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Vasili Byros

Northwestern University, Music Theory and Cognition, Faculty Member

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Ph.D., Yale University (2009)

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Noel B. Salazar

KU Leuven

Stefanie Acevedo

University of Connecticut

Nicola Jane Holt

University of the West of England

University of California, Merced

Javier Díaz Noci

Pompeu Fabra University

Katherine Butler Schofield

King's College London

Cynthia R . Nielsen

University of Dallas

Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Ruben López-Cano

Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya

Kwantlen Polytechnic University

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Videos by Vasili Byros

“Creating Music in Old Styles”: An Interview (2017) YOUTUBE link: https://youtu.be/OsvS5yD6hR4

This interview took place in January 2017 as part of Robert Yaple’s podcast, “Creative Voices,” r... more

25 views

Papers by Vasili Byros

How to do the Rule of the Octave like Beethoven

This video imagines how Beethoven might have realized the Rule of the Octave, which was the most ... more This video imagines how Beethoven might have realized the Rule of the Octave, which was the most widely taught introductory pattern in the Baroque and Classical periods. It is the most concise yet powerful summary of fundamentals in both Classical harmony and counterpoint.

My imagined Beethoven realization is an improvised adaptation on the versions in A minor and C major from Johann David Heinichen’s General-Bass in der Composition from 1728. The first A minor section in the improvisation uses a tempesta or storm and stress style with sigh figures (Seufzer) that turn each chord into an appoggiatura or suspension into the next chord on nearly every downbeat. The second C major section is in a hymn style adapted to the piano. The improvisation tells a kind of story with and through the harmony of the Rule of the Octave: the struggle of A minor finding peace in C major.

Of Elegant Tones and Fantastical Progressions: A Historical, Schema-Based, and Comprovisational Perspective on Diminished Seventh-Chord Modulation, c. 1720–1830. Or, an Exercise in corporis studium

The Oxford Handbook of Music and Corpus Studies The Oxford Handbook of Music and Corpus Studies, ed. Dan Shanahan et al. (Oxford University Press), 2022

This chapter reconstructs aspects of diminished-seventh chord usage and modulation in the long ei... more This chapter reconstructs aspects of diminished-seventh chord usage and modulation in the long eighteenth century that have been lost to and distorted by modern conceptualizations. The reconstruction centers on the “diatonic” foundations of scale degree ♯4 and the diminished seventh chord build upon it. Corpus study is a methodological driver of the project, but with a reflective and critical eye that questions conventional understanding and ultimately leads to a novel, practical, and hands-on realization of the method that operationalizes DIM7 modulation and the history of theory via schemata and comprovisation. Using the diminished seventh chord as its object of inquiry, this chapter tells a story of musical epistemology and the different role that corpora may play in its creation—the different types of knowledge their analysis might produce as well as the varieties of its representation, according to their particular alignment with different ways of doing music theory.

What is Composition? A Historical Perspective (from Of Music, A Life—a blog)

How Beethoven Copied and Stole from Haydn (from Of Music, A Life—a blog)

(Re)Creating Bach's Weimar Organ Fugues: Model-Learning, Externalization, and Conceptual Combination in Musical Creativity

EuroMAC 2017, Strasbourg, 2017

Though never explicitly presented as studies in musical creativity, schema and partimento researc... more Though never explicitly presented as studies in musical creativity, schema and partimento research have tacitly advanced a theory of the creative process in the long eighteenth century, one centered on the close imitation of models or schemata. Because every composer of the period presumably worked with the same models, these areas have opened a lacuna in our understanding of musical creativity—namely, how composers as aesthetically and stylistically diverse as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven were cut from the same schematic cloth as a Vivaldi, Porpora, or Boccherini.

This paper examines the problem by theorizing the relationship of models to creativity, following research in creative cognition. Bach’s Weimar organ fugues in D, G, and A minor (BWV 538, 542, 543) serve as case studies, whereby music analysis becomes a means of (re)enacting the creative compositional act.
The investigation pivots on two key themes in creativity studies: 1) schemata are not internalized in the same way by all members of a culture (Vygotsky 1978), but rather are already learned in a creative manner, which subsequently leads to their original use and appropriation; 2) original contributions in a given domain rely not on the mere imitation of models, but rather on deep-level analogies among them, which allows for conceptual combination or conceptual blending.

