TY - JOUR
AU1 - Chung, Andrew J
AB - At the 2020 meeting of the Society for Music Theory, the award for Outstanding Multi-Author Collection went to The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory (hereafter, CCMT). I hope that editors Alexander Rehding and Steven Rings have gotten their chance to pour the champange and trade high fives with each other and the other authors of its 26 chapters. In reading it, I learned and I was exercised; the collection is outstanding indeed—this shall not be in dispute in the pages that follow. There are numerous reviews of the volume already, including an excellent and quite comprehensive four-author undertaking published in Music Theory Online.1 It is to that essay that I would point readers for an in-depth survey of the volume’s contents and achievements. The task that I pursue in this single-author review, however, will not be to document a journey from first recto to last verso, but rather to present the kind of appraisal of opportunities taken—and missed—that can be uttered from a solo reviewer’s critical vantage point. I will cover many (though far from all) of the volume’s 26 individual chapters, peripatetically and cross-sectionally, drawing out both the themes that suture multiple contributions as well as those that make themselves known through their conspicuous absence. I’d like to frame the review below in the same spirit of critique announced in the very title of the volume (“Critical Concepts … ”) by posing the following question: what is the place the CCMT might occupy in the ongoingness of music-theoretical work—now that we find ourselves gazing and listening back upon the year of its publication (2019), partitioned from that date by the Covid-19 pandemic and the many precarities it exposed and exacerbated, difficult reckonings with racial and colonial and economic asymmetries at the national level and beyond, plus an unusually eventful (and, for many, painful) period of disciplinary agon in music theory? I won’t attempt to formulate a tidy answer to that query, but simply to draw out aspects of the contributions that have propelled me into moments of productive discomfort about some of the field’s entrenched value systems, priorities, and habits of thought. The splinter in one’s eye, it has been said, is a most powerful magnifying glass.2 BOOKENDS As Suzannah Clark’s essay on Key and Modulation (Chapter 18) reminds us, the ways that opening and closing states cohere with one another can exert a powerful orienting force upon how we receive what intervenes in between. With this in mind, I read the volume’s first and last essays in terms of how they can dialogue with each other—a dialogue that, like the notion of a global tonic that governs modern conceptions of tonal composition, can be productively seen as framing the CCMT’s concerns and contents overall. These bookending chapters may be read together as a continuous gesture of confronting music theory with social factors it has traditionally absented from itself. They demand that music theory take on understandings of the political economy—that is, the way in which the exercise of power and governance over a polity are infused with economic motivations and pressures—in which music is enmeshed. And they both present opportunities to reject anew the field’s traditionally avoidant stance towards seeing histories of race, difference, gender, and regulative presumptions of able-bodiedness as directly relevant to music theory’s “business.” Bryan Parkhurst and Stephan Hammel’s imaginative, speculative first chapter, “Pitch, Tone, and Note,” is undergirded by a commitment to a Marxian analysis of how these overlapping categories are embedded in capital’s rationalities, material forms, and juridical supports. Their three case studies begin with an account of the transformation of intellectual work into intellectual property in early capitalism, a shift made possible by moveable type. Here, the note is metonymically linked to the printing press, a technology that transforms the inscriptive production of notes on pages into an efficient procedure capable of maximizing profit accumulation. This profit motive further “underwrites the origination of intellectual property norms” (14) and eventually the work concept—central therefore to modern music theory’s anxious attachments to musical works. Because of the vast potential surplus value enabled by this efficiency, printing activities (or rather, printers) needed jurisprudential rationalities like the precursors to copyright and intellectual property protections in order to control the wealth printing could generate and to protect the social power secured by that wealth. Parkhurst and Hammel’s second case study thematizes tone by excavating the material basis for the rise of 12-tone equal temperament. They argue that the mass manufacture of pianos and new domestic markets for them in the nineteenth century demanded factory tuning that implemented the highly routinized and efficient procedures of setting equal temperament—rather than the increasingly intricate (and hence laborious and expensive) circulating temperaments pioneered through the eighteenth century. This decision robbed instruments of the expressive possibilities of differing key characters, but nevertheless became an aesthetic standard because of its logically prior status as a sound fiscal calculation. The chapter’s final case study on pitch reads the advent of sound recording and playback (and analysis) technologies as some of the cogs within a machinery wherein capital ruthlessly incorporates technological advances to make accumulation and production more generative and efficient. Accordingly, they demonstrate how sound recording and playback machines emblematize a fundamentally capitalistic desire for more perfect control and manipulation over the physical world. Thus, the analysis of the economic and capital conditions of musical production reminds us that it is ultimately an analysis of power. On the other physical end of the volume, Vijay Iyer’s concluding chapter, “Beneath Improvisation,” excavates the power relations implicit in the affordances and associations of improvisatory practices. Iyer does so in the name of disposing with sentimental, rosily communitarian tropes of improvisatory practice, opting instead to examine the more difficult significances of improvisatory traditions and their social meanings in the history of the Americas. This interrogation points not just to the growing prominence of improvisation within elite musical spheres of discourse but also to the history of the anthropological ear’s condescensions towards the non-Western world’s improvisatory practices—to say nothing of the history of the American nation state’s racial grammars, wherein improvisatory traditions like jazz were pathologized and criminalized. Taking a wide view of improvisation—of which musical improvisation is only one instantiation—Iyer defines improvisation at one point as “movement in relation to power,” or in-the-moment negotiations of contingent and new relations to governing frames that structure one’s comprehensibility and one’s available paths for action. Iyer highlights the idea that modernity and its aesthetic forms—and, therefore, its musical priorities—are marked by “a massive investment in the concepts of race and racial difference” (761). One of Iyer’s initial gestures is to point to Sylvia Wynter’s foundational theorization of modernity and the figure therein of what she calls “Man.” This is a term of art that Wynter uses to name how a particular portrait of European, Christian, and able-bodied masculinity was taken as the exemplar of the most universal of subjects—the activities (including musical ones) of whom are treated as the most self-evident and central.3 In Wynter’s paradigm, literacy and the notated tradition stand as the “traditional” musical instantiations of “Man,” while improvisatory practices have been constructed as the other of literacy, notation, and Euro-Western “Man.” In what ways have we allowed and encouraged such a paradigm to stand within music studies? Iyer reflects upon his interactions with the growing discourse of critical improvisation studies, writing that “despite the epistemological revolution of the last half-century in Black studies, postcolonial thought, feminist theory, indigeneity, queer theory, and their intersections, it was rare to fund much of it in the bibliographies of critical improvisation studies” (763). To this charter, I would add a critique of the presumption of normative bodies and brains in musical and improvisatory discourses—especially if, as Iyer writes, improvisation is “inextricable from concurrent efforts to theorize embodiment” (762). Iyer’s remarks draw continuities between two structures. First, the ways in which the Black, Indigenous, and those perceived historically as non-normative in other ways have limned alternate horizons for freedom amidst a modernity where the freedoms characteristically enjoyed by able-bodied, neurotypical, masculine Whiteness articulate freedom’s very standard. And second, the ways in which musical improvisation is dialectically caught between the spontaneous irruption of non-idiomatic invention enacted in the medium of sound and the submission to acquired harmonic, voice-leading scripts. What Iyer enjoins us to remember—with reference to figures such as Hortense Spillers,4 Fred Moten,5 and Lisa Lowe6—is that liberal modernity produced the freedom of privileged, Whitened “Man” to engage in things like the “liberal arts” on the material basis of the standards of living facilitated by the expropriation of Indigenous lands, the stolen use of slave labor, and the relentless naturalization of a human hierarchy both conceived by and, hence to little surprise, topped by Europeanness.7 Liberal modernity, in other words, departed from the received historical scripts of aristocratic monarchical power and improvised its way to modern ideas of the humanities, democratic theory, and the freedoms proper to the autonomous individualist subject at precisely the time when it was busy producing the unfreedom of millions of non-Europeans by undemocratically designating them as less than human. To build upon the spirit of Parkhurst and Hammel’s contribution but in view of the critical themes that Iyer centers, I would point out two unresolved lines of questioning towards which further Marxian music theorization and historicization might turn. The first has to do with Marx’s commentaries on “primitive accumulation,” a term with which Parkhurst and Hammel do not engage. This absence becomes particularly conspicuous when it is held up against the way Iyer focalizes modernity’s investments in constructing and normalizing hierarchies of racial difference. Marx explains the gist of his concept of primitive accumulation in a particularly vivid passage of Das Capital: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.”8 The wealth generated in the violent theft of the Americas from its Indigenous inhabitants—for instance via sugarcane plantation farming, silver mining, and further enslavement economies that regarded its violently stolen Indigenous, then African, laborers as fungible units of toil—was a factor in the ability for wealthy sixteenth- and seventeenth-century patrons to fund early musical printing, and later enabled the economic emergence of the piano-buying bourgeoisie. The omission of this historical facet of capital’s early modern narrative within Parkhurst and Hammel’s chapter opens their chapter to the very critique made of Marx’s own terminology of “primitive accumulation.” Namely that it is a mistake to believe or allow others to believe that the violence’s of colonial invasion and enslavement can be safely tucked away into the primitive, primordial “before” that preceded modern capital—and hence ignored or omitted from an analysis of capital.9 As a long tradition of Black Marxism shaped by figures like C. L. R. James and Cedric Robinson conclude, capitalism is better regarded as racial capitalism, because slavery and the post-emancipation period’s racial asymmetries in labor have always been integral pieces of the functioning of global capital.10 Another question worth tarrying with concerns Parkhurst and Hammel’s concluding reflection on pitch, tone, and note in the age of digital sharing and streaming, a new horizon in which sonic commodity production might appear to render itself “essentially costless.” However, Theodor Adorno, in a Marxian spirit of his own, reminds us that the progressive, churning, never-satisfied dynamic of the technical advancement of capitalism—which steers towards increasingly complete and technically efficient material domination of the Earth—inevitably turns against its human handlers. Our techniques of gaining practical mastery in and over the Earth begin eventually exercise their tyranny over us. My Adornian rejoinder to Parkhurst and Hammel is that digital formats and the computing resources and electricity they require are eminently material. Moreover, this material facilitation is far from costless on an increasingly inhospitable planet—as Kyle Devine reminds in his explorations of streaming services’ carbon footprints.11 If pitch, tone, and note are to be regarded as “infinitely reproducible and shareable at zero cost” in the age of the internet, then they might be said in this era to have achieved a most profound feat of instrumentality, that being their instrumental capacity to ruthlessly occlude their materiality, their ultimate physical basis in the harnessing and expenditure of computational energy. This computational price is now levied in the greenhouse gas contributions of energy production for digital media and thus the trajectory of the Anthropocene’s warming climate, with its own staggering existential costs—distributed unevenly across lines of racial, colonial, and economic difference as they already are and will continue to be.12 If, as the geologist Jan Zalasiewicz and his co-authors write, “there is no way back to the Holocene,” the increasingly inhospitable state of the only planet known to support life will thwart the reliance on established scripts of inhabiting the Holocene Earth and will therefore demand improvisation.13 The Anthropocene, however distant it may seem from the center of music theory, is, inevitably a context in which musical theorization takes place—whether we like, or even recognize, it or not. REFLECTIONS ON WESTERNNESS AND NON-WESTERNNESS By demanding that we locate music theory’s foundational systems, both conceptual and valuative, within the long narrative arc of colonial modernity and the racial-economic hierarchies embedded therein, these first and last chapters of the CCMT apply a kind of critical torque to the volume as a whole. While previous handbooks like the Cambridge History of Western Music Theory or the Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy signal in their titles the Western-situatedness of the ear from