The Impact of Language on Cadential Stress in Polish Instrumental Music
Video
The video corresponds to a related but different talk on the CPCC.
class CoAuthor
def __init__(self, name):
self.name = "Derek J. Myler"Format (When): Where
- Presentation (2021) – Music Theory Midwest
- Title: Investigating the Mazurka Style using the Common-Practice Cadence Corpus
- Poster (2021) – The International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition
TL;DR
In Polish-music studies, ethnomusicologists have shown that mazurka rhythms crystallized alongside the standardization of penultimate stress in the Polish language, suggesting a connection between Polish spoken and musical accent (Zaborowski, 2013; Downes, 2001). This connection contextualizes claims about the prevalence of weak-beat accent patterns in Polish musical cadences (McKee, 2017; Paczkowski, 2011), though there has not been an empirical evaluation of such.
We bring empirical support to these claims by introducing the Common-Practice Cadence Corpus (CPCC)—a corpus of over one thousand cadences encoded by hand. By studying the CPCC, we show that nineteenth-century mazurkas are more likely to implement paroxytonic (weak-beat) cadences and feature two distinct step-skip cadential schemata: the “escape-tone” and “fa-mi-do” cadence. Moreover, we conjecture that the prevailing penultimate stress in untexted music may have been carried over from Polish texted music and language.
Email for accompanying code in python