The Hero Who Practices Resignation: Beethoven’s Eroica as ‘Late’ Work (Page Proof)

The Cambridge Companion to the Eroica Symphony, ed. Nancy November, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 105–138, 2020

Historically informed analysis reveals a very different conception of hero in the Eroica than the... more Historically informed analysis reveals a very different conception of hero in the Eroica than the one sustained in the popular imagination and perpetuated by the majority of its reception history: a militaristic or Napoleonic Heldenleben. By combining analytic perspectives from schema theory and topic theory with key passages from Beethoven’s epistolary life and Tagebuch, this chapter illustrates that the Eroica’s narrative is akin to religious drama, conveying the same theme of abnegation found in the contemporary oratorio Christus am Ölberge and the Heiligenstadt Testament, the Eroica’s ‘literary prototype’. Unlike some middle-period works which communicate a ‘tragic-to-triumphant’ expressive genre, the Eroica is cast in the ‘tragic-to-transcendent’ type, which became characteristic of Beethoven’s late style. A central component of this spiritual genre is the strategic positioning of structural and semantic oppositions in an unresolved state of suspension. The Eroica manifests this most overtly through a governing opposition between death (‘ombra’) and pastoral (‘Ländler, contredanse’) music, and the association of this stylistic opposition with the tonalities of G minor and E flat major, respectively. Rather than a programmatic narrative about a hero who overcomes, the Eroica is a conceptually ‘late’ work that meditates on suffering as a spiritual necessity and its implications for transcendence.

Review of LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827) THE LATE QUARTETS Quatuor Mosaïques Naive V5445, 2017; three discs, 188 minutes

Eighteenth-Century Music, 2019

Thinking in Bach’s Language, Teaching in His Shoes: How the Thomaskantor Structured My Syllabus as a Modern-Day Notenbüchlein or Zibaldone

BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute, Vol. 49, No. 2, pp. 175–204, 2018

Over the past decade or so, historically informed theory, pedagogy, and (more recently) compositi... more Over the past decade or so, historically informed theory, pedagogy, and (more recently) composition have emerged fully as outgrowths of the historically informed performance (HIP) movement, for which Bach’s music has been instrumental. In this light, “Bach in the music theory classroom” is a metaphor for a broader HI initiative, one where, in my own teaching, historically informed theory (HIT) becomes the basis for structuring a curriculum centered on period composition. In this article, I discuss the materials, process, rationale, and philosophical implications for a mini-curriculum that constitutes the first of a three-course HIT sequence. My aim with this first leg is to change students’ thinking from the “know-what” types of knowledge characteristic of present-day music theory curricula to a “know-how” mind-set consistent with eighteenth-century pedagogy.

The goals of music theory today approximate the reading knowledge of a language acquired in graduate school. Enough about its syntax, grammar, and vocabulary is learned to supply a translation, but without ever acquiring the knowledge and experience to speak, think, or write in the language itself. Score annotations and analyses, as ends in themselves, are like metalinguistic translations. In Bach’s day, on the other hand, music theory was the business of training musicians to speak the language, on the performance-improvisation-composition continuum that defined their daily activities. To implement a “know-how” curriculum in an environment designed for “know-what,” however, is not without its challenges, not least because of limited time and often resources.

I narrate how Bach himself offered me a solution through his own music and pedagogical materials. Rather than throwing students into the proverbial deep end, my mini-curriculum engages them actively and continuously in creative work. The goal is not to compose a self-standing composition, but to get students thinking in Bach’s language in terms of musical schemata, the everyday patterns and conventions of Bach’s day. I do so through a series of creative problem-solving activities that impart knowledge of schemata, particularly as they are used in Bach’s hands. Students are placed in Bach’s shoes as both a teacher and composer, by exploring the connections and differences among Bach’s figured basses from the Vorschriften und Grundsätze zum vierstimmigen spielen des General-Bass, the partimento-preludes of the Langloz manuscript, and certain preludes from the Well-Tempered Clavier as well as selected fantasias. Through realization, analysis, and (class) composition exercises, students encounter a number of recurring schemata as a familiar cast of characters in these materials, all fashioned together into a modern-day Notenbüchlein or zibaldone (musical notebook), which tells a story about Bach’s schema usage—his compositional strategies employing schema development, elision, nesting, extension, and expansion.
The story culminates with Bach’s unique canonic treatment of a particular sequence, the 9/7–8/6/5. After ten weeks, students are able to realize a complex Bach partimento (BWV 908) and compose a continuo part for the Sanctus of the Mass in B Minor, for which no figures survive. These advanced creative problem-solving activities fill the last pages of the students’ Notenbüchlein, which is organized nearly single-handedly by Leipzig’s beloved Thomaskantor himself.

