​

Abstracts

 

Aidan Brych, Serial Displacement in George Walker’s Spatials

​

Musical serialism is defined by the arranging of the chromatic scale into a set order, referred

to as a tone row. How do we reconcile, then, a serialist composition that uses the same tone row but

slightly rearranged, or even with notes missing? This is the case in the 1961 piano composition

Spatials by George Walker, a theme and variations in which the tone row at the beginning of each

section is rarely heard twice in its proper order. In Jack Boss’s analysis of Spatials, he demonstrates

that deviation from the tone row is used to create form over the set of variations through increased

tension (Boss 2022). What motivates these deviations is unclear, but the solution may lie in the name

of the piece itself, “spatial” meaning related to space.

​

I combine the ideas of Jack Boss with Daniel Leech-Wilkinson’s (2017) research on shapes

in music, as well as pedagogical tools for serial composition created by Ron Jarzombek (2011), by

creating representations of tone rows in the shape of a circle. The path Walker takes to create the row

can then be charted with a line, producing shapes that are repeatedly seen. Building off of Zachary

Wallmark’s connection of musical concepts to embodied sensory experiences (2022), this paper

demonstrates how the metaphor of musical shape can be given a physical form which connects tone

row deviation to sight, offering a better understanding of deviation from the tone row in serial music.

In successive variations, certain shapes recur and the number of deviations grows to a climax leading

into the next section. Through this analysis, we can visually grasp how George Walker

navigates tone rows, understanding how his deviations contribute to the piece’s overall form, as well

as learning how to replicate Walker’s techniques.

​

Lee Cannon-Brown, Messiaen, mod 24

​

Olivier Messiaen’s music has been well illuminated by US/Canadian pitch-class set theory

(Neidhöfer 2005; Forte 2007). Yet his music also possesses the opposite capacity, I argue, to expose

pitch-class set theory’s limits. I find a provocative case study in Messiaen’s unpublished essay in

quartertones: the Deux Monodies for solo Ondes Martenot (1938), preserved at the Paris Conservatoire,

and recorded by Nathalie Forget. In analyzing the Monodies’ intervals, I expand mod-12 to mod-24 pitch

space (Hook 2023, 607–9), rupturing a closed universe of interval and set classes. As I further uncover

the pieces’ quartertonal modes of limited transposition, I show how set-class space resists mod-24

expansion, necessitating an alternative approach.

​

Messiaen notated his Monodies using accidentals, borrowed from the composer-theorist Ivan

Wyschnegradsky (1932, 2). I analyze the pieces using pcs 0–23 and ics 1–12, whose odd-numbered

classes exceed twelve-tone equal temperament (12TET). Throughout my paper, I uncover Messiaen’s

constructions in mod-24 pitch space, expanding the analytic literature on equal-tempered microtonality

(Hasegawa 2015, 204–23; Madrid 2015, 111–35; Kostka and Santa 2018, 29–30; Segall 2024). More

importantly, I destabilize mod-12 and set-class spaces that are foundational to pitch-class set theory.

While my analysis is tailored to a specialized case study, it ultimately illustrates a broader desideratum

for pitch-class set theory: For set theory to have purchase on the most adventurous experiments in

modernist music, it must be not only systematic, but also flexible, even in its basic assumptions about

pitch space.

​

Michael Dekovich, Hyperverses

​

In rock’s verse-chorus paradigm, choruses act as teleological goals and distillations of a song’s

meaning. Osborn observes the paradigm’s function “as a methodological constraint on analysts

and compositional restraint on songwriters” (2013, 23)–a view epitomized by Braheny’s

description of choruses as “a simple and easily remembered statement” of a song’s “essence,

emotion, and meaning” (2002, 78). While effective in many contexts, this strength becomes a

limitation in narrative-driven compositions. A chorus established early can be a hermeneutic

prison: its repetitive, summative character inhibits developmental storytelling. When a chorus

prematurely summarizes the central conflict, the narrative reaches a deadlock that can only be

resolved through new material. I propose the hyperverse as a terminal formal function for

resolving such narrative deadlocks.