which they listen, the CCMT does not.14 Rehding and Rings’ volume ventures a complicated bid both for and against the centrality of the West incipient in the unmarked designation of “critical concepts in music theory.” One could argue that there would be a form of implicit humility in qualifying a volume explicitly as a treatment of the West, but such would necessarily also amount to an editorial acquiescence to and rubberstamping of the comfort zones of most of the readers of a text of this kind. The CCMT does not mean to be exclusively about the Western world. But other reviewers of this edited volume have noted the preponderating focus on Euro-Western, literate, “art tradition” musics despite the openness signaled by its title. Antares Boyle, for instance, detects a “lost opportunity” to look beyond the field’s customary geographical and repertorial borders.15 But the complexities having to do with this opportunity lost are manifold: rethinking this geographical, historical narrowness of the field certainly requires—but is far more difficult than—sprinkling in a few more or even many more musics (both Western and non-Western) that the Western “tradition” has sidelined. Nor does it suffice to simply include more authors who look different from the stereotypical portrait of the field’s membership—though that portrait grows fuzzier year by year. These kinds of strategies are rendered inadequate in the face of the politics of naming: the unmarked designation of “critical concepts in music theory” threatens to affirm a belief in a universality located nonetheless in the notion of a self-evident epistemological privilege for the music-theoretical concepts and values trained on particular Western notated traditions—and only a relatively conspicuous segment of those Western traditions at best. I don’t think the editors nor the authors mean to endorse such beliefs per se, but the difficulty with written language and any discursive form, of course, is that language has always made a mockery of the idea that its significances can be fully corralled by and through the willful intentions of its authors. The volume’s unmarked designation of “critical concepts in music theory” might, however, intimate another possibility: an opening towards a more genuinely inclusive, cosmopolitan field of inquiry. A field with wider horizons does not mean—as stated already—merely sprinkling in “diversity.” I am not calling for more of what Kofi Agawu calls “ethnotheory,” those naïvely well-meaning attempts to decenter Western epistemologies by frontstaging the apparently vastly different ones of others/Others. Such attempts are naïve not because that decentering is itself foolish, but because the common and perhaps “intuitive” means for doing so—typically by seeking some notion of the “pure” Other—will perforce be marred by unexamined hubris and implicit derision towards difference. Ethnotheory, according to Agawu, commits numerous errors: it occludes the ways in which different peoples’ conceptual frameworks might have continuities with Anglo-American ones; it fails to actually listen to the non-Western thinkers who employ explanatory frameworks with their own claims to generality; it tends to treat Indigenous interlocutors as primordial prophets of that which the metropoles have alienated themselves from; and it normalizes the “hungry listening” by which the anthropological ear produces its objects of study as objects of acquisitive desire.16 Agawu instead articulates the possibility of a more hybridized conversation: “a liberating discourse would incorporate all of the ethnotheorist’s data into a larger cosmopolitan construct,” wherein cosmopolitanism refers to the ways in which societies from outside and inside of the Western metropole participate in a locally differentiated commons.17 Agawu professes a faith in more “cosmopolitan” concepts, but the problem that he does not interrogate, as Bruno Latour has recently articulated, is that cosmopolitanism has two overall flavors that can be difficult to distinguish.18 The first is a cosmopolitanism that takes a single metropole as its regulative model for how the members of the entire Earthen cosmopolity should organize themselves and their concepts. The second is a cosmopolitanism that seeks not to be univocal and instead embraces the multiplicities and divergences of global practices. What the latter cosmopolitanism would eventually involve is what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls “provincializing Europe”—that is, for our case, recognizing how the Western music-theoretical concepts many of us have been trained in are historically-contingent and parochial particulars whose potential for generality or inevitability demands relentless scrutiny rather than pious endorsements or dogmatic dismissals. That is, provincializing music theory as it is practiced in the Euro-Western academy must entail situating its concepts as both illuminating and inadequate for grasping a wider diversity of musical practices, but would also espouse an openness to how other provincialized musics and music theories productively complicate what we think of as our music-theoretical knowledges.19 Provincializing music theory would also mean returning theoretical inheritances to their global historical, economic, and social contexts—the same kinds of contextualization we comfortably demand of inquiry situated outside the West but rarely ever demand in quite the same ways when it comes to Western concepts and repertoires. Below I query three chapters of the CCMT (but not the only three) that demonstrate how music theory looks different when seen from the vantage points of its margins and Europe’s colonial histories and histories of marginalizing its Others. Michael Tenzer’s essay, “Polyphony” (Chapter 21), is the volume’s most sustained exercise in diving patiently into musical examples from far outside the Euro-Western core. It is perhaps the most direct exemplar of Chakrabarty’s concept of provincializing Europe: not a rejection of European ideas, but an effort towards renewing the categories of Western thought by lavishing attention onto perceived margins, here to the purpose of pluralizing the history and conceptual frameworks of polyphony. Tenzer articulates the tension residing within this project: “Western music’s prestige has been inseparable from, and at times an instrument of, its society’s history of power, which is not innocent. While Western musicians are nearly always eager to expand their canon via curiosity about the music of others, the expansion bears witness to the receding voices of traditional musicians in the wake of modernity’s blunt potency” (620). Tenzer’s chapter, then, undertakes the difficult project of balancing the extension of polyphonic concepts to non-Western musics with strategically highlighting how non-Western musics confound the polyphonic conceptual frameworks they may invite. Tenzer’s chapter is a primer on comparative thought. An opening case study documents the puzzling similarities between a Croatian genre called kanat and an agricultural song called Najan from the Indonesian island of Flores—both of which are duets with highly chromatic lines featuring unisons and what sound like harmonic major seconds. Tenzer reminds readers of Jaap Kunst’s 1954 conjecture that the two musics must have been linked “genetically” by a migrating population leaving Europe. Urging a greater modesty of judgment, Tenzer cautions that these musics might be analogous but not