-century musicians, and many schemata, even those as old as the Pachelbel, the Lamento, or the descending fifth sequence are still common in present-day popular music.
In this workshop, our speakers will discuss the properties of schemata and their compositional application in the music of Mozart, Chopin, and Bruckner. The workshop will bring together music theoretical, algorithmic, corpus-based, and analytical approaches to schemata, culminating into Uri Rom’s practical guide to writing Nocturnes and Mazurkas in the Chopin style.
A further highlight will be a session devoted to the methodological challenges involved in state-of-the-art musicological corpus research.
This workshop is hosted at the DCML in the context of a three-year research project “From Bach to the Beatles – Exploring compositional building blocks and musical style change with hermeneutic and computational methods” funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (‘Mixed Methods’ in the Humanities program; 2018–2020) and carried out by Martin Rohrmeier and Markus Neuwirth.
The program can be found here.
Speakers
- Prof. Dr. Uri Rom (Tel Aviv University)
- Prof. Dr. Nathan Martin (Michigan University)
- Prof. Dr. Felix Diergarten (HfM Freiburg)
- Prof. Dr. David Sears (Texas Tech University)
- Prof. Dr. Martin Rohrmeier (EPFL)
- Dr. Markus Neuwirth (EPFL)
- Christoph Finkensiep (EPFL)
Organizers: Markus Neuwirth and Martin Rohrmeier
If you wish to attend, please send us a registration mail ([email protected]). Note that attendance is free; there will be no registration fee.
Here is a description of how to get to the EPFL by public transport (https://information.epfl.ch/access).