2025/06/24 by Brian A. Miller · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Music History and Culture #Musicology and Musical Analysis #Theater, Performance, and Music History
paper · doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945442.013.3
openalex publication_date 2025/06/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract As with many terms that appear ubiquitously across both technical and popular discourses, “style” is an unstable concept. This chapter argues that re-examining Meyer’s Style and Music (1989) alongside other historical texts on style can lead to a productive understanding of the conceptual foundations of corpus studies and music theory more broadly. The author examines Meyer’s claims about style alongside a set of additional thought experiments, which might be called style puzzles, designed to probe questions about replication and imitation across a variety of art forms. The resulting framework is applied to demonstrate how different assumptions about the nature of stylistic replication can lead to seemingly contradictory analyses of the same passage of music.