Aamamata, Funeral Lamentation from the Solomon Islands
John Roeder’s transcription with annotations of a vocal duet from the Solomon Islands (Les Voix du Monde, CD 3, track 21).
Acknowledgements and Bibliography for Oscar Smith’s SEM 2022 Presentation
link to PDF poster Acknowledgements Thank you to the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people for their patience and ongoing hospitality as UBC operates on their ancestral, unceded territory. Thanks to the UBC School of Music’s Cycles in the World of Music Research Cluster for providing funding for both this research and for travel to New Orleans for this conference. Thanks to John Roeder […]
Media
View recorded conference presentations and other available media relevant to our studies. ‘Some Traditional-Music Examples of Cycle Variation and its Grouping Effects’ – Presentation delivered by John Roeder at AAWM 2022 (abstract here). ‘Variable-rhythm Quale Cycles in World Music and their Special Properties’ – Presentation delivered by John Roeder at AAWM 2021 (abstract here) ‘Sound Materiality and […]
Research Products
On the published research page, you will find publications primarily written by our principal investigators. The conference presentations section lists those presentations funded by our project and by our research team members. The page of unpublished materials is a home for fairly substantial work done by our members that has not yet found a place […]
Published Research
Books (click for external purchase links or view through your institution) Roeder, J., Tenzer, M., ed. 2011. Analytical and Cross-Cultural Studies in World Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Tenzer, Michael, ed. 2006. Analytical Studies in World Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Roeder, J., Tenzer, M. 2020. Identitas dan Genre dalam Gamelan Gong Kebyar: Studi […]
Visual Representations of Cycles
On this page, we explore how visually representing musical cycles in various ways can enrich our understanding of them. How can we visually represent cycles? What do we learn by representing cycles in a visual format? What limitations does each visualisation have for our understanding of cyclic phenomena? Aural phenomena such as music are necessarily […]
Definitions
What is a musical cycle? A strict cycle is a series, associated with a succession of events, that is heard to be immediately and persistently repeated. It gives every event the purpose of completing the series and filling out its duration. The repetitions also associate events that appear in the same position in their respective cycles. […]
Research Team
Principal Investigators Dr. John Roeder (Professor of Music Theory) As a music theorist and analyst, I describe ways that people conceive of music, and how music is heard to organize time coherently, expressively, and meaningfully. I concentrate on music of special relevance today: recent works by contemporary composers in the Western art-music tradition, and the […]
Repertoire
Immediate and persistent repetition characterizes many kinds of music. Some have been well studied, especially popular music, Euro-American miminalism, and music of Africa and its diaspora. This project, however, seeks broad geographical and cultural diversity in order to appreciate, represent and theorize the widest possible sampling of cyclical techniques. Consulting both the latest literature and living experts, we […]
About
Our project seeks to sketch a portrait of cyclic music in cultures worldwide, considering how the range of its varieties could be represented. Cooordinating the perspectives of music theory and ethnomusicology, principal investigators John Roeder and Michael Tenzer, along with their research associates, create and evaluate tools and methodologies for describing, analyzing, and comparing musical cycles […]