Swotd 9!

The image today is only a piece of the work space. I'm at the carrel for the third straight day, so rather than a picture of the desk, here are some of the cool historic song books I'm using in my research:

SOTD is a pseudo-gratuitous cite of one of my former advisors, Brian Hyer:

Complementing this description, Brian Hyer elucidates one way, tonality, in which music manages the emotions and expectations that McClary describes here:

[Tonality] gives rise to abstract relations that control melodic motion and harmonic succession over long expanses of musical time. In its power to form musical goals and regulate the progress of the music toward these moments of arrival, tonality has become the principal musical means in Western culture by which to manage expectation and structure desire.[1]

Here, Hyer describes the operation of musical desire on a local level, according to a prototypical tonal “phrase model.”

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[1] Brian Hyer, “Tonality,” in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 728.