A number of scholars have written on characteristics of vocal melody in popular music, but little attention has been paid at the level of phonetic detail. This study argues that the phonetic structure of a melody can contribute in important ways to a song's reception and success, given the ways that listeners react and respond to vocalised melody. This article discusses different ways in which stressed syllables in familiar pop songs alliterate, and it investigates the way these patterns interact rhythmically with metre.

What purpose does a jazz transcription serve? What is at stake in a jazz transcription? What is being represented and how? This article considers these questions, drawing from three independently-conceived transcriptions of the same jazz solo by tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins. Following an introduction that situates our views of jazz transcription within the context of recent discourse on transcription and notation, we present our transcriptions, each of which is accompanied by a narrative that describes the transcriber’s aims, approach, and rationale for certain notational choices. In the last section of our paper, we compare select passages from our transcriptions of Rollins’s solo as a means to substantiate our conclusion, that (1) jazz transcriptions simultaneously serve descriptive and prescriptive purposes; (2) transcriptions reflect the strategic needs of the analyst and intended audience; (3) transcriptions are interpretive acts that contain the traces of one’s individualized experience of acoustical objects; (4) when transcriptions of the same performance are read side by side, they coalesce into a plural analysis, highlighting the complexity of the performance.

<p>Keith Salley and Dan Shanahan’s “Phrase Rhythm in Standard Jazz Repertoire: A Taxonomy and Corpus Study” reflects a number of Steven Strunk's scholarly interests. The authors encourage readers to consider how the layered analyses at the end of Strunk’s seminal “Harmony of Early Bop” article (<em>JJS</em> 6.1) agree, depart from, or inform the processes discussed in their contribution. Furthermore, Salley and Shanahan’s broad stylistic survey of standard jazz tunes resonates notably with Strunk’s work—particularly his “Linear Intervallic Patterns in Jazz Repertory” (<em>ARJS</em> 8) and his entry on “Harmony” in the <em>New Grove Dictionary of Jazz</em>.</p>

The focus of this study is the melodic motive. It uses a tool called the Ordered Step Motive (OSM) to investigate the way linear motives give shape to jazz compositions that have frequently changing tonal centers, nonfunctional chord connections, no clear global tonics, or structurally open, circular forms. This study contributes to the written body of theoretical knowledge about jazz composition by engaging with current scholarship on tonal ambiguity, circular form, and motivic associations between melody and harmonic organization. This study also invites further research into the relationship between common riffs and underlying structure in jazz composition, which may reveal crucial differences between standards written by Broadway and Tin-Pan-Alley composers and those written by practicing jazz musicians.

This article takes a close look at the concept of duration (durée), an idea that is central to Henri Bergson’s philosophy of subjective time. It argues that Schoenberg’s early concept of developing variation resonates with Bergson’s duration in a way that enables us to shift the locus of developing variation from a musical object to a participant subject. It presents analytical readings of three pieces from Schoenberg’sSechs kleine Klavierstücke, op. 19, a collection of miniatures written when German translations of Bergson’s works were published for the first time and when Bergson’s popularity was especially high.