The Ohio State Online Music Journal (OSOM) is the electronic journal of the graduate music students at The Ohio State University.
Featured Article:
The Government of Cantabile: Notes on Eighteenth-Century Musical Meaning
"This investigation seeks to uncover aspects of eighteenth-century cantabile that have been largely ignored by musical scholarship. In a previous search for definitions of cantabile, I discovered that significant musical dictionaries such as the New Grove and Musik im Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG) are selective about which constructions of cantabile's meanings to represent. The MGG highlights quality of sound and expressive markings, while the New Grove mentions cantabile as a performance ideal and nineteenth-century aria type. It is time for a more comprehensive construction of cantabile's joint meanings to be acknowledged and articulated, so that it can become a more understood part of our understanding of eighteenth-century music."
Rising Scholar Series:
Bilateral Keyboard Symmetry in the Music of Einojuhani Rautavaara
"One very unique type of symmetry is prominent throughout Rautavaara's oeuvre; the symmetry of physical space by visual organization at the piano and the relationship of white and black keys has become a generative system of composition. The arrangement of piano keys allows certain axes of reflective symmetry. Examining the symmetrical groups around axes of pitch-classes 2 and 8, each remaining pitch class has a reflective complement: 0 complements 4, 1 complements 3, 5 complements 11, 6 complements 10, and 7 complements 9. This system is referred to as bilateral keyboard symmetry."