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Joshua Banks Mailman
Joshua Banks Mailman is an American music theorist, as well an analyst, composer, improvisor, philosopher, critic, and technologist of music.
Joshua Banks Mailman was born in New York City and attended Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of the Arts. He gained a bachelor's degree in Philosophy from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Music Theory from the Eastman School of Music of University of Rochester. Among his teachers were Charles Rosen, Ted Cohen (philosopher), Richard Cohn, and Robert Morris.
Mailman has taught predominantly at Columbia University, as well as at New York University, University of Alabama, and University of California, Santa Barbara. He has lectured at the Japan Society (NYC), the Society for Music Analysis (UK), IRCAM (Paris), the Symposium (SIMPOM) of Brazilian Studies in Music (Rio de Janeiro)., and the Symposium on Computer-assisted Composition, Istituto per la Musica, Cini Foundation (Venice, Italy).
His writings, published in numerous scholarly journals and books, contribute to several areas of music theory, analysis, and technology, spanning such topics as narrativity, phenomenology, metaphor, form as process and dynamic form, cybernetics, music visualization, and range over repertoires from Arnold Schoenberg, Elliott Carter, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and Milton Babbitt, to Gyorgy Ligeti, Luciano Berio, Alvin Lucier, Robert Ashley, Gerard Grisey, and Kaija Saariaho.
According to Katherine Lee, “Theorist Joshua Mailman has written prodigiously of… dynamic form in Western Music…[arguing] that musical form should be interpreted as dynamic or as the ‘retrospective contour of the flux of intensity of qualities, [challenging] oft-held views of musical form as architectonic or structural.” Several writers have noted the indebtedness of their work to this idea. Mailman's work on dynamic form in music focuses on “emergent properties in dynamic processes”, for instance ‘’temporal density’’ (‘’interonset density’’) as a generator of phenomenologically emergent properties. The analyses and concepts that Mailman presents reveal underlying principles of electroacoustic music operating in music outside the electroacoustic realm, such as in Robert Morris’s String Quartet Arc
Mailman has examined
“flux and flow in music by [Elliott] Carter and [Luciano] Berio, [modeling these] on multi-layered graphs showing the curve of various musical features” with the graphs aligned to indicate visually “the degree of coordination of flux among these salient musical elements, [with] a high degree of coordination [being] said to contribute to a more assertive (rather than furtive) projection of form, one that is more easily apprehended in time. Yet Berio’s Points on the Curve to Find was shown [by Mailman] to assertively project form through a completely different unconventional flux that did not depend on such coordination.”
Other emergent properties Mailman identifies as generators of dynamic form include ‘’echo rate’’ and ‘’pitch freshness’’.
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Joshua Banks Mailman
Joshua Banks Mailman is an American music theorist, as well an analyst, composer, improvisor, philosopher, critic, and technologist of music.
Joshua Banks Mailman was born in New York City and attended Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of the Arts. He gained a bachelor's degree in Philosophy from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Music Theory from the Eastman School of Music of University of Rochester. Among his teachers were Charles Rosen, Ted Cohen (philosopher), Richard Cohn, and Robert Morris.
Mailman has taught predominantly at Columbia University, as well as at New York University, University of Alabama, and University of California, Santa Barbara. He has lectured at the Japan Society (NYC), the Society for Music Analysis (UK), IRCAM (Paris), the Symposium (SIMPOM) of Brazilian Studies in Music (Rio de Janeiro)., and the Symposium on Computer-assisted Composition, Istituto per la Musica, Cini Foundation (Venice, Italy).
His writings, published in numerous scholarly journals and books, contribute to several areas of music theory, analysis, and technology, spanning such topics as narrativity, phenomenology, metaphor, form as process and dynamic form, cybernetics, music visualization, and range over repertoires from Arnold Schoenberg, Elliott Carter, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and Milton Babbitt, to Gyorgy Ligeti, Luciano Berio, Alvin Lucier, Robert Ashley, Gerard Grisey, and Kaija Saariaho.
According to Katherine Lee, “Theorist Joshua Mailman has written prodigiously of… dynamic form in Western Music…[arguing] that musical form should be interpreted as dynamic or as the ‘retrospective contour of the flux of intensity of qualities, [challenging] oft-held views of musical form as architectonic or structural.” Several writers have noted the indebtedness of their work to this idea. Mailman's work on dynamic form in music focuses on “emergent properties in dynamic processes”, for instance ‘’temporal density’’ (‘’interonset density’’) as a generator of phenomenologically emergent properties. The analyses and concepts that Mailman presents reveal underlying principles of electroacoustic music operating in music outside the electroacoustic realm, such as in Robert Morris’s String Quartet Arc
Mailman has examined
“flux and flow in music by [Elliott] Carter and [Luciano] Berio, [modeling these] on multi-layered graphs showing the curve of various musical features” with the graphs aligned to indicate visually “the degree of coordination of flux among these salient musical elements, [with] a high degree of coordination [being] said to contribute to a more assertive (rather than furtive) projection of form, one that is more easily apprehended in time. Yet Berio’s Points on the Curve to Find was shown [by Mailman] to assertively project form through a completely different unconventional flux that did not depend on such coordination.”
Other emergent properties Mailman identifies as generators of dynamic form include ‘’echo rate’’ and ‘’pitch freshness’’.