​

Hyperverses resemble verses but surpass both verses and choruses in memorability

(Osborn 2013, 29)–a rhetorical variant of Osborn’s “hyperchorus” (2014, 177). Occurring near a

song’s conclusion, hyperverses advance plot by combining verse-like narrative expansion with

chorus-like anthemic impact through three key features: (1) replacing expected recapitulation

with new material; (2) parametric transformation (including modal shift, textural thinning, and

dynamic reduction); and (3) pairing expansive narrative exposition with memorable melody.

Dream Theater’s “The Count of Tuscany” (2009) illustrates this process. The protagonist’s

paranoia escalates during a visit to a Tuscan count’s villa. Each E-minor verse intensifies

dread, while the C-minor chorus’s lines, “I may not survive / Knew it from the moment we

arrived,” reinforce entrapment through minor-mode harmony and loud, full-band texture.

Following an extensive bridge, Dream Theater avoid recapitulating the fatalistic chorus.

Instead, a terminal hyperverse (14:28—17:00) introduces radical parametric changes: the mode

shifts to B major, dynamics soften, instrumentation thins to voice and acoustic guitar, and

monologue becomes dialogue. The section culminates in the count’s revelation to the

protagonist, “Of course you’re free to go,” exposing the earlier chorus as paranoid delusion rather

than the locus of meaning.

​

By shifting analytical focus from musical syntax to narrative function, the hyperverse

builds upon existing theories of terminal forms (Osborn 2013; Simonds 2025) while addressing

storytelling dimensions directly relevant to songwriters. Hyperverses reward hermeneutic

engagement by transforming the chorus from a site of summary into a point of departure,

emerging as a crucial concept for understanding how rock artists reconcile structural demands

with narrative ambition.

​

Collin Felter, Pentatonicism in Jazz: An Analysis of Anhemitonic Pentatonicism’s

Affordances for Dissonance throughout Jazz Styles

​

Anhemitonic pentatonicism persists throughout cultures spanning time and place. Whether the

collection stemmed from innate physical qualities or shared sonic histories, vast acquaintance across

cultures has primed our ears to find comfort, consonance, and grounding in anhemitonic pentatonicism

as an isolated structure (Day-O’Connell 2007). Jazz musicians have tapped into this familiarity to

compose and improvise while simultaneously using pentatonicism’s distinct abilities to quench the thirst

for dissonant exploration. This paper primarily reveals the pentatonic techniques and affordances

developed in the jazz canon. Jazz musicians abstract consonance from the anhemitonic pentatonic

collection through these affordances to achieve “out” sonorities through tactics of superimposition and

alteration as evidenced by their performance and pedagogical practice alongside existing theoretical and

musicological scholarship.

​

Close musical analysis, historiographic scholarship, performer-theory, interface studies, and 

pedagogical literature demonstrate how jazz musicians leverage the pentatonic collection’s properties. After

finding anhemitonic pentatonicism amply throughout jazz styles, this paper explores five ways in

which the collection produces unique musical content in jazz: 1) Superimposition, 2) Side-Slipping, 3)

Alteration, 4) Blues Pentatonicism, and 5) Pentatonic Cadences. Minor pentatonicism is closely related

to blues melodic content and this relationship is expanded through particular cadential pentatonic

structures. When jazz musicians avoid leading-tone resolution, they often employ other stepwise closures

stemming from pentatonic scales (ˆ1, ˆ𝑏7-ˆ1, and ˆ𝑏3-1ˆ). These cadential gestures alongside other

pentatonic content regularly occur over disparate harmonic material. Jazz musicians refer to this as

superimposition, and several common superimposed pentatonics developed throughout modern jazz styles

(Williams 2017; Coker 1964). Performing superimposed pentatonics can occur through sequenced

playing, labelled “side-slipping” throughout jazz literature (Liebman 1991). As pentatonicism became a

foundational framework for jazz musicians, it was then used as a base for alteration.