Mozart's Vintage Corelli: The Microstory of a Fonte-Romanesca

Intégral, 2017

This article traces a brief history of a schema from Corelli to Mozart, here designated the Fonte... more This article traces a brief history of a schema from Corelli to Mozart, here designated the Fonte-Romanesca, in order to clarify certain foundational principles in schema theory's conception of a model, particularly as it relates to the creative act. Models are not theoretical abstractions, but cultural artifacts that inform the compositional process through (near-)literal copy, (creative) imitation, variation, and problem solving—both combinatorially and developmentally. Such a re-evaluation of schema theory is simultaneously an opportunity to reflect on larger disciplinary changes surrounding the study of music from the long eighteenth century over the last few decades.

Errata and Supplement to: “‘Hauptruhepuncte des Geistes’: Punctuation Schemas and the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata.”

Prelude on a Partimento: Invention in the Compositional Pedagogy of the German States in the Time of J. S. Bach. *Music Theory Online* 21.3 (2015)

This article examines a hypothetical compositional and pedagogical use of the Langloz manuscript,... more This article examines a hypothetical compositional and pedagogical use of the Langloz manuscript, a collection of German partimenti, during the time of J. S. Bach. The partimento is reconceptualized as a bridge to free composition, by aligning it with what Bach and his Thuringian and Hamburgian neighbors (including Werckmeister, Walther, Niedt, and Mattheson) called inventiones: materials for free composition that are subject to substantial development, involving processes of elaboration, variation, extension, and expansion. My argument is borne out by a historically informed practical demonstration: my own composition of a Prelude in D minor, which broadly derives from the partimento-prelude numbered 48 in the manuscript. The transformation of a simple thoroughbass into a fully worked-out composition pivots on two species of invention and their development, one structural, the other stylistic: 1) a genre-specific structuring principle that is coded into the partimento; for the prelude genre, this concerns long-range scale-harmonizations spanning 1–4 octaves; the principle recurs in several preludes of The Langloz Manuscript and of The Well-Tempered Clavier; and 2) the subject (thema) of a composition, which results from novel combinations of musical topics (Manieren), and the constructive imitation of other composers’ uses of styles and genres (locus exemplorum).

"'Hauptruhepuncte des Geistes': Punctuation Schemas and the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata," In *What Is a Cadence?: Theoretical and Analytical Perspectives on Cadences in the Classical Repertoire.* Ed. by Markus Neuwirth and Pieter Bergé (Leuven University Press, 2015), 215–251.

Topics and Harmonic Schemata: A Case from Beethoven. In *The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory.* Ed. Danuta Mirka (2014), pp. 381–414.

Topics and harmonic schemata powerfully interact in the late-eighteenth-century communicative cha... more Topics and harmonic schemata powerfully interact in the late-eighteenth-century communicative channel. This article illustrates both a categorial and pragmatic interfacing of the two domains in Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, where a particular schema-topic amalgam, the le–sol–fi–sol (Byros 2012, 2009), enables the communication of a powerful philosophical message involving the spiritual consequences of suffering, self-sacrifice, and death. The le–sol–fi–sol, as an instance of harmonic grammar, is also an ombra topic with mortal, funereal, and sacrificial connotations. As a hybrid symbolic structure, it is the basis for establishing a number of correlations of oppositions in the structural and expressive domains of the Symphony, which communicate a “tragic-to-transcendent” expressive genre and the cultural unit of “abnegation” (Hatten 1994).

Trazom's Wit: Communicative Strategies in a 'Popular' Yet 'Difficult' Sonata. Eighteenth-Century Music 10 (2): 213–252. © Cambridge University Press 2013

Eighteenth-Century Music 10/2: 213-252, Sep 2013

Meyer's Anvil: Revisiting the Schema Concept. Music Analysis 31/3 (2012): 273–346.

