"Life, Color, Warmth and Truth": Expressive timing in German late Romantic organ music

Abstract

This paper proposes a mathematical model for expressive timing in German late Romantic organ music based on Riemannian phrasing principles. The model is built following the symmetric hierarchical motivic scheme and then applied to the organ work of Max Reger. It was shown that music expressive content is carried by the model parameter defined as temporal elasticity. Along with the standard analytical and empirical evaluation, the model was also evaluated in terms of its naturalness. We found that the correlation between model and human performance is comparable with the correlation between distinct professional human interpretations.

Keywords

• hugo riemann
• music information retrieval
• expressive timing
• organ performance