 

A central methodological concern of the paper is to locate theory within musical practice rather

than impose abstract systems onto repertory. Looking to scholarship that expands what counts as music

theory opens the door for explanatory insights from vast performer-theory and pedagogical materials

(Hannaford 2021; Salley 2007). Much of this theory comes in the form of method books spanning

musical vocabulary to specific interface studies (e.g., Kahn 2002; Yamaguchi 2006; Scofield 1983; Ricker

1999). Placing practitioners’ theory in conversation with recorded improvisations unveils cognitive

frameworks among jazz musicians. It is this connection between performer-theory, analysis, and historical

evidence that informs the methodology of my jazz pentatonic discussion.

​

Arka Ashis Gupta, A Formal Grammar of Raga:

Weighted Directed Graphs, Ornamental Subgraphs, and Melodic Conditioning in Yaman

​

Raga grammar in Hindustani music is among the most structurally rich and analytically

underserved domains in music theory. A raga is not a scale but a dynamic melodic entity governed

by pitch selection, sequential motion, tonal hierarchy, and ornamentation. Yet as Rao and Rao

(2014) observe, "no scientific model has yet been formulated to codify the rules governing phrasing in raga-s."

Existing computational approaches model what musicians statistically do, not what raga grammar

formally licenses. This paper proposes a prescriptive formal grammar addressing this gap,

demonstrated through a case study of Raga Yaman.

 

The model is a two-level context-sensitive weighted transduction system. The first level is a

weighted directed graph Gₚ over the active swara set of a raga, where nodes represent pitch classes

and directed edges encode prescribed melodic transitions. Edge weights are derived from transition

frequency counts across prescriptive theoretical sources, primarily Bhatkhande’s Kramik Pustak

Malika, adjusted by a tonal salience correction that encodes the vadi–samvadi hierarchy. For Yaman,

the active node set is {Sa, Re, Ga, tivra Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni}, with Gandhar (Ga) as the vadi and Nishad (Ni)

as the samvadi. The weight matrix encodes asymmetries invisible to scale-based descriptions: Pa

appears weak in ascent, the movement Pa→Re as a bare melodic step is grammatically absent, and

Gandhar exhibits near-balanced bidirectional salience as a structural pivot.

​

The second level is a raga-specific ornamentation subgraph G₀ whose nodes represent

ornamentation types as applied to specific swaras in the raga’s grammar: primarily meend (glide) and

kan (grace note), supplemented by gamaka and murki as style-dependent variants. Crucially,

ornamentation nodes are not decorative additions to the melodic layer. They are grammatically

active intermediate states that modify the outgoing edge weights of the parent graph through a

conditioning function. When ornamentation node oᵢ activates at swara x, the modified transition

weight is W′(x→z | oᵢ) = W(x→z) • [1 + β • α(oᵢ) • δ(oᵢ, x, z)], where α encodes ornamentation

salience and δ encodes the directional force of the ornament on subsequent transitions. The

mechanism is soft and probabilistic: prescribed connections are amplified and grammatically

disfavored connections are suppressed.

​

This model departs from all existing approaches in a specific and documentable way. The

computational musicology literature on Indian music—including pitch distribution models (Chordia

and Şentürk 2013), phrase-based recognition systems (Gulati et al. 2016), and note-embedding

approaches (Ross et al. 2017)—is descriptive and posterior: it characterizes what performers do

rather than what raga grammar licenses. The closest formal precursor, Chakraborty et al.’s (2014)

first-order Markov chain of raga structure, explicitly externalizes ornamentation to the human

performer as stylistic “how,” separate from the melodic “what” (pp. 97–99). Here, the

ornamentation is not the “how” applied after melodic decisions are made, but a grammatical state

through which melodic decisions are partially generated.

The paper concludes by identifying a limitation—cadential phrase closure requires a phrasephase

parameter extension φ ∈ {ascending, descending, cadential}—and proposes the generalization

of the two-level architecture to other Hindustani ragas as a direction for future work.