necessarily homologous (sharing a common genealogy). What complicates the superficial structural similarities are questions of how dissonance is conceptualized differently in different places. Are the Croatian and Indonesian duets are conceptualized as duets at all, or might they be better thought of as dissonant intensifications of a single vocal-melodic shape? A later comparison of two hocketing textures, one from Balinese gamelan and the other from a Ugandan court genre, raises similar ambiguities that undercut the apparent similarities of the musics. In pointing out these false “cognates,” Tenzer carefully underscores the ways in which terms like hocket, duet, and polyphony might be treated as mutable signifiers. And, as mutable signifiers, they disclose the possibility that European conceptions of such categories might profitably and strategically be regarded as marginal to the sum of their global manifestations. Interrogating the legitimating powers of the prestige located in Western musical sound and thought is an overdue project within our field. Though I would have liked to see more authors take it up explicitly, Tenzer is by no means the only writer in the collection to point in such a direction. Martin Scherzinger’s contribution “Temporalities” (Chapter 10), undertakes a searching account of the interaction between conceptions of time and conceptions of musical time in the past two and half centuries. The chapter’s critical premise is that the temporalities that characterize the West “remain bound up in colonial thought” and the capital economies birthed in the history of early modern empire. Scherzinger embarks on a search for senses of musical temporality that breach the hegemonic concepts of linear time, the ruthless time of economic productivity, of teleological notions of artistic and societal progress. He starts by holding our attention to the idea that understanding musical time and how it is felt is a way to expose ourselves to alternate conceptions of and relationships to duration other than what our prereflective, societally-acquired habits typically lead us to conclude. For instance, when it is said that music “suspends the flow of time” or “transports us” to alternate senses of timescale through its sensuous maneuvering, one potential implication is that music offers a portal out of the regulative, hegemonic sense of what Scherzinger refers to as unidirectional absolute time: the time of the clock, the time of capitalist production, the time expressed as distance through the technology of cartography. But other aspects of musical time are in league with colonial-capitalist temporality. We are reminded, in the association between the timeline and the map, of how notions of “short” and “long” durations come from spatial metaphors. Those metaphors are in turn closely bound with ideas of physical distances as plotted by early modern cartography—the nearness or distantness of resources and peoples to conquer in the aggressive “globalization” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We are also reminded of how our own timelines—such as the standard timelines of the “great” composers in every music history textbook—are, like maps, produced through selecting certain things as important enough to plot and important enough to center. Scherzinger’s critique reminds readers that the high prestige of notionally “objective” techniques of measuring time itself stems from an ideological belief in objectivity and measurement as preferred methods for accessing truth. This belief in the genuine objectiveness of objectivity and the importance of measurement became Western priorities especially in projects of coloniality and enslavement economies, which demanded a proliferation of techniques to measure, classify, count, and control the resources and people of expanding empires. Scherzinger draws a continuity between teleological notions of unilinear time and the techniques of mapping that were used to figure out how to most efficiently conquer/enslave the West’s Others in the name of profitability. Where should we find relief from these relentless and ruthlessly colonial-capitalistic temporalities? According to Scherzinger (by reference to Agawu), it is not through a search for a magically recuperative Other in non-Western musics and the kinds of cyclical or otherwise non-teleological non-Western time that have been attributed to them. This is a foil that perpetuates the hungrily colonial routine of discerning the non-Western as a source for what we think our Westernness alienates us from. Instead, Scherzinger points out that clinging to stereotyped ideas about the non-West and its purportedly cyclical or non-linear senses of time can siphon our attention away from how the world is increasingly subjected to the kinds of temporal demands that characterize the time of late, neoliberal capital—desires for a notion of societal progress over time defined by the consumption-informed prerogatives of the few, or for the sacrifice of more and more at the altar of economic and productive efficiency.20 Matthew Gelbart’s essay, “Scale” (Chapter 4), pries open its subject philologically and etymologically. Gelbart notes how scale has always denoted two competing structures: on the one hand, an abstract collection—a “ladder” (scala) of pitch classes—out of which smaller sets can be drawn combinatorially; and on the other hand the embodiments ranging from pedagogical exercises (practice your scales!) to patterns of conjunct motion within embodied performance as the music-making body’s phenomenal access to part of a piece’s vocabulary of tones. Like Iyer and Scherzinger, Gelbart also discloses how music theory’s long-standing aspirations towards the objectivity of a science—especially through practices of categorization, hierarchization, and measurement, and now bolstered by recourse to the perceptual and cognitive sciences—have a history intimately linked to the colonial projects that nurtured early modernity’s own scientific inclinations. By the mid-eighteenth century, as Gelbart writes, scales had become comparative and anthropological concepts, handy for cataloguing the many other musical societies reached by European empire and “discerning” through them evidence for European superiority. He cites Charles Burney’s and others’ attempts to discuss scales from different geographies in terms of their evolutionary descent from one another, wherein preferences for pentatonic octave species were adduced by Burney and others as metonyms for primitiveness, while preferences for heptatonic octave species were adduced as evidence for a state of evolutionary advancement. Here, the concept of scale as a sort of ladder of tones draws uncomfortably close to early modern Europe’s notion of a Great Chain of Being—or scala naturae: the notion that there exists a natural order that inherently consists of a hierarchical ranking of all life and all matter and all phenomena—whose most exalted subject on the terrestrial Earth (and what its portrait would look like) can come as no surprise. Of course, the ideological maneuvers in which comparativist ideas concerning scales participated were shaped by material conditions. Gelbart points out that European listeners constantly contended with inconsistencies of temperament across their experiences of scales in daily life, even within a single locality. They may thus have had to develop routines of hearing acoustically-distinct instantiations of scales as semantically alike—a material