Music Analysis, Oct 2012

This article re-examines the concept of a ‘schema’ in light of a new body of empirical evidence r... more This article re-examines the concept of a ‘schema’ in light of a new body of empirical evidence regarding the culture and cognition of key in the eighteenth century. The schema concept in music, which originated in the work of Leonard B. Meyer, holds that social and historical experience gives rise to knowledge structures that engender a situated psychology of hearing and a context-contingent understanding of music. In previous studies by Meyer and Robert O. Gjerdingen, evidence for the schema concept has been advanced largely by interpreting a musical corpus as a metaphor for experience. That is, arguments for the existence of schemata as mental categories that configure a situated psychology of hearing have been presented primarily in the form of music analysis – historically situated patterns detected in musical scores. For this reason, the schema concept has remained, in Meyer's and Gjerdingen's words, a ‘hypothesis’ and ‘assum[ption]’ respectively.The evidence I advance here derives from a case study on Beethoven's Eroica Symphony and what I call the le–sol–fi–sol schema. The study was conducted in the spirit of the psychologically orientated, humanistic music theory that characterised Meyer's lifelong research program. By establishing a correlation between real listeners’ responses in the Symphony's reception history and the details of my own corpus study of music from the long eighteenth century (1720–1840), my Eroica case study brings a novel perspective to the idea that schemata engender a historical mode of listening. The case study bears out several hypotheses that are basic to Meyer's writings and perpetuated in Gjerdingen's galant style project: (1) that replicated patternings in eighteenth-century works are commensurate with listeners’ knowledge structures; (2) that these knowledge structures are historically contingent and therefore engender a situated psychology of hearing; (3) that these situated psychologies are affected by style change; and (4) that schemata provide access to historical modes of listening today.

Review of *The Art of Partimento: History, Theory, and Practice* (Oxford) by Giorgio Sanguinetti. Music Theory Online 18/3

Unearthing The Past: Theory and Archaeology in Robert Gjerdingen's *Music in the Galant Style*. Music Analysis 31/1 (2012): 112–124

Towards an "Archaeology" of Hearing: Schemata and Eighteenth-Century Consciousness. Musica Humana 1/2 (2009): 235–306.

This article investigates the problem of historical modes of listening through the lens of recent... more This article investigates the problem of historical modes of listening through the lens of recent research in schema theory and historically-informed music cognition (Gjerdingen 1988; 2007; Byros 2009). Substantial empirical evidence now exists surrounding two particular late eighteenth-century schemata: the 1–7, 4–3 (Gjerdingen 1988; Meyer 1980) and the le–sol–fi–sol (Byros 2009). The population distributions derived from extensive corpus study for both schemata approximate a Gaussian distribution that bells in 1750–1760 and 1810–1820, with population peaks in the 1770s and 1790s, respectively. The statistics demonstrate that late eighteenth-century schemata are highly perceptually redundant (Meyer 1967/1994) while historically limited, by following a "life cycle." By extension, the evidence implies that schema-driven listening would by nature be "historical through and through"(Adorno 2004). Occasions of such "historicized" modes of listening are examined with three case studies (Mozart's "Dissonance" Quartet, Beethoven's Eroica Symphony and Piano Sonata in E minor), which indicate that, where eighteenth-century tonality is concerned, historical and modern modes of cognition differ respectively in the cognitive presence and absence of schemata.

Competing "Windows of Order": The Dialectics of System-Construction and -Withdrawal in Berg's Sonata for Piano, Op. 1

This article reads Berg's Piano Sonata in the context of a paradox fundamental to fin-de-siècle V... more This article reads Berg's Piano Sonata in the context of a paradox fundamental to fin-de-siècle Viennese musical aesthetics—namely, the need to move beyond convention for expressive advantage while recognizing the inexorability of convention for music's "autonomy principle" (Dahlhaus). On the one hand, the Sonata displays a "systemic impulse," in its attempts to build a new system following the abnegation of common-practice tonality—a "whole-tone tonality," which derives from a specific pairing of interval cycles 1 and 2 (Perle). At the same time, the Sonata acknowledges the aesthetic insincerity of this ambition, which plays out in a "negative impulse," whereby the work seeks to destroy the very system it creates in a manner reflective of musique informelle and the "death urge" in Berg's music in general (Adorno).

