Sample Abstracts
Abstract: A formal abstract is a purely academic kind of writing, a presentation of the
article itself in miniature, and it is proportionally similar to the original:
introduction, premises, evidence, discussion, conclusions. Unlike summaries,
abstracts place more emphasis on methodology, argument, and proof—that is, not
just the conclusions, but rather how the author arrives at them.1
Example 1:
Within country music’s songwriting practices, musical form and harmonic
structure often become functional contributors to a song’s story; these
combinations of form and theme can be modeled as distinct narrative paradigms.
This essay defines a Time-Shift narrative paradigm that relates a central trope in
country music’s texts to formal, structural, and poetic devices. It then presents
analyses of several songs to show how the use of the narrative paradigm
reinforces the core identity of country as a genre, and connects art, biography, and
interpretation.2
Example 2:
This article discusses a group of pieces that can best be understood as musical
collages: the third movement of Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia (1968), the first
movement of George Rochberg’s Music for the Magic Theater (1965), and the
last movement of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Musique pour le Soupers du Roi
Ubu (1966). It demonstrates that chromatic complementation and a concurrent
systematic process of chromatic saturation provide the logic behind the harmonic,
formal and voice-leading content of these pieces, thus establishing an unexpected
link between these works and their serial predecessors. 3
1
Jonathan Bellman, A Short Guide to Writing About Music (Longman, 1999), 63.
Jocelyn R. Neal, “Narrative Paradigms, Musical Signifiers, and Form as Function in Country
Music.” Music Theory Spectrum 29/1 (Spring 2007): 41.
3
C. Catherine Losada, “Between Modernism and Postmodernism: Strands of Continuity in
Collage Compositions by Rochberg, Berio, and Zimmermann.” Music Theory Spectrum 31/1
(Spring 2009): 57
2