“A fragment should be like a little work of art, complete in itself and separated from the rest of the universe like a hedgehog.”
My work on musical fragments reflects my interest in 19th-century music in general, and has already been presented at regional and international conferences. I plan to adapt these conference papers into an article that investigates the characteristics of musical fragments from a theoretical perspective, differentiating these pieces into distinct types. I use a combination of structural and surface features to come to a more refined definition of the genre, drawing particularly on Carl Schachter's notion of “true” and “stylized” fragments to show the continuum of options available to a Romantic composer active within this genre.
Conference Papers
"differentiating 'true' and 'stylized' romantic fragments: A Schenkerian approach"
- 18th Biennial International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music (2014) (Abstract) (Handout)
- New England Conference of Music Theorists (2014)