“Creating Music in Old Styles”: An Interview (2017) YOUTUBE link: https://youtu.be/OsvS5yD6hR4

This interview took place in January 2017 as part of Robert Yaple’s podcast, “Creative Voices,” r... more

25 views

How to do the Rule of the Octave like Beethoven

This video imagines how Beethoven might have realized the Rule of the Octave, which was the most ... more This video imagines how Beethoven might have realized the Rule of the Octave, which was the most widely taught introductory pattern in the Baroque and Classical periods. It is the most concise yet powerful summary of fundamentals in both Classical harmony and counterpoint.

My imagined Beethoven realization is an improvised adaptation on the versions in A minor and C major from Johann David Heinichen’s General-Bass in der Composition from 1728. The first A minor section in the improvisation uses a tempesta or storm and stress style with sigh figures (Seufzer) that turn each chord into an appoggiatura or suspension into the next chord on nearly every downbeat. The second C major section is in a hymn style adapted to the piano. The improvisation tells a kind of story with and through the harmony of the Rule of the Octave: the struggle of A minor finding peace in C major.

Of Elegant Tones and Fantastical Progressions: A Historical, Schema-Based, and Comprovisational Perspective on Diminished Seventh-Chord Modulation, c. 1720–1830. Or, an Exercise in corporis studium

The Oxford Handbook of Music and Corpus Studies The Oxford Handbook of Music and Corpus Studies, ed. Dan Shanahan et al. (Oxford University Press), 2022

This chapter reconstructs aspects of diminished-seventh chord usage and modulation in the long ei... more This chapter reconstructs aspects of diminished-seventh chord usage and modulation in the long eighteenth century that have been lost to and distorted by modern conceptualizations. The reconstruction centers on the “diatonic” foundations of scale degree ♯4 and the diminished seventh chord build upon it. Corpus study is a methodological driver of the project, but with a reflective and critical eye that questions conventional understanding and ultimately leads to a novel, practical, and hands-on realization of the method that operationalizes DIM7 modulation and the history of theory via schemata and comprovisation. Using the diminished seventh chord as its object of inquiry, this chapter tells a story of musical epistemology and the different role that corpora may play in its creation—the different types of knowledge their analysis might produce as well as the varieties of its representation, according to their particular alignment with different ways of doing music theory.

What is Composition? A Historical Perspective (from Of Music, A Life—a blog)

How Beethoven Copied and Stole from Haydn (from Of Music, A Life—a blog)

(Re)Creating Bach's Weimar Organ Fugues: Model-Learning, Externalization, and Conceptual Combination in Musical Creativity

EuroMAC 2017, Strasbourg, 2017

Though never explicitly presented as studies in musical creativity, schema and partimento researc... more Though never explicitly presented as studies in musical creativity, schema and partimento research have tacitly advanced a theory of the creative process in the long eighteenth century, one centered on the close imitation of models or schemata. Because every composer of the period presumably worked with the same models, these areas have opened a lacuna in our understanding of musical creativity—namely, how composers as aesthetically and stylistically diverse as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven were cut from the same schematic cloth as a Vivaldi, Porpora, or Boccherini.

This paper examines the problem by theorizing the relationship of models to creativity, following research in creative cognition. Bach’s Weimar organ fugues in D, G, and A minor (BWV 538, 542, 543) serve as case studies, whereby music analysis becomes a means of (re)enacting the creative compositional act.
The investigation pivots on two key themes in creativity studies: 1) schemata are not internalized in the same way by all members of a culture (Vygotsky 1978), but rather are already learned in a creative manner, which subsequently leads to their original use and appropriation; 2) original contributions in a given domain rely not on the mere imitation of models, but rather on deep-level analogies among them, which allows for conceptual combination or conceptual blending.