and praxiological condition of possibility that facilitated the European (proto-)anthropological imaginary’s reductionistic parsing of othered Others’ heptatonic scales as deformations of Europe’s vocabulary of scales. Tenzer, Scherzinger, and Gelbart each demonstrate ways towards situating Euro-Western musics and music theories among worldly connections by drawing their topics into relation with Europe’s margins. Collectively, they show how inherited music-theoretical concepts and terminology are in fact products of particular value systems—methods of organizing musical observations embedded historically and ideologically in the socially contingent relations between the West and its Others. These chapters create a productive unraveling, intimating that there have always been multiple Wests and multiple Europes that belong to specific, concrete traditions of speculation and praxis rather than the dubious register of the universal. ENTANGLEMENT The contemporary academy tends to carve out its constituent knowledges into discrete methodologies and discrete paradigms of knowing, and music studies in general is no exception to this partitioning. Beyond music departments, scattered across the geography of the campus or administratively separated from one another, disciplinary borders are made manifest in countless less literal boundaries and barricades. In a contrast to this particularizing force, nearly all of the chapters of the CCMT expose how multiply-directed our attentions must be when we attempt to understand any one of music theory’s knowledges or parameters for study. The CCMT undercuts the contemporary academy’s picture of deep but narrow knowledges as the inevitable imprimatur of the expert, and encourages music theorists to venture out of the silo that music theory has used in the past to protect itself from what it has often regarded at least tacitly as “contamination” by the social or the cross-disciplinary. It reminds readers that knowledge production and theorization never simply take place in laboratory grade vacuums—however attractive such a condition may seem to certain kinds of minds—but instead are surrounded always by a manifold of material, cultural inputs and ideological pressures. Elizabeth Helmuth Margulis’s contribution, “Repetition” (Chapter 8), demonstrates the volume’s efforts towards a catholic methodological stance, with its rich citational depth in the music cognition literature. Margulis cites perceptual studies that demonstrate, among other things: how pitch and interval repetition produce perceptions of a tonic; how repeated passages can incite stronger propensities to move in sync with music; how repeated rehearings of music can modulate senses of formal anticipation; and how the very activity of musical analysis and the deep listening it depends on are supported by repetitive acts of rescrutinizing musics beyond initial sonic impressions. Writ subtly across the chapter is a more philosophical point concerning the ways in which repetition is never merely sameness—a point that will be explored in a number of essays, most deeply in Naomi Waltham-Smith’s chapter on Sequences. Repeated stimuli splay outwards to embrace difference. A pedal tone is recontextualized harmonically across its duration; a car’s blinker signal begins to channel attention to tiny inconsistencies in its sound, and so on. One point of further departure concerns Margulis’s invocation of John Rahn’s notion of “thingification,” by which is meant the way “repeated elements tend to establish themselves as points of reference—to emerge from the continuous stream of musical elements as a cohesive unit, capable of being referred to and mulled over and conceptualized as a thing” (193).21 Those with curiosities in anti-colonial critique might recall another, far less sanguine notion of “thingification,” from Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, wherein “thingification” refers to how European colonizers conceived of the peoples of the non-European world not as humans but as fungible objects so as to justify colonial invasion. This terminological coincidence between Rahn and Césaire prompts consideration of the ways in which highly repetitive musical phenomena—from the cyclical repetitions of Indonesian gamelan to the rhythmic repetitions of ragtime—have been reified in Western musical discourses as things that evince a perceived lack of invention and barbarity in the communities and racial categories from which such musics originate. Regarding one historical instance of such a view, Robert Walker explains how the musical Schulwerk developed in the 1920s by Carl Orff and Dorothee Günther proposed that “children should learn simple repetitive patterns first because, as primitives in their stage of development, they naturally take to primitive music because it was repetitive and simple.”22 This infantilizing trope attached to the so-called “primitive music” of non-Western societies—a common early twentieth-century designation—is mediated through the fabrication of an axis that situates repetition at one pole and a notion of sophistication or elaborateness at the other. Relatedly, the postcolonial theorist Ashis Nandy describes perceptions of “cyclical or other forms of disreputable nonlinear times” that Western historians have attributed to the societies of what it deemed “irrational savages.”23 Repetition and the suspicions that have been attached to it, then, point to a racialized politics of genre and sociality. Margulis, aware of this connotative underside of repeated things, cites Rebecca Leydon to caution that repetition as a musical characteristic might problematically “suggest a ‘will-less’ or ‘automatized’ subject” if we are not careful (199).24 What demands proper scrutiny, then, is the presumption of a continuity birthed in Enlightenment humanism between repetition, automatized (and hence absent) subjectivity, and deficiency—attributed in the history of modernity to Europe’s Others. Leydon’s automatized subject alludes to characterizations attributed in different ways and for different reasons to the slave, the Native, the working-class subject of Fordist capitalism, and the figure of the technically proficient but expressively deficient Asian music performance major (to name just a few). Musical repetition, then, is far more than a structural parameter of sounds, if certain suspicions towards repetition have functioned as evaluative parameters for musics and the people they are practiced by. In Daniel M. Grimley’s essay “Form” (Chapter 13), the author immediately concedes its necessary incompletion: “the current chapter cannot offer a comprehensive account of musical form” (346) due to how the thematic of form spirals outwards to encompass “form’s relationship with notions of time and space, issues of authoriality, intention, meaning, and design; and music’s richly contingent status as a live event” (347). The author’s novel intervention is to track the ideological freight with which the Western discussion on musical form has been loaded. In Grimley’s telling, form was adduced by the nineteenth century as the parameter that housed the notion of music’s organic unity and notions of the quasi-theological character of the form-conjuring compositional hand (“And the Earth was without form…”). Instead of serving as a primer on contemporary approaches to analyzing musical form, Grimley opens a view onto a different order of analysis altogether: an analysis of the intellectual history, etymologies, and