​

Caleb Herrmann, Losing Perspective in Song

​

Recorded songs often give us objects to cling to. With the help of the studio, they parse

sounds from one another, arranging voices and instruments in space and assigning them discrete

profiles. The experience they offer the listener is one of certainty and affirmation: of being able to say

where sounds are, where one ends and another begins—in short, of being able to know the song’s

world. Recent scholarship on studio production theorizes such intelligibility through concepts such as

the sound box (Dockwray and Moore 2010), sound staging (Moylan 2015), and recorded virtual

space (Duguay 2022), all of which position studio techniques as central to rendering a song’s sonic

environment intelligible for the listener.

​

What happens, though, when songs instead orchestrate a listening experience organized

around uncertainty—when the very coordinates that would allow us to differentiate and organize a

song’s environment begin to dissolve? How does our experience change when a song withholds a

stable auditory perspective? This talk examines studio-recorded songs from the 21st century that

make it difficult for listeners to gain a fixed sense of what they hear. From Billie Eilish’s hazy sound

environments to Charli XCX’s disorienting hyper-realities, these post-millennial pop songs distort,

erode, and blur perceptual cues through production techniques such as reverb, EQ, compression,

and stereo manipulation. What emerges across these works is not a single sound or technique, but a

recurring set of strategies for staging perceptual instability—strategies that cut across genre and artist.

To account for these strategies, I propose the trope of dissolve: a trope of perceptual

unmooring in which sonic elements fall out of reach through processes of blur and bleed. Dissolve is

fundamentally a product of audio production and sound design, a trope rooted in the techne of the

studio. My talk considers the role of recording and production techniques—track editing, effects and

dynamics processing, stereo mixing, and mastering—in coordinating this loss of perspective.

Production effects that contribute to instances of dissolve include dense spatial resonance, textural

saturation, lateral extension of the stereo image, temporal sustain, and an emphasis on high, breathy

frequencies through filtering and EQ. In these instances, the studio does not simply clarify or

stabilize sonic objects; rather, it becomes the technical infrastructure through which they are

diffused, displaced, and rendered perceptually unstable.

​

Taken together, I argue that these tropes structure a field of listening that departs from the

epistemological security often associated with recorded sound. Instead of offering a world that can be

readily grasped and organized, these songs invite listeners into environments defined by ambiguity,

flux, and partial access. In doing so, they provide a powerful means of inhabiting and grappling with

the perceptual and affective conditions of the present.

​

Bailey Labrie, Creative Process as Metanarrative: Diegetic Layering in

Whisper of the Heart (1995)

​

Film music has traditionally been thought to function in either diegetic or non-diegetic space,

with recent scholarship suggesting placement between the two extremes (Gorbman 1987, Smith 2009,

Cohen 2013, Sbravatti 2016). This dichotomy neglects to recognize when there is a fictional diegesis

within the lived diegesis of the characters. For Whisper of the Heart (1995), a diegetic divide exists between

the protagonist's experienced realities and her creative writing project: a story inspired by The Baron, a

cat statue belonging to her love interest's family. My analysis shows how the sequential placement of

leitmotivic material in the protagonist's "Fantasy" and "Reality" worlds establishes parallels between

them, ultimately placing weight on the protagonist's "Internal" reality of developing self-esteem and

creativity.

The composer Yuuji Nomi creates musical parallels in Whisper of the Heart through leitmotifs that

undergo thematic transformations (Bribitzer-Stull 2015) between cues in the soundtrack: Nomi

primarily uses orchestration and melodic variation (Bellano 2012) to transform a given theme, as well

as silence between tracks as a kind of grounding principle (Kulezic-Wilson 2009). These variables,

paired with simultaneous visuals and dialogue, defme the denotative (representing "something") and

connotative (representing characters' thoughts/emotions) qualities of each musical track (Sbravatti

2016). Each cue contains some evidence of one of the three central leitmotifs or is a standalone track. I

created the Diegesis Roadmap to organize each leitmotivic cue according to its track-by-track

placement in and development through each diegetic layer.

