In order to theorize high-level relationships within musical structure, music theory as it is currently practiced in Western academia has presupposed the ontological stability of its basic building blocks— notes, scales, and chords. Although the definitions of these terms have changed over time, the primary task of music theory has traditionally been to understand the ways in which these concepts interact, not to interrogate the philosophical underpinnings of their being. Unfortunately, we argue, the ontological stability theorists presume in order to study musical systems is not only unwarranted, but sits within a legacy of epistemic imperialism. As many critical race theorists have shown, during the Enlightenment episteme of reason, intellectual technologies such as abstraction and taxonomy instituted a generalizable understanding of truth that continues to dictate the realities of societies around the globe, irrespective of social particularities. These intellectual technologies have historically been implemented to invalidate and replace other forms of knowledge. In this post, we discuss a structural feature of music-theoretical discourse that has sustained the immanent positioning of music-theoretical terminology. We call it “the priorness axiom.”
The priorness axiom posits music-theoretical systems as existing prior to both music and people’s perceptions of music. The presumption of priorness allows the theorist to circumvent the need to specify how their claims about musical structure relate to other people’s knowledge, because they situate music theory as something that people already have intuited. An example of priorness can be found in Heinrich Schenker’s appeals to nature, when he writes: “Music is the living motion of tones in the space given in Nature: the composing-out of the Nature-given sonority. The law of all life, the motion which, as procreation, issues forth beyond the boundaries of individual being, penetrates into man in this sonority which Nature has preordained in his hearing.”[1] For Schenker, the bridge between his theory of musical structure and human involvement is that musical structure’s a priori location in man’s ear. The music theorist then becomes a neutral conveyor of a naturally-arising phenomenon rather than a socially-contingent figure in histories of human knowledge production. Music theory is seen as ontologically preordained, prior even to the theorists who interpret it, rather than circumscribed by the theorist’s contingent and partial vantage on the world.
We argue in our introduction that the priorness axiom continues to pervade more contemporary American music-theoretical writings. One example we analyze is the response to the New Musicology critique of formalist analysis in the 90’s, in which music theorists defended the discipline as being unapologetically about “the music itself.” These defenses hinged on positioning a deeply personal analytical engagement with the music through priorness, as these theorists often presumed that an individualized and unmediated engagement with music is elemental to the human experience of music more broadly. In this case, the experience of “the music itself” is positioned as prior to modes of musical experience other than the concentrated, autonomous listening experience on which music-theoretical formalism is built. Ultimately, we argue that priorness in American music theory is a colorblind position on music analysis: it enables theorists to cast musical structure as their object of study without taking into account how race (as a construct) shapes the question of access when it comes to modes of listening. Concentrated listening is acquired through training in conservatory settings of classical music pedagogy, which unevenly favors middle and upper class family upbringings in ways that are deeply scored along racialized and gendered lines in America. Moreover, community formations around other modes of listening are integral to how individuals express their sense of belonging. These modes of listening do not always involve the same attentiveness to “the music itself,” but can be informed by social and embodied musical meanings. Although defining the discipline as knowledge about “the music itself” may appear innocent on the surface, music theorists who ground their knowledge in colorblindness unwittingly help to sustain the present power relations that position Western universities as privileged producers of knowledge about the world.[2] The defense of “the music itself” fails to recognize the theorist’s privileged identification with formalism. Music theory can only address the diversity of human experience once it calls into question how its formalism has long been grounded in the universality of a particular white experience of music-loving. The priorness of concentrated listening positions formalist analysis as the only one worthy of study in music theory, while other kinds of subjective engagements with music are rendered outside the field of knowledge.