the desires that comprise form’s entanglements. Citing Scott Burnham, Grimley proposes that “by the end of the nineteenth century… form had become a canonizing device, based on highly essentialized notions of gender, race, national identity, and class, in which the sonata allegro became the most emblematic and revered category of musical expression” (347).25 Form and formalism, in other words, may seem to denote a kind of tunnel-vision focused simply on scores and works and their anatomies, but just underneath is form’s relation to the social. Form’s regulative and subjugative connotations do not escape notice: “to be ‘true to form’ suggests regularity and predictability: it is to conform” (349), which should prompt readers to recall Michel Foucault’s dictum that no knowledge (and no theory of music) is lifted free from the exercise of power and forms of control.26 Grimley’s discussion of the debates around the architectural significances of Dufay’s Nuper rosarum flores, for instance, uses the connotations of both temporality and spatiality within the topic of form to address musical form’s historical intimacies with monumentalization. The final pages of the chapter trace how Romantic musical aesthetics began to discern musical form as music’s proper content, burdening the discussion of musical form with the responsibility of disclosing the interior of the Will in the writings of figures like Eduard Hanslick and A. B. Marx. This conceptual encumbrance becomes even heavier in the twentieth century, as Theodor Adorno and later Jacques Attali cast form as the muzzled intimation (even foretelling) of society’s antinomies.27 In this period, Grimley’s examples cast form as a hungry concept, its maw gaping ever wider from the narratival unity towards which the sonata allegro aspired, to the ruptures of compositional forms in twentieth-century modernisms, to the palimpsestic layering of states of activity and relationships within improvisatory time in a discussion of Miles Davis. Grimley’s conclusion to his chapter converges productively with Ashon Crawley’s state of “otherwise being,” a concept that functions as an invitation to tarry with the alterity and the uncontainability of the very concept of possibility—an elusiveness against containment that might be said to comprise musical form’s inaugurating anxiety.28 David Trippett’s contribution to the CCMT (Chapter 15), “Melody,” also demonstrates the breadth and sprawl necessary to think the concept towards which it is devoted. As Trippett writes, melody is “the compositional parameter that most closely mirrors our experience of finite duration, with all the allusive value this has for the nature of transient experience, sonic decay, expiring breath, and the impermanence of living matter” (398). Melody has carried a significant ideological freight through its history, connoting the charisma of individuality and the power of musical sound to seduce for better or for ill. This is in implicit contradistinction with harmony, which has connoted order, the regulative power of law and administrative rationalities, and the forms of submission to harmonious order and authorities imagined as the basis for a functioning society. (Incidentally, Ian Quinn’s essay on Tonal Harmony (Chapter 17) expresses well this continuity between harmony and law.) Notoriously, melody has resisted definition across its history and might seem to be too self-evident for critical scrutiny to access. Trippett cites, in this connection, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s non-definition of obscenity: “I know it when I see it” (399). But this concept cannot be treated so self-evidently as an “objective” trait of music-making. Melody is answerable to many things: to the interpreting ear that discerns that which is “melodic“ from the thicket of undifferentiated auditory stimulus; to the topic of rhetoric and the carnal performing body in its relation to voice (as in Rousseau); and to aesthetics, in its capacity to mark style and expressive sensibility. As Trippett explores, historical conceptions involve melody being adduced (as in Rameau) as a “natural” outgrowth of the laws of counterpoint, harmony, phrase rhythm, and syntaxes of intervallic succession. But just as significant are the social and hegemonic “growths” in which melody is bound up: the outgrowth of regimes of national and imperial feeling, the presumed inborn traits of the Earth’s different peoples, as well as European concepts of what kinds of melodic traits comprise “proper” expressions of (White, Christian) man’s soul and its “nature” as the Earth’s inevitably civilizing, administrative force. In light of this, what we must remember as Trippett warns is how such “natures” are by no means natural or inevitable, but anxious dissimulations of “one’s own familiar preference” (428). That is, the many attempts to theorize what melody is and how it should work are expressions of cultural contingencies and tastes, elevated through elaborate justificatory gambits to the status of transcendental expressions of what does and does not count as music—and hence, in the thinking of liberal modernity, as human—and whose musics and melodies count towards such a definition. NEW ARENAS The CCMT devotes multiple chapters to sites for theoretical and analytical scrutiny that don’t have the long discursive history of topics like counterpoint, cadence, tonic centricity, and so on. Four in particular demonstrate new opportunities for research, made possible by technologies that have entered musical ecosystems (such as digital audio workstations or spectrograms) and emerging interdisciplinary intimacies (namely with cognitive and data sciences). Guilherme Schmidt Câmara and Anne Danielsen’s essay, “Groove” (Chapter 11) begins out of the gates with an acknowledgment of pleasure that is surprisingly uncommon in music theory, describing groove as the commingling of rhythmic feels characteristic of diverse musical styles that produce delight. Their most compelling acknowledgment identifies groove with attraction and desire, and the ways in which music propels and incites movement. A music’s rhythmic feel and groove, then, index the practices of dance and musical absorption that are perhaps better spoken of in the idiom of sexual attraction and bodily pleasure than in the denaturing and psychologizing language of “positive affective states” and “cognitive-physical stimulation.” Groove points to states of musical absorption in themselves, forms of musical experience that thwart the detached “objectivity” with which musical analysis has often aligned itself in its disciplinary past. Notably, the chapter focuses almost exclusively on popular musics: conflicting swing ratios in James Brown’s “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine,” metric dissonances in Jackie Wilson’s “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher,” and the width of beat bins in Tangelo’s “Left & Right” and Rihanna’s “Needed Me.” While the authors perhaps render the explanation of groove and its sensuality in a way that might be analogous to the humorless act of explaining the punchline of a joke, what they reveal is that the parameters involved in feelings of inhabiting the groove of musics possess a theoretical and analytic dignity that has yet to be recognized adequately. Groove helps us approach musics that rely on features other than what graduate educations in music theory have traditionally featured, even when they draw students’ attentions