Music

I contributed a short piano piece, “Kodaly’s Music Box,” to Guy Livingston’s 2001 CD Sixty Seconds for Piano. (Spotify link).

Here are some choral arrangements of black spirituals that I wrote in graduate school while working as a church organist and music director. These have been performed by several choirs in the US and Europe.

Here is my voice-and-piano arrangement of “Iti Milvanon” (My Bride from Lebanon). The Hebrew words come from the Song of Solomon, and the melody is a juiced-up version of a simpler tune by Nira Hen. This song was performed at my wedding (though I wrote it earlier, and my bride, in fact, is not from Lebanon):

And here is a short barbershop number that I wrote while standing over my daughter’s changing table.

From 1998 to 2000, I worked as a postdoc in the Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Lab at Ohio State University. I did research on chord structure, on musical symmetry, on melodic structure, and on listeners’ tonal and melodic expectations. I still write about the psychology of music on occasion, and work musical themes into my other work:

  1. von Hippel, P.T., & Huron, D. (2020). Tonal and” anti-tonal” cognitive structure in Viennese twelve-tone rows. Empirical Musicology Review.
  2. Aarden, B., & von Hippel, P.T. (2004). “Rules for chord-tone doubling (and spacing): Which ones do we need?” Music Theory Online 2.
  3. Hunter, D.J., & von Hippel, P.T. (2003). “How rare is symmetry in musical 12-tone rows?” American Mathematical Monthly 110(2), 124-132.
  4. von Hippel, P.T. (2002). “Melodic expectation rules as learned heuristics.” Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition. Adelaide: Causal Productions.
  5. von Hippel, P.T., & Huron, D. (2000). “Why do skips precede reversals? The effect of tessitura constraints on melodic structure.” Music Perception 18(1), 59-85.
  6. von Hippel, P.T. (2000). “Redefining pitch proximity: Tessitura and mobility as constraints on melodic intervals.” Music Perception 17(3), 315-327.
  7. von Hippel, P.T. (2000). “Questioning a melodic archetype: Do listeners use gap-fill to classify melodies?” Music Perception 18(2), 139-153.