bach paper

_music_theory/2023_bach_project.md

@@ -1,7 +1,11 @@
 ---
 title: "The Beginning of the Middle: Initiation and Reinitiation in Bach’s Binary-form Keyboard Works"
-subheading: Music Theory and Analysis (MTA) Volume 10.2 (Forthcoming).
+subheading: "<a href=\"https://doi.org/10.11116/MTA.10.2.2\">Music Theory and Analysis (MTA) Volume 10.2.</a>"
 year: 2023
-abstract: "This article borrows from William Caplin’s theory of formal functions, adapting these borrowings to music from Bach’s keyboard dance suites. It begins with a description of how Caplinian phrase functions, like “initiation” and “continuation,” can be applied in this music. It then describes “reinitiation” function, a phrase function that Bach uses following non-final cadences. Reinitiation is similar to Caplin’s initiating phrase functions, with the crucial difference that it occurs in an unstable harmonic context. This combination of harmonic instability with otherwise initiating features allows reinitiation to succinctly express both a local “beginning” and a higher-level “middle.” Bach most often achieves the harmonic instability characteristic of reinitiation function by means of a technique this article calls “de-tonicization”: the immediate tonal destabilization of a point of cadential arrival by reinterpreting it as a non-tonic harmony in some other key."
+abstract: "This article borrows from William Caplin's theory of formal functions, adapting these concepts to music from Bach's keyboard dance suites. It begins with a description of how Caplinian phrase functions such as \"initiation\" and \"continuation\" can be applied to this music. A novel \"reinitiation\" function is then proposed to identify a phrase function that Bach uses following non-final cadences. Reinitiation is similar to Caplin's initiating phrase functions, with the crucial difference that it occurs in an unstable harmonic con text. This combination of harmonic instability with otherwise initiating features allows reinitiation to succinctly express both a local \"beginning\" and a higher-level \"middle.\" Bach most often achieves the harmonic instability characteristic of reinitiation function by means of a technique this article calls \"de-tonicization\": the immediate tonal desta bilization of a point of cadential arrival by reinterpreting it as a non-tonic harmony in another key. These ideas help illuminate how each moment of Bach's music \"expresses [its] own location within musical time\" (Caplin 2010)."
+downloads:
+    - text: "text"
+      path: "MTA2023.2.Sailor.pdf"
 ---
 
+For most of my life, the keyboard music of J.S. Bach has been an enthralling and dependable companion. In this article, based on research I did during my Master's degree, I develop some of my accumulated observations about Bach's use of form.

_posts/2024-01-11-DIY-persistent-shuffle.md

@@ -14,7 +14,7 @@ Instead, I'd rather have my playlists on shuffle. But it's in the nature of rand
 
 Consider the chart below, where I've simulated listening 10 times to a shuffled playlist of 100 tracks, each time listening to between 10% and 40% of the playlist. (The orange line shows the theoretical distribution that the simulation should follow; you can see that it matches exactly.)[^fn1]
 
-[^fn1]: For simplicity, I'm assuming that Spotify shuffle is uniformly random. But in fact, I don't think it is, which makes the problem worse than I have described. When shuffling tracks, Spotify appears to favor tracks that it A) thinks you particularly like (because you have listened to them before), or B) thinks people like in general (because they have been listened to a lot). That is, it seems to put tend to put these tracks earlier in the queue. This may be good user design (in general, people are probably *pleased* when they put a playlist on and their favorite song comes right on). But it compounds the problem I describe above, because it means that, after (purely by chance) you listen to a track 5, 6, or 7 times, Spotify will put it in the queue ahead of the tracks that you've only heard once or twice, or not at all.
+[^fn1]: For simplicity, I'm assuming that Spotify shuffle is uniformly random. But in fact, I don't think it is, which makes the problem worse than I have described. When shuffling tracks, Spotify appears to favor tracks that it A) thinks you particularly like (because you have listened to them before), or B) thinks people like in general (because they have been listened to a lot). That is, it seems to tend to put these tracks earlier in the queue. This may be good user design (in general, people are probably *pleased* when they put a playlist on and their favorite song comes right on). But it compounds the problem I describe above, because it means that, after (purely by chance) you listen to a track 5, 6, or 7 times, Spotify will put it in the queue ahead of the tracks that you've only heard once or twice, or not at all.
 
 ![Simulation of Spotify shuffle](/assets/images/spotify_playlist_hist.png)
 

_posts/2024-03-20-bach-article.md

@@ -0,0 +1,7 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: My Bach article in *Music Theory Analysis*
+date: 2024-03-20
+---
+
+I'm happy to announce that a paper I began during my Master's degree, "The Beginning of the Middle: Initiation and Reinitiation in Bach’s Binary-form Keyboard Works," has been published in the journal *Music Theory and Analysis*. (The pace of publication in small humanities fields like music theory can be glacial, although I must own that in this case I am not entirely blameless if this article took a long time to come out.) This is a work of good old-fashioned music theory where I investigate Bach's use of form in his keyboard suites, music that has played a long and important role in my life.