to musical time over and above the traditional emphasis on musical pitch. Mitchell Ohriner’s chapter, “Expressive Timing” (Chapter 14) is an intuitive counterpart of Câmara and Danielson’s. Its investigation of microtiming examines differing performances of the same work and also takes up the topic of durations that may be notated equivalently but played more elastically. Studies of expressive timing, for instance in performances of rubato, have had their own journey of achieving recognition in a field whose disciplinary past has involved treating the work of the performer as ancillary to insight about musical works. This chapter shows how changes in the technological arsenal of music theory can reconfigure its aims and activities. Studying microtiming in musical recordings in any practicable way requires software that can plot acoustic data across a time axis—Ohriner’s suggestions are Audacity, Sonic Visualizer, and PRAAT. In a case study of Brahms’s Violin Concerto, Ohriner observes how microtiming analysis can generate understandings of tonal ambiguities and can be used to track historical changes in the performance practice of a work over decades. A study of Varese’s Density 21.5 on the other hand demonstrates how disunity in microtiming between performances disrupts the unity and fixity of the musical work-concept. (Although Ohriner concedes the converse to an extent, that the recognizability of a single work across its divergent performances reveals how the underlying identity of a work is not obliterated but merely changed by the accumulation of divergent performances that mediate the work.29) Ohriner’s final study on the synchrony of Kendrick Lamar’s voice to the beat of “Momma” draws hermeneutic significance from the findings of microtiming analysis: specifically, an observation of how the syllabification of one verse is draped elastically over its sixteenth-note pulse stream. Like a number of other CCMT chapters, Ohriner’s prompts readers to consider how newer methods and areas in music theory might dialogue with our colleagues in music information retrieval, music psychology, and computational humanities. Ohriner gives a glimpse of the wealth of possibilities for data generation for microtiming studies, although a nagging question presents itself, of whether the heft of the data finding procedures is justified by the musical observations that can be drawn from them. David Blake’s essay, “Timbre” (Chapter 6) has a way of organizing itself around what seems to be a bugbear of the author’s—the concept of language. Blake argues that “it [timbre] does all its work outside the realm of language” (136). The chapter would have benefitted from a less dogmatic stance towards the putative pre-linguisticness of timbre, which comes into a strange tension with the author’s attributions of its social significance, since in some humanistic conversations on the pre-linguistic realm of affect and affect theory, pre-linguisticness is often treated as tantamount to pre-sociality—as in the contested literature on the immediacy of affect.30 In any case, Blake’s discussion of vowel formants in Caroline Shaw’s Partita for 8 Voices efficiently shows how timbre can serve as a determinative parameter for a composition. One question to ponder, as Blake points out, is whether timbre is a parameter at all—or is it simply the residue that remains when other parameters have been accounted for? If timbre is known to be an emergent effect of acoustic features like onset envelope and the upper partials of a fundamental, is its newfound place within the discourse of music theory a correspondingly emergent realization borne from spectrographic data and the increasingly scientific bent of the discipline? Timbre, as Blake notes, is also part of an epistemological technique of attempting to discern the sources of sounds. But as Nina Eidsheim points out in her work unpacking the gendering and racialization of vocal timbre, the idea of timbre as a seemingly reliable source of direct knowledge about the essence of the sound producer needs to be pressured, if not demolished. Eidsheim cautions us that, in putting so much stock in the putative immediacy of timbre and its seemingly direct linkage to sonic identities, we can be lead to dubious assumptions that certain sounds simply and inevitably mark the Other.31 This is a habit that derives from Euro-Western modernity’s long tradition of understanding the traits it discerned in its (economically, racially) selected and dysselected populations as biological, “natural” inevitabilities rather than as results of evaluative frameworks with social histories. Jonathan De Souza’s essay on Texture (Chapter 7) locates its topic between two meanings. Texture has traditionally referred to states of chordal homophony, linear monophony, or contrapuntal polyphony. But noting that the term is etymologically linked to the Latin texere (weaving), De Souza also acknowledges a broader musical usage, referring to the sensuous, material qualities of how we parse the totality of musical sound as a gestalt. Texture is not merely mind-independent structure, but is also answerable to perceptual processes like auditory stream segregation, and indeed the ways the distribution of musical objects across the anatomy of the performing body separates and fuses musical activity into discrete parts. Musical texture prompts consideration of the spatiality of music-making. Antiphonal textures, for instance, index the ways in which musical activity is distributed across the geometry of the stage and/or the performing ensemble. Texture also carries interpretive significance. Discussing Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock n’ Roll,” De Souza points out how a thinning of the texture to voice and drums in one late presentation of the chorus provokes anticipation for an ending to the song yet to be realized. Dense, multivocal textures might likewise suggest the cacophonous interpersonal dynamics of public life, or connote the thick materiality of Earthly landscapes. Texture, then, is a conceptual passageway towards the body, the sociality, and environmentality of music-making. DISCIPLINARY VALUE SYSTEMS Across its pages, the CCMT gives glimpses into disciplinary value systems of numerous kinds: ones having to do with geographical/repertorial tendencies, with methodological preferences, and indeed with foundational (and oft-implicit) justificatory logics. Below, I focus on two chapters that spawn reflection on how a small sample of our disciplinary value systems have been shaped by their histories in modernity. Henry Klumpenhouwer’s contribution, “Interval”—the second in the volume, a signal of sorts as to its assumed indispensability—undertakes an efficient and precise discussion focused upon how “order position” intervals (e.g., thirds, fifths, unisons, etc.) and “semitone” intervals (intervals as directed or undirected distances measured in terms of a total number of semitones that link two pitches) coexist, sometimes uncomfortably, so as to illuminate each other’s deficits. Although the chapter does not explicitly take up some of the grander meta-theoretical implications of its musical parameter, Klumpenhouwer’s inquiry into the notion of interval does present an opportunity to ask questions about the discipline’s attachments to measurement, taxonomy, and categorization. As the author writes, “interval systems are filing systems” (41). The arithmetical formalization present in the chapter concisely discloses