Invited Talk
Prof. Jason Yust
Boston University School of Music
Room BC410
Wednesday, 25 June 2025
15:30–16:30
Memento link
We often think of the musical conventions of the eighteenth century as a kind of language. If so, what kind of grammar does the language of eighteenth-century musical forms have?
I begin by considering one of the few instances where we can pinpoint the invention of a form type with specific composers and pieces, the sonata-rondo (which first appears in the music of Michael Haydn and Mozart). A formal language that includes sonata-rondo requires the hierarchical structure of a context-free grammar. This kind of hierarchy of timespans, a temporal structure, can be generally defined with a network model. This opens the way to define formal grammar more flexibly using just a few generalized processes, and also makes it possible to compare formal structures with other temporal structures, such as one based on harmony and modulations. One consequence of this approach is the identification of certain innovations of Haydn and Beethoven (off-tonic beginnings, non-standard subordinate keys, codas) with particular forms of tonal-formal disjunction (mismatches between structures in the two domains), and the classification of these.
Jason Yust is a music theorist and Associate Professor of Music Theory at the Boston University School of Music. His research applies mathematics to topics in music theory, music analysis, and music cognition, and he is interested in how theorists, composers, and listeners conceptualize tonal and rhythmic spaces and structures.
The event is co-sponsored by the DH Seminar series.