When Revolution Conflicts with Resolution: A Contemporary Issue Based on the Revisit of a Modern Compositional Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Responding to a common feature in atonal music— the lack of consistent sound organization, Charles Seeger pioneered a pre-compositional method, called dissonant counterpoint (1913). In Seeger’s method, all consonances must be prepared and resolved by dissonances. To distinguish the quality of each interval, Seeger categorizes all intervals into consonances or dissonances. However, within this categorization, he intentionally leaves the tritone undefined. Problematically, if the tritone is defined neither a consonance nor a dissonance, its use in a chord will also affect the quality of the corresponding harmony, making that harmony essentially indeterminate as well. It is puzzling that if Seeger’s dissonant counterpoint carries such an inherent problem, how would composers put this problematic pre-compositional theory into practice? Do their derived compositions project a similar image, preserving this problem and presenting a succession of chords with ambiguous harmonic qualities? Or, perhaps, in these compositions, we may find an alternative solution, which can be further adopted to solve the problem as described above? Using a dissonant contrapuntal string quartet by Ruth Crawford as a case study, my analysis shows that it is difficult to consistently describe the harmonic qualities of all the chords that are used.Testing the limits of Seeger’s method and also seeking ways to consistently describe the chords in Crawford’s composition, I develop a harmonic measurement that further refines Seeger’s method. With this new measurement, my analysis reveals relevant harmonic progressions, ones that, I believe, solve the problem inherent in Seeger’s dissonant counterpoint, and explain Crawford’s practical application of this method.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.046 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.067 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.034 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.019 | 0.020 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".