​

A closer look at the progression of the “Baron's Theme” shows how it represents both the

protagonist's “fictional” character and her own adventures on the way to personal progress. The theme

first appears in the Fantasy Layer, but next appears in the protagonist's "Internal Reality," through a

conversation in reality about creative progress, transitioning back to Fantasy while underscoring a

scene from her creative work. Next, the melody is cued by the protagonist's own struggle with isolation

and creative self-esteem, with only ambiguous visual associations with the Baron. The theme completes

its development in Reality, without diegetic reference to the Baron, underscoring the protagonist's bike ride

through town with her love interest. Thus, the trajectory of the Baron's theme transforms through

reference to the protagonist's imagination, the “Fantasy” realm she writes on the page, and the

fairytale adventure she experiences after the trials of developing her creative voice. The other themes

take different trajectories, but all of them envelop this same “Internal Reality.” My analysis thus suggests

that the film and the protagonist's story are both narratives about the creative process itself. This hidden

parallel creates a metanarrative connecting the film to our reality: a parallel to the process of creating a

film. Even more, it provides a model for understanding how music functions in other multi-diegetic

narrative structures. This opens the door for understanding the hidden narratives in visual media as

revealed in their less-obvious elements, such as the score.

​

Nolan Miranda, Constructing Destruction:

An Anamorphic Analysis of Simon Steen-Andersen’s Piano Concerto

​

Given that piano destruction pieces are no longer shocking (having become a genre of their

own), composers now must grapple with this “new tradition” if they choose to take on its fraught

history. Simon Steen-Andersen has a talent for wrestling with multifarious musical histories, as

beautifully evinced by his 2019 Trio for symphony orchestra, big band, and choir(!) featuring archival

footage from decades of early public television. His Piano Concerto, premiered by Nicolas Hodges and

the SWR Symphony Orchestra at the 2014 Donaueschinger Musiktage, starts with a dramatic slo-mo

video of a grand piano being dropped from a large height accompanied by about four minutes of frozen

orchestral clusters that reconstruct the sound of this event. This event serves as the genesis, conceptually

and literally, of much of the audio and visual material in the piece.

​

The piece proceeds through a gestural buildup from pointillistic sounds through glissandi to

large-scale quotations from Beethoven, all punctuated by callbacks to the destruction video. After an

anticlimactic cadenza, the orchestra performs an odd coda and the piece concludes with a reverse timelapse

video of the setup preceding the piano destruction. For a more detailed and evocative summary,

please see Stefan Drees’ excellent analysis of this work, which concludes with the following passage:

“[Steen-Andersen] works with permanently-changing perspectives: he creates a kind of

ambiguous figure which shifts between the different media levels of the performance, triggering

the attention through certain acoustic or visual key signals, thereby underlining the importance of

reflected media use for the future of musical composition and at the same time looking back on

the history of European music.”

​

Picking up where Drees left off requires anamorphosis, which can be defined many ways, but

perhaps can be summed up cleanly through Zizek’s idea that “the anamorphotic object [is] a pure

semblance that we can perceive clearly only by ‘looking awry.’”

In this paper, I apply the anamorphic lens in three ways as analytic tools for Simon Steen-

Andersen’s Piano Concerto (specifically as performed by Nicolas Hodges in the 2021 recording uploaded

to Steen-Andersen’s personal YouTube channel). I first situate the event of the destruction of the piano

as the primary anamorphic object of the piece. I then discuss temporal anamorphosis given that the

destruction event is depicted in various stages and speeds over the course of the piece. I proceed by

applying an anamorphic lens to the musical texture (drawing on wonderful work by Calum Jensen) and

then examine the piece as an anamorphic treatment of the piano concerto form through its quotations

and subverted expectations. I conclude with an unavoidable mirror-stage analysis of the pianist’s video

doppelgänger and an analysis of an important fourth-wall break moment.

​

Anna Peloso, Backbeat as an Agent of Reinterpretation in the

Music of DOMi & JD BECK

​

French keyboardist DOMi Louna (Domitille Degalle) and American drummer JD BECK

(James Dennis Beck) emerged as a contemporary jazz duo in 2018, blending 1960s–70s jazz fusion

with neo-soul, hip-hop, and drum machine/broken-beat aesthetics. Professionally known as DOMi

& JD BECK, their music features modal and non-functional harmony, virtuosic rhythmic textures,

rapid tempos, and irregular meters.

