Ambiguity

Abstract

This article is an homage to the late music theorist Steve Larson, who passed away quite unexpectedly last year. Among his many talents (and he had many) was a remarkable ability to createambigrams, which are constructed using ambiguous figures that can be interpreted in two different ways. An ambigram can be read the same way in two different orientations (often right-side-up and upside-down, but other orientation pairs are sometimes used). This article takes the notion of ambiguity at the heart of the ambigram concept and examines it in music. In addition to paying tribute to Steve Larson's delightful mind, the paper explores how metric and tonal ambiguity affect music analysis and pedagogy—two disciplines that were important to Steve throughout his career.