The Hero Who Practices Resignation: Beethoven’s Eroica as ‘Late’ Work (Page Proof)

The Cambridge Companion to the Eroica Symphony, ed. Nancy November, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 105–138, 2020

Historically informed analysis reveals a very different conception of hero in the Eroica than the... more Historically informed analysis reveals a very different conception of hero in the Eroica than the one sustained in the popular imagination and perpetuated by the majority of its reception history: a militaristic or Napoleonic Heldenleben. By combining analytic perspectives from schema theory and topic theory with key passages from Beethoven’s epistolary life and Tagebuch, this chapter illustrates that the Eroica’s narrative is akin to religious drama, conveying the same theme of abnegation found in the contemporary oratorio Christus am Ölberge and the Heiligenstadt Testament, the Eroica’s ‘literary prototype’. Unlike some middle-period works which communicate a ‘tragic-to-triumphant’ expressive genre, the Eroica is cast in the ‘tragic-to-transcendent’ type, which became characteristic of Beethoven’s late style. A central component of this spiritual genre is the strategic positioning of structural and semantic oppositions in an unresolved state of suspension. The Eroica manifests this most overtly through a governing opposition between death (‘ombra’) and pastoral (‘Ländler, contredanse’) music, and the association of this stylistic opposition with the tonalities of G minor and E flat major, respectively. Rather than a programmatic narrative about a hero who overcomes, the Eroica is a conceptually ‘late’ work that meditates on suffering as a spiritual necessity and its implications for transcendence.

Review of LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827) THE LATE QUARTETS Quatuor Mosaïques Naive V5445, 2017; three discs, 188 minutes

Eighteenth-Century Music, 2019

Thinking in Bach’s Language, Teaching in His Shoes: How the Thomaskantor Structured My Syllabus as a Modern-Day Notenbüchlein or Zibaldone

BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute, Vol. 49, No. 2, pp. 175–204, 2018

Over the past decade or so, historically informed theory, pedagogy, and (more recently) compositi... more Over the past decade or so, historically informed theory, pedagogy, and (more recently) composition have emerged fully as outgrowths of the historically informed performance (HIP) movement, for which Bach’s music has been instrumental. In this light, “Bach in the music theory classroom” is a metaphor for a broader HI initiative, one where, in my own teaching, historically informed theory (HIT) becomes the basis for structuring a curriculum centered on period composition. In this article, I discuss the materials, process, rationale, and philosophical implications for a mini-curriculum that constitutes the first of a three-course HIT sequence. My aim with this first leg is to change students’ thinking from the “know-what” types of knowledge characteristic of present-day music theory curricula to a “know-how” mind-set consistent with eighteenth-century pedagogy.

The goals of music theory today approximate the reading knowledge of a language acquired in graduate school. Enough about its syntax, grammar, and vocabulary is learned to supply a translation, but without ever acquiring the knowledge and experience to speak, think, or write in the language itself. Score annotations and analyses, as ends in themselves, are like metalinguistic translations. In Bach’s day, on the other hand, music theory was the business of training musicians to speak the language, on the performance-improvisation-composition continuum that defined their daily activities. To implement a “know-how” curriculum in an environment designed for “know-what,” however, is not without its challenges, not least because of limited time and often resources.

I narrate how Bach himself offered me a solution through his own music and pedagogical materials. Rather than throwing students into the proverbial deep end, my mini-curriculum engages them actively and continuously in creative work. The goal is not to compose a self-standing composition, but to get students thinking in Bach’s language in terms of musical schemata, the everyday patterns and conventions of Bach’s day. I do so through a series of creative problem-solving activities that impart knowledge of schemata, particularly as they are used in Bach’s hands. Students are placed in Bach’s shoes as both a teacher and composer, by exploring the connections and differences among Bach’s figured basses from the Vorschriften und Grundsätze zum vierstimmigen spielen des General-Bass, the partimento-preludes of the Langloz manuscript, and certain preludes from the Well-Tempered Clavier as well as selected fantasias. Through realization, analysis, and (class) composition exercises, students encounter a number of recurring schemata as a familiar cast of characters in these materials, all fashioned together into a modern-day Notenbüchlein or zibaldone (musical notebook), which tells a story about Bach’s schema usage—his compositional strategies employing schema development, elision, nesting, extension, and expansion.
The story culminates with Bach’s unique canonic treatment of a particular sequence, the 9/7–8/6/5. After ten weeks, students are able to realize a complex Bach partimento (BWV 908) and compose a continuo part for the Sanctus of the Mass in B Minor, for which no figures survive. These advanced creative problem-solving activities fill the last pages of the students’ Notenbüchlein, which is organized nearly single-handedly by Leipzig’s beloved Thomaskantor himself.

