THIS issue of Empirical Musicology Review represents an astounding range of music-theoretical interests and expertise. Topics range from schema theory to sonata form; from the analysis of popular music to the large-scale analysis of music history. Gilad Rabinovitch's article connects the research on rare intervals to that of schema theory, discussing key-finding and previous research on the consolidation of mode. David Clampitt's commentary situates the research within some previous work on scale theory. Jonathan De Souza and David Lokan conduct a corpus study that looks at hypermeter in sonata expositions and developments in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pieces, finding that expositions have significantly more hypermetric regularity than developments. Jan Miyake's commentary suggests interesting future directions for the empirical study of hypermeter and form.
Kris Shaffer et al. conduct a cluster analysis of chord-to-chord transitions in the McGill Billboard corpus, identifying the range of different harmonic grammars and practices of song writing in Western popular music. Editor Daniel Müllensiefen provides a commentary that discusses how this work might be strengthened by considering longer chord sequences as empirical data. Nicholas Shea uses the same dataset in his article, testing hypotheses relating to the lament topic in both popular music and the music of J.S. Bach. Bryn Hughes's commentary suggests that the definition of a "lament" is difficult to pin down and argues that future work with larger corpora is needed. Andrew Gustar examines the notion of musical fame and obscurity from the analysis of power law distributions. A commentary on this article will be forthcoming in a future issue.
We are also pleased to announce our new editorial board, beginning with this issue. Joshua Albrecht, Richard Ashley, Ami Belfi, Trevor de Clercq, Johanna Devaney, Nikki Dibben, Emily Elliott, Mary Farbood, Kelly Jakubowski, Reinhard Kopiez, Justin London, Psyche Loui, Patrick Savage, Renee Timmers, Leigh VanHandel, and Christopher White will all be serving on the board, and we are honored to have them aboard.
