Doctoral Colloquium (Music) | Jade Roth
The Doctoral Colloquium is open to all.
Doctoral Colloquium: Vanessa Blais-Tremblay (UQAM)
Title: Orchestration Semantics: How Tailleferre鈥檚 Orchestration Conjures Imagery in the Ballade (1920)
Bio: Jade Roth is a Ph.D. candidate in music theory at 平特五不中, where her research is co-supervised by Robert Hasegawa and Stephen McAdams. She conducts interdisciplinary research on the roles of timbre and orchestration in music perception in the Music Perception and Cognition Lab. Her dissertation research focuses on the analysis of the orchestral works of French composer Germaine Tailleferre (1892鈥�1983).
Abstract: Previous research in the field of timbre semantics finds a strong connection between metaphorical language and timbre, with Wallmark (2014) noting that metaphorical descriptions convey shared perceptions of timbre. However, the influence of specific musical elements on these semantic descriptions in orchestral music has not been examined. Studies on the significance of shared narrative associations (Margulis 2017) and genre-specific semantic descriptors (Noble 2018) in orchestral music show promising findings鈥攕uggesting that intersubjective semantic-timbral connections can exist, even in complex musical contexts.
This presentation reports on a perceptual experiment analyzing semantic descriptions from participants provided in response to piano and orchestral versions of Germaine Tailleferre鈥檚 Ballade (1920). The descriptions are examined for patterns related to Tailleferre鈥檚 orchestration techniques; particularly, how the two instrumentations influence the type of language listeners use. This project aims to disentangle the relationship between semantic descriptions and the musical elements they are derived from in Tailleferre鈥檚 work.