The priorness axiom is undergirded by the idea of “natural law,” an ontological presupposition that everything is always already rationally ordered.[3] Reason, for Enlightenment thinkers, provided the link between man and God, epistemology and ontology: men produced knowledge about the world through reason, even as the world was already ordered by reason. Sylvia Wynter has shown that the Enlightenment episteme of reason instituted a racial epistemology by producing two categories of the human: those who possessed reason and those who did not. For Wynter, the modern idea of race came about at the dawn of European colonialism as a transformation of the older archetype of the “Other,” the infidel. But while infidels could convert to Christianity, race absolutized human difference because there was no way for racial Others to opt in to reason.[4] Summarizing the views of Renaissance philosopher Pico de Mirandola, Wynter writes, “While reason is not a god, ‘it partakes of some of God’s functions’ in that it is intended to rule over a ‘lower order of reality.’ The fundamental separation for Pico was one between two orders of creation, with man placed by God at the midpoint between them.”[5] In practicing reason, European men performed their privileged epistemic intimacy with God. By conflating the epistemology and ontology of musical structure, theorists could increasingly understand musical structure to be rationally prior to individual musical acts.
The connection between natural law and reason justified colonization and enslavement, Wynter argues, as European imperialists constituted inferior races as those who “defied” natural law and behaved without reason.[6] The phrase “racial epistemology,” then, describes a situation in which a hierarchical conception of the human is implicated in the ways knowledge is produced and legitimated. As critical race theorist Denise Ferreira da Silva puts it, “As a signifier of irreducible and unsublatable mental difference, the racial is relevant only to mark the difference between post-Enlightenment European and other contemporaneous, coexisting social configurations.”[7] Reason’s bifurcation of the human is still at work in contemporary scholarship across disciplines. Ferreira da Silva observes that “the racial emerges in projects of knowledge that presume scientific universality, for which universal reason plays the role of an exterior determinant.”[8] Tautologically, it is Man’s unique ability to “discover” a reality ordered by reason that substantiates his superiority within that reality. Meanwhile, because of their estrangement from reason, racial Others cannot author their own reality within dominant, legitimated realms of knowledge. For Ferreira da Silva, “an analytics of raciality” is at work when authors of knowledge make other people into objects of a knowledge that does not belong to them.[9]
Within music theory, priorness and formalism co-produce a racial epistemology in which the knowledge historically produced by white men is institutionally legitimized and allowed to speak for all. For this reason, we advocate in our volume for a definition of music theory that invites a plurality of different discourses. Discourses are viewed as culturally-acquired semiotic systems that situate people as subjects of knowledge in relation to the objects of the world, as well as in relation to sources of power. Music-theoretical discourses would be understood to systematize music in ways that render certain aesthetic relationships and parameters of knowledge legible vis-à-vis the theorist’s subject position, but no single discourse can speak for any other. To eliminate priorness is to allow for music-analytical discourses built around other subjectivities in our field.
[1] Heinrich Schenker, The Masterwork in Music, Volume I, ed. William Drabkin (Mineola: Dover, [1925] 2014), 46.
[2] Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Daniel HoSang, and George Lipsitz write, “Behind the colorblind façade of the existing disciplines is the historical role that knowledge production has played in creating and fortifying racial projects ranging from slavery and segregation to imperialism and genocide. Historically situated against this backdrop, colorblindness thus becomes a series of moves and investments that conceal the fingerprints of the university in constructing the very conditions that colorblind frameworks refuse to name.” “Introduction,” in Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness Across the Disciplines, ed. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Daniel HoSang, and George Lipsitz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020), 5.
[3] As T.J. Hochstrasser writes, natural law as it appears in the writings of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Enlightenment-era philosophers “was viewed as a set of eternal verities presented by God to humanity in finished and perfect shape, and found embodied in the moral and civil order as evidence of its divine fashioning.” T.J. Hochstrasster, “Natural Law” in the New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005), 1607.
[4] Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument,” The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3, Fall 2003: 266.
[5] Ibid., 287.
[6] Ibid., 297.
[7] Denise Ferreira da Silva. Toward a Global Idea of Race. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 29.
[8] Ibid., 20.
[9] For example, in the wake of Darwin’s theories, Ferreira da Silva writes, members of “inferior races” are “apprehended as exteriorizations or actualizations, effects or products of the temporal play of the exterior power that regulates and produces them” (Ibid., 112).