​

One striking feature is how meter is an actively negotiated parameter that is frequently

reshaped and embellished by BECK’s drum patterns. One of the drum patterns used to achieve this

reshaping is the backbeat. The backbeat—a drum set pattern where the snare drum is placed on beats

two and four in 4/4 meter—is generally a stabilizing, foundational groove utilized by drummers in a

wide variety of genres (e.g., pop, rock, R&B, soul, funk).

​

Building on the Metric Preference Rules developed by Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983), metric

dissonance (Krebs 1999), and backbeat studies in popular music (Biamonte 2014; Butler 2006; Geary

2022; Cairns 2021), I argue that BECK’s backbeats generate the opposite effect of its conventional

use: they create moments of tension-driven metric reinterpretations that last between one and

multiple measures. Not only does BECK execute this by way of backbeat variations in irregular

meter, but he often achieves this without varying the backbeat itself. Analyzing three original songs

written by the duo, this paper highlights how BECK can momentarily obscure or redirect meter in

fluid, localized ways using the “stable” 4/4 backbeat in unstable ways in contemporary jazz

drumming.

​

Alexander Shannon, Piano Keyboard (Mod-14) Voice-Leading Spaces

​

While abstract conceptions of pitch and pitch-class spaces understand the elements to be

evenly distributed, they are not represented this way on the piano keyboard. Though scholars have

engaged with the topography of the keyboard through hand crossings (Mead 1999), keyboard

fingerings (Bungert 2015), physical balance (Duguay 2019), key-color invariance (Hook 2014) and

modular spaces (De Souza 2017, 57–58), and transformation groups of keyboard chord shapes

(Frederick 2024a), I propose a model that explicitly leans into the keyboard’s structural asymmetry.

This set of voice-leading spaces (modeled after Tymoczko 2011) reimagines how musical motion

operates in embodied piano performance contexts.

​

I represent the piano’s uneven layout using a mod-14 system that assigns integers to white

keys and half-integers to black keys; thus, I preserve the keys’ horizontal spacing while introducing

“placeholder” points for absent keys that mark white–white semitone boundaries (2.5 and 6.5). In

this keyboard space, the aesthetic quality of voice-leading models fundamentally changes; this

change is highlighted by coloring placeholder points green. These points do not act as barriers to

musical movement but instead highlight a key feature of the space that aligns with the piano’s

design. I show the opening two-voice progression in Claude Debussy’s “Voiles” (from Préludes),

contrasted between realizations of the usual pitch space and the newly introduced keyboard space

(KBD). This passage is known for creating a sense of wandering due to the symmetric nature of the

whole-tone collection. When the voices no longer move in parallel trajectories, they reveal

disjunction and capture the piece’s tactile variability.

​

I then turn to three-voice spaces and right-hand motion in a typical omnibus progression

realized through the three-voice OP-space (Octave and Permutational equivalence; Callender,

Quinn, and Tymoczko 2008), manifested as a triangular prism that twists and wraps on itself. The

prism includes a lattice of keyboard triads in the center. Not every segment of the bolded path is

equal in length (but they would all be equal in the traditional chromatic mod-12 space): some

segments are three half-units (i.e., 1.5 units) long, and others are four half-units (two units). The ones

that travel through three half-units only include black points, signaling exclusive half-step motion

between keys of different colors. The longer paths that move through four half-units, however,

include green placeholder points, specifically signaling same-color half-step motion.

This model bridges abstract geometry and instrumental embodiment, offering a new

analytical framework for keyboard-based voice leading. This paper demonstrates how the mod-14

space captures tangible asymmetry often overlooked in geometric theory, situating the work within

broader conversations about technique and performance.

