“Shot Into the Air Like a Rocket”: Climax in the Lieder of Alma Mahler

01 May 2023 occasionally, an increasing harmonic tension. The role of harmony in climax is especially complex; Ji Yeon Lee evokes V. Kofi Agawu to argue that: Where dynamics and pitch are straightforward as highpoint parameters, harmony is treated with great...

The First Movement of Beethoven's Opus 132 and the Classical Style

01 October 1987 Late Style: Early Symptom of a Fatal Condition," Journal of the American Musicological Society 29 (1976):249. authors: V. Kofi Agawu author_ids: 1215 authors: V. Kofi Agawu author_ids: 1215

Schenkerian Analysis, Metaphor, and Performance

01 October 2007 One model of the relation between analysis and performance asserts that analysis, because it is a rational endeavor, is in a position to preside over performance—to determine how it should be—because performance is by nature more intuitive and emotive....

Celebrating 60 Years of the [i]Symposium[/i] (1961-2021): Learning from our Past

01 May 2021 articles for Sympsoium, for instance, the 2016 work, “A Web of Words: Elliott Carter’s End of a Chapter” (DeLio 2016); V. Kofi Agawu, the musical semiotic expert from Ghana, in 1987 analyzed “The First Movement of Beethoven's Opus 132” (Agawu 1987); and...

The Popular Album as Song Cycle: Paul Simon's [i]Still Crazy After All These Years[/i]

01 October 1992 The analysis of popular music in the academic community is no longer the clandestine enterprise of a few heretical musicologists and theorists. Over the last ten years, popular music criticism has become an academically viable and even trendy affair...

[i]Semiotics of Musical Time[/i], by Thomas Reiner

01 October 2001 of an understanding of how, but not necessarily what, a piece means in regard to its treatment of time (paraphrase of V. Kofi Agawu, in his introduction to Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music [Princeton: Princeton University...