Editor’s Message
[1] Hello again MTO readers and welcome to our June 2026 edition, otherwise known as Volume 32, Number 2! We are just past midsummer, and I hope that this message finds you lounging, recreating, and/or sightseeing in a sunny, forested, and/or far-from-home locale. But wherever you are, if you find your summer disposition suffering from a lack of appropriate reading material, fret not! The editorial team at MTO is here to cure your ills with a slate of eight engaging music theory articles suitable for both reading by the oceanside and dramatically performing around a campfire.
[2] If you go the dramatic-performance route, you might do well to begin with Olga Sánchez-Kisielewska’s “Choreomusical Analogies in the Symphonic Minuet.” In this article, Sánchez-Kisielewska explores the deep connection between minuet dancing and minuet composition in eighteenth-century symphonic movements. Juxtaposing video demonstrations and hypermetrical analyses, Sánchez-Kisielewska shows how various phrase-rhythmic patterns call to mind specific dance practices, producing for enculturated listeners a multimodal and embodied listening experience even in pieces not accompanied by live dancers.
[3] Equally suitable for campsite performance—and perhaps sparking an impromptu aural skills session on polymeter—is Lina S. Tabak’s exploration of metrical perception in Colombian currulao. Using the genre’s so-called “rhythmic venom” (veneno rítmico) as a jumping-off point, Tabak revisits the controversial possibility of polymetric perception, offering an analytical perspective that is equally listener- and performer-oriented.
[4] One thing we can observe across all of MTO’s four seasons is the increasing prevalence of articles employing empirical methods, and this issue is no exception. Here, you’ll find Stanley Ralph Fink doing some data crunching to tease out the behavior of so-called “soul dominant” chords (a.k.a. V11, a.k.a. IV/) in twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular music. Using the McGill Billboard corpus as a dataset, Fink investigates to what degree these chords live up to the word “dominant” in their name. And Jenine Brown and Yeonju Lindsey Lee use empirical methods to explore the relative prevalence of different types of minor scales in common-practice tonal music. After taking us through a historical account of how different forms of minor have been taught, Brown and Lee present some surprising findings on how classical composers used minor scales, drawing their data from the Yale-Classical Archives Corpus.
[5] The four remaining articles all deal with musical meaning in some way, though they focus on very different repertoires. Matthew Thomson investigates the often conflicting narrative implications of musical form and literary text in thirteenth-century trouvère song. Centering on Gerbert de Montreuil’s Roman de la Violette, Thomson’s analysis shows how the interplay of song and text generates moments of interpretive tension, as musical structures both support and complicate the overall narrative. Jumping forward a half-millennium, David Keep considers how memory—and, more specifically, forgetting—functions in the slow movement of Johannes Brahms’s second piano concerto. In his deep analysis, Keep shows how the solo piano line forgets its main theme while interspersing memories of other pieces.
[6] Moving into our current century, we encounter both a Broadway megamusical and politically engaged country music. Kyle Hutchinson shows how motivic and tonal trajectories reflect the main character Elphaba’s show-spanning development in Stephen Schwartz’s Wicked. And Alan Reese shows how, after 9/11, country artists strategically adopted elements of rock music to drum up support for the Bush-era War on Terror.
[7] With these eight new offerings, you have few remaining excuses not to head outside with an iced beverage, don your oversized sunglasses, and dig into some crisp, fresh music theory scholarship. And so, on behalf of all of us at MTO, we wish you happy summer and, as always, Happy Reading!
Drew Nobile, MTO EditorUniversity of Oregon