Mozart's Vintage Corelli: The Microstory of a Fonte-Romanesca

Intégral, 2017

This article traces a brief history of a schema from Corelli to Mozart, here designated the Fonte... more This article traces a brief history of a schema from Corelli to Mozart, here designated the Fonte-Romanesca, in order to clarify certain foundational principles in schema theory's conception of a model, particularly as it relates to the creative act. Models are not theoretical abstractions, but cultural artifacts that inform the compositional process through (near-)literal copy, (creative) imitation, variation, and problem solving—both combinatorially and developmentally. Such a re-evaluation of schema theory is simultaneously an opportunity to reflect on larger disciplinary changes surrounding the study of music from the long eighteenth century over the last few decades.

Errata and Supplement to: “‘Hauptruhepuncte des Geistes’: Punctuation Schemas and the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata.”

Prelude on a Partimento: Invention in the Compositional Pedagogy of the German States in the Time of J. S. Bach. *Music Theory Online* 21.3 (2015)

This article examines a hypothetical compositional and pedagogical use of the Langloz manuscript,... more This article examines a hypothetical compositional and pedagogical use of the Langloz manuscript, a collection of German partimenti, during the time of J. S. Bach. The partimento is reconceptualized as a bridge to free composition, by aligning it with what Bach and his Thuringian and Hamburgian neighbors (including Werckmeister, Walther, Niedt, and Mattheson) called inventiones: materials for free composition that are subject to substantial development, involving processes of elaboration, variation, extension, and expansion. My argument is borne out by a historically informed practical demonstration: my own composition of a Prelude in D minor, which broadly derives from the partimento-prelude numbered 48 in the manuscript. The transformation of a simple thoroughbass into a fully worked-out composition pivots on two species of invention and their development, one structural, the other stylistic: 1) a genre-specific structuring principle that is coded into the partimento; for the prelude genre, this concerns long-range scale-harmonizations spanning 1–4 octaves; the principle recurs in several preludes of The Langloz Manuscript and of The Well-Tempered Clavier; and 2) the subject (thema) of a composition, which results from novel combinations of musical topics (Manieren), and the constructive imitation of other composers’ uses of styles and genres (locus exemplorum).

"'Hauptruhepuncte des Geistes': Punctuation Schemas and the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata," In *What Is a Cadence?: Theoretical and Analytical Perspectives on Cadences in the Classical Repertoire.* Ed. by Markus Neuwirth and Pieter Bergé (Leuven University Press, 2015), 215–251.

Topics and Harmonic Schemata: A Case from Beethoven. In *The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory.* Ed. Danuta Mirka (2014), pp. 381–414.

Topics and harmonic schemata powerfully interact in the late-eighteenth-century communicative cha... more Topics and harmonic schemata powerfully interact in the late-eighteenth-century communicative channel. This article illustrates both a categorial and pragmatic interfacing of the two domains in Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, where a particular schema-topic amalgam, the le–sol–fi–sol (Byros 2012, 2009), enables the communication of a powerful philosophical message involving the spiritual consequences of suffering, self-sacrifice, and death. The le–sol–fi–sol, as an instance of harmonic grammar, is also an ombra topic with mortal, funereal, and sacrificial connotations. As a hybrid symbolic structure, it is the basis for establishing a number of correlations of oppositions in the structural and expressive domains of the Symphony, which communicate a “tragic-to-transcendent” expressive genre and the cultural unit of “abnegation” (Hatten 1994).

Trazom's Wit: Communicative Strategies in a 'Popular' Yet 'Difficult' Sonata. Eighteenth-Century Music 10 (2): 213–252. © Cambridge University Press 2013

Eighteenth-Century Music 10/2: 213-252, Sep 2013

Meyer's Anvil: Revisiting the Schema Concept. Music Analysis 31/3 (2012): 273–346.

