Jade Conlee and Tatiana Koike
If music theory is a kind of worldmaking, what world, what political matrix, does music theory imagine? Right now, music theory is in the process of confronting the racist worldviews embedded in our field’s foundational texts and methods. In blog posts below, both Thomas Christensen and Alex Rehding comment on the need to “rethink” the relationships between people, ideas, and taxonomy in music theory. Our in-progress edited volume Key Terms in Music Theory for Antiracist Scholars: Epistemic Disavowals, Reimagined Formalisms takes up this task. Our book evaluates music theory’s constitutive claims to formalism, autonomy, and abstraction, showing how they have structured the discipline such that access to legitimate musical knowledge is deeply scored along racial, gendered, and geographic fault lines.
The idea for this volume came during Yale’s 2020 graduate student conference, which we co-chaired along with our colleague Taryn Dubois. Kwami Coleman delivered a keynote lecture questioning the original distinction drawn between heterophony and polyphony by Carl Stumpf and Guido Adler. In contrasting the “illogical” multivoice singing of the folk in and out of Europe with the logic of classical polyphony, this distinction disguises differences of race and class as musical difference. Unaware of this academic distinction, mid-century French critics attempted to understand the work of American free jazz musicians through the lens of polyphony, prompting Coleman to ask, “What might it mean for us to ‘hear’ non-Western and improvised multivoice music with a principal melody as polyphonic instead of heterophonic?”
In response to Coleman’s keynote, we began to reflect on our field’s own problematic history and how this history has been addressed to date. While many music theorists writing the history of our field have called out the racism and sexism of canonic thinkers, the standard responses have encompassed either calls to cancel the figure in question or to apologize for the thinker’s beliefs but to otherwise continue engaging with their work as before. These responses have done little to effect institutional change. As Philip Ewell has argued, racist music theorists remain integral to the definition of music theory through a whitewashing of the discipline’s history, which dissociates the claims of music theory from the racism of the figures who wrote them (Ewell 2020, 4.1.3). Ewell has convincingly illuminated the field’s white racial frame and the problematic writing of the discipline’s history that this frame legitimates. We see our intervention in this volume as being different from Ewell’s, though it is a complementary project that is highly indebted to his work. Our idea is to redefine the predominant discourse that presently constitutes music theory as a form of knowledge production.
Our central premise in this book is that music theory is presently a centralized discourse that is built from the workings of Western art music. Music theory has defined itself around a particular set of methodologies that have historically been used to elevate this canon of music, and these methods idealize the interpreter who engages in the concentrated, autonomous listening experience typically associated with musical works. This discourse also works to naturalize the music theorist’s subject position. Music analyses are typically posited as demonstrating either the workings of “the music itself” or a given fact of everyone’s hearing, which effaces any possibility for the music theorist to be a contingent and partial knower of the world (this is a structure we will explain in our second blog post in greater detail). While the field has significantly worked towards decentering the Western art canon as the only object worthy of study, the same centralizing discourse has remained intact. Music theorists have continued to employ the same methods of concentrated listening to an ever-increasing number of musical repertoires from throughout the world, and they have continued to trust in the idea that music-theoretical knowledge is authoritative and generalizable. Our volume asks: what would it mean for music theory to consist of a multiplicity of discourses that are each built around particular subjectivities and relationships to sound? The focus of our intervention in this book is to reconstruct our field’s analytical terminology in order to move the field towards this discursive shift. If terms such as pitch or scale presently have one centralized meaning because these terms are overdetermined through music theory’s predominant discourse, what if there was a way for music theory to allow for other meanings of these same analytical terms—meanings that would arise through discourses built around subject positions other than that of the authoritative Western academic?
Music theory’s fascination with “the music itself” has prevented the field from theorizing listening as a relational act imbricated in constructions of human difference. While historians of music theory have eloquently relayed the transformation of concepts like pitch and scale across centuries of literature, music theorists rarely account for the ways in which these concepts fail to honor the vast multiplicity of listening experiences that exist among different people today. In the classroom, scales and chords are positioned as things students must learn in order to “understand” music, regardless of the other forms of musical knowledge they may have brought into the room. To adequately account for music theory’s historical and present influence within a racialized global order, it is essential to view music theory as a form of worldmaking— as a field that produces knowledge not only about “the music itself,” but about people, nature, politics and power. Taking seriously the understanding of music theory as worldmaking requires redefining formalism to embrace variable subjectivities and listening relationships as constitutive elements of musical structure.
To this end, we reimagine music theory as any mode of formalizing culturally acquired relationships to sound. This reformulation of music theory sees musical cultures as fluid and communicable, and it places the social transmission of knowledge at the center of musical analysis. Issues of power, race, and subjective relationality would then be integral to discussions of musical meaning because they structure the transmission of knowledge in today’s world. The chapters included in our volume work towards this goal by reevaluating the historical entanglement between music theory and racist ideologies, offering critical perspectives through which to evaluate music-theoretical epistemologies, or coining new terminology to describe perceptions of musical detail in specific cultural contexts.
(to be continued)
Continuation: Part II