​

Brandon Woo Snyder, Monoculture and Myth: Simon Steen-Andersen’s TRIO and the

Role of Institution in New Music

​

Recent discourse in music and TV journalism regarding the rise and fall of “monoculture”

signals a current societal fascination in how institutions play a role in shaping an understanding of

culture. Within the field of New Music, a similar examination has emerged, moving away from a

focus on a “canon” of composers and compositions, and towards a network of material conditions and

behaviors that afford New Music to be created. Simon Steen-Anderson’s TRIO (2019) reflects this

context. Created entirely from the digitized archives of the SWR Broadcast Orchestras, this 48-minute

work for orchestra, big band, choir, and video, navigates history along non-chronological axes of logic as

a way of framing New Music culture beyond listing a canon of composers and compositions.

​

In this paper, I argue that TRIO uses musical frameworks to supplant composer-centric and

chronology-centric expressions of New Music history. Through a score analysis, I outline how TRIO

organizes material from the SWR’s archive along six musical parameters: harmony, rhythm, melody,

gesture, and historical context, with the explicit exclusion of organization by chronology (from oldest

to newest). I also present an analysis of how video and live ensemble interaction is organized in TRIO,

as a way of theorizing about musical development of multimedia. Overall, these organizing

frameworks render the identity of individual pieces and composers as unrecognizable, while

foregrounding the role of the broadcast institution, the conductor, and the historical context of each

moment in the piece.

​

Deirdre Toh, Fanny Hensel’s Textual Interventions: Reimagining Heine in Lied

​

Fanny Hensel’s reputation as a composer of Lieder has grown considerably in recent

years. Lieder comprise more than half of her output, and the current literature highlights her

sensitivity to the emotional flow of poetry and to the nuances of poetic form (Rodgers,

2011). This scholarship also foregrounds her innovative melodic and textual strategies, her

engagement with rich imagery in her Lied settings––such as nature, travel, and melancholy–

–and her adventurous tonal excursions involving distant modulations (Krebs, Burnham,

Osborne, et al., 2021). Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine, and Ludwig Tieck

were among the poets whose works Hensel most frequently set to music.

​

This paper draws on case studies of what I term Hensel’s ‘textual interventions’ in

her settings of Heine––her practice of altering his poems at critical moments to avoid a

rupture in tone––thereby demonstrating her creative agency beyond poetic sensitivity.

Hensel set Heine’s verse in two distinct periods: 1827–28 and 1835–38. I focus on the second

phase: her treatment of Heine’s endings that employ the poetic device of Stimmungsbrechung

(“breaking the mood”). Her resistance to the ironic and paradoxical turns that frequently

conclude Heine’s poems can be discerned in many of these settings. In these works, she

softens the abrupt, bitter tone of such endings by substituting her own texts or, at times,

eliminating them altogether, instead directing the musical material towards a dramatic and

elevated conclusion.

​

I examine Hensel’s settings in which her textual interventions radically alter the

trajectory of Heine’s poems. For instance, “Wenn der Frühling kommt” (1835) describes the

abundance of spring through imagery of the shining sun, blooming flowers, and the moon

and the stars. Hensel preserves this joyful sentiment throughout her musical setting by

altering the final two lines of the poem, which in the original contain the Stimmungsbrechung.

She replaces “Wie sehr das Zeug auch gefällt, So macht’s doch noch lang keine Welt”

(“However much you like these things, That’s not how the world works”) with “Sind alles

nur tändelnder Scherz, und meine Welt ist dein liebendes Herz” (“Are all a mere joke, And

my world is your loving heart”). This change frees the poem from its deflated turn and

allows the musical setting to sustain an unbroken joy. Beyond this textual substitution,

Hensel repeats selected lines from the main sections to create a musical ‘refrain’ between

each stanza, thereby persistently recalling the imagery of spring’s abundance. Even the final

stanza, which she drives towards an exuberant musical ending, stands in defiance of Heine’s

original verse.

​

I interpret this work in relation to several of Hensel’s other Heine settings from this

period, showing how she engages formal design and poetic form to steer the poetry in new

directions. Juxtaposing these Lieder with other composers’ settings of the same poems

further illustrates the effects of Hensel’s textual interventions on poetic meaning. These

comparisons demonstrate that the scope of Hensel’s interventions surpasses poetic

sensitivity and the simple emendations composers typically make, revealing her distinctive

creative agency in shaping Heine’s verse.