Date/Time
Fri, Mar 20, 2026
4:00 pm EDT - 5:30 pm EDT
Danuta Mirka, Dan Shanahan, Michael Slattery, and Emily Schwitzgebel share preliminary findings from an ongoing research project on cadential formulas. This research calls into question the common view of cadences as signs of closure repeatable from work to work and from genre to genre. Combining empirical methods of corpus studies and historical information gleaned from eighteenth-century sources, it offers a far richer account of cadences in their structural, historical, and stylistic dimensions.
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Bios:
Danuta Mirka is Harry N. and Ruth F. Wyatt Professor of Music Theory at the Bienen School of Music, Northwestern University. Her research interests encompass various aspects of structure and expression in Western art music, focusing on the theory and analysis of meter and rhythm and the study of musical communication in the eighteenth century. She is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory (2014) and the author of Metric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart (2009) and Hypermetric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart (2021).
Daniel Shanahan is an associate professor of Music Theory and Cognition at Northwestern University. His research focuses on how musical knowledge is represented and transmitted—both in human minds and in technical systems. He is currently working on a book about the history of music information retrieval and algorithmic individuation in music, and has published widely in both music theory and music cognition journals.
Emily Schwitzgebel is Assistant Professor of Music and Artificial Intelligence at the University of South Carolina. As a music theorist with a particular interest in listener perception, her research examines the real-time experience of post-millennial pop music listening, showing how existing music-analytical frameworks can be complemented by the analysis of social and technological mediations. Combining methods of behavioral study, corpus study, and computational analysis, her current work posits that the cognitive and the communicative are fundamentally intertwined and consistently updated to constrain the music listening experience.
Michael Slattery is a PhD candidate at Northwestern University. His work examines the meanings of musical structures, especially those typically conceptualized as schemata, by viewing meanings in terms of associative cultural units. Michael’s current project analyzes the Do-Re-Mi in Haydn and Beethoven, positing the ascent of this schema as linked to sunrise, the divine, and the sublime. He has presented on the semiotic implications of the Do-Re-Mi at the annual meeting of Music Theory Midwest, at the Galant Schema Studies Conference, and at a joint meeting of the Haydn Society of North America and Mozart Society of America.