Music Analysis, Oct 2012

This article re-examines the concept of a ‘schema’ in light of a new body of empirical evidence r... more This article re-examines the concept of a ‘schema’ in light of a new body of empirical evidence regarding the culture and cognition of key in the eighteenth century. The schema concept in music, which originated in the work of Leonard B. Meyer, holds that social and historical experience gives rise to knowledge structures that engender a situated psychology of hearing and a context-contingent understanding of music. In previous studies by Meyer and Robert O. Gjerdingen, evidence for the schema concept has been advanced largely by interpreting a musical corpus as a metaphor for experience. That is, arguments for the existence of schemata as mental categories that configure a situated psychology of hearing have been presented primarily in the form of music analysis – historically situated patterns detected in musical scores. For this reason, the schema concept has remained, in Meyer's and Gjerdingen's words, a ‘hypothesis’ and ‘assum[ption]’ respectively.The evidence I advance here derives from a case study on Beethoven's Eroica Symphony and what I call the le–sol–fi–sol schema. The study was conducted in the spirit of the psychologically orientated, humanistic music theory that characterised Meyer's lifelong research program. By establishing a correlation between real listeners’ responses in the Symphony's reception history and the details of my own corpus study of music from the long eighteenth century (1720–1840), my Eroica case study brings a novel perspective to the idea that schemata engender a historical mode of listening. The case study bears out several hypotheses that are basic to Meyer's writings and perpetuated in Gjerdingen's galant style project: (1) that replicated patternings in eighteenth-century works are commensurate with listeners’ knowledge structures; (2) that these knowledge structures are historically contingent and therefore engender a situated psychology of hearing; (3) that these situated psychologies are affected by style change; and (4) that schemata provide access to historical modes of listening today.

Review of *The Art of Partimento: History, Theory, and Practice* (Oxford) by Giorgio Sanguinetti. Music Theory Online 18/3

Unearthing The Past: Theory and Archaeology in Robert Gjerdingen's *Music in the Galant Style*. Music Analysis 31/1 (2012): 112–124

Towards an "Archaeology" of Hearing: Schemata and Eighteenth-Century Consciousness. Musica Humana 1/2 (2009): 235–306.

This article investigates the problem of historical modes of listening through the lens of recent... more This article investigates the problem of historical modes of listening through the lens of recent research in schema theory and historically-informed music cognition (Gjerdingen 1988; 2007; Byros 2009). Substantial empirical evidence now exists surrounding two particular late eighteenth-century schemata: the 1–7, 4–3 (Gjerdingen 1988; Meyer 1980) and the le–sol–fi–sol (Byros 2009). The population distributions derived from extensive corpus study for both schemata approximate a Gaussian distribution that bells in 1750–1760 and 1810–1820, with population peaks in the 1770s and 1790s, respectively. The statistics demonstrate that late eighteenth-century schemata are highly perceptually redundant (Meyer 1967/1994) while historically limited, by following a "life cycle." By extension, the evidence implies that schema-driven listening would by nature be "historical through and through"(Adorno 2004). Occasions of such "historicized" modes of listening are examined with three case studies (Mozart's "Dissonance" Quartet, Beethoven's Eroica Symphony and Piano Sonata in E minor), which indicate that, where eighteenth-century tonality is concerned, historical and modern modes of cognition differ respectively in the cognitive presence and absence of schemata.

Competing "Windows of Order": The Dialectics of System-Construction and -Withdrawal in Berg's Sonata for Piano, Op. 1

This article reads Berg's Piano Sonata in the context of a paradox fundamental to fin-de-siècle V... more This article reads Berg's Piano Sonata in the context of a paradox fundamental to fin-de-siècle Viennese musical aesthetics—namely, the need to move beyond convention for expressive advantage while recognizing the inexorability of convention for music's "autonomy principle" (Dahlhaus). On the one hand, the Sonata displays a "systemic impulse," in its attempts to build a new system following the abnegation of common-practice tonality—a "whole-tone tonality," which derives from a specific pairing of interval cycles 1 and 2 (Perle). At the same time, the Sonata acknowledges the aesthetic insincerity of this ambition, which plays out in a "negative impulse," whereby the work seeks to destroy the very system it creates in a manner reflective of musique informelle and the "death urge" in Berg's music in general (Adorno).

Foundations of tonality as situated cognition, 1730-1830: An enquiry into the culture and cognition of eighteenth-century tonality, with Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony as a case study. Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University, 2009

Praeludium in D minor (© 2015 )

Fuga in B minor for String Trio (© 2013 )

The Nikhil Hogan Show: Episode 86