a quantitative bent, one characteristic especially of recent mathematically-inclined theory such as transformational theory, attended as it is by its own rethinking of intervals between measurement and motion (and a mathematical rigor that has granted it substantial imprimatur). This desire for formal precision is not peculiar to music theory, and has its own long history that many scholars have linked to early modern projects of empire. Drawing on such scholarship in anti-colonial critique and critical Black studies, Martin Scherzinger’s chapter, discussed earlier, intimates this history of one disciplinary value system that also rears its head in Klumpenhouwer’s essay: the European techniques of classification (including zoological taxonomy, but also racialized blood quantum schemes), navigation, mapping, and so forth—techniques all, it bears reemphasizing, developed to make colonial invasion and its enslavement economies more efficient. These were important points of origin for the broader prestige of scientific “objective” precision, and they trickled into musical production, into aesthetics, into the tastes for laboratory-grade measurement, taxonomy, and categorization that inform the epistemological standards of a great deal of music-theoretical intellection today.32 “The underside of liberal modernity” may seem eye-rollingly broad as a disciplinary context for music theorists to consider, but given the belated attention to systems of inequity that appeared decisively on music studies’ radar in the past two years or so, the difficulty of this inquiry into histories of empire and the sciences and human hierarchies that operated within them to give them justificatory support will be a necessary difficulty to take on. Without struggling with these inconvenient intellectual histories, theorists will never gain proper contextual insight into music theory’s attractions towards categorization, formalization, measurement, the mapping of musical spaces, and so on. Richard Cohn’s essay, “Meter” (Chapter 9), aims at synthesis and generality concerning both musical meter and its major research literature of the past 40 years. Noting that metric theory “has suffered from long periods of neglect,” most egregiously in the standard music theory pedagogical resources, the author makes clear that “tonality has long held the center of music-theory pedagogy, to the extent that curricula treat it as co-extensive with the term music ‘theory’” (207). Cohn’s chapter aims to decouple understandings of meter from the time signatures of musical notations, instead defining meter as a concatenation of pulse streams wherein a faster pulse stream is a duple or triple division of a slower pulse stream. For instance, if a piece of music carries a dotted half note slower pulse, that stream may be supported by a quicker stream of either a quarter note or dotted quarter note pulse. A quarter note pulse stream may, in turn, be supported either by a triplet eighth note pulse stream or a straight eighth note pulse stream, while a dotted quarter pulse stream may be supported either by a dotted eighth note pulse stream or a straight eighth note pulse stream. In Cohn’s technology, the eighth note pulse stream is a “common denominator” to the quarter note and dotted quarter pulse streams. Cohn relies throughout on dot arrays that show the nested hierarchies of pulse streams activated within his musical examples. The model is efficient and is meant to be able to attend to phenomena that time signature and notation capture only indirectly, such as displacement dissonances (syncopations) and metric grouping dissonances (hemiolas). Undergirding this disciplinary pedagogical history of undertheorizing the time domain of music are centuries in which the theopolitics around musical production associated the pitch domain and counterpoint with values like literacy, rationality, cosmological order, and so forth. The time domain, by contrast, though also subjected to rational numerological embrace, primarily attracted associations with the body: with sensuality and carnality; with movement, dance, and drink; with other rhythmic dispositions of the body’s biological habitus; and with sin. As medical historian James Kennaway describes, “the two principal moral approaches to the problem of music […] were either to deny its physicality in a view of music that emphasized mathematical order and cosmological relationships, or to subject it to a ringing moral denunciation as a carnal vice.”33 This web of connotations also bears a gendered history in which the adjacency of rhythm and meter to the body also entailed an adjacency to conceptions of femininity. Furthermore, rhythm and meter developed associations with the musics of non-White Others. Indeed, early modern writers frequently figured the Othered peoples encountered by Europeans in the colonial project and its enslavement economies in terms of a profusion of percussive, rhythmic, cyclical musics—a characterization nearly always contiguous with attestations of a lack of societal development and a lack of Christianity. The accounts of early European travelers to the so-called New World such as Jean de Léry or the conquistadors involved in Hernán Cortés’s invasion of Central Mexico and its chroniclers are rife with characterizations of Indigenous peoples’ drumming and its metric regularity as metonyms for the primitiveness and terribleness of these societies.34 Much later, but in a development of the same degrading vein, the music educator Will Earhart wrote derisively in 1924 that jazz amounted “in its twitching, convulsive, hiccoughing rhythms [to] the abdication of control by the central nervous system—the brain.”35 Here, the rhythms of jazz and their relation to metrical grids are made to attest to the pathological status of Blackness. The anti-colonial thinker and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon wrote poignantly about how African and Indigenous societies have been characterized as primitive and as lacking through an essentialistic reduction of their musical cultures to their rhythmic features—speaking to a history of racial, colonial inferiorization of the time domain of music.36 As this review emphasizes, the CCMT’s chapters enter into productive dialogues with one another—dialogues that may not be evident within the borders of any single contribution. One of the central pressures the volume applies to its readers within the current social and historical moment is that it enjoins us to take heed not only of the epistemological attitudes within music theory and its biases towards certain phenomena and parameters rather than others. It also provides conceptual resources for tarrying in the generative discomfort of situating what became the tasks and priorities of the field within the difficult histories of the modernity we have inherited, marked as it is with unfreedoms, patterns of hierarchizing the category of the human, and the processes of empire. THEORY, PHILOSOPHY, AND MUSIC THEORY The CCMT bespeaks a field whose borders and self-definitions are growing more capacious—more capacious in the histories it consults, more capacious in the repertoires it probes, more capacious in the methodologies and pedagogies it develops. This expansion invites questions about what counts as “theory,” and more specifically about what relation music theory has with philosophy and with what our colleagues in other disciplines recognize as theory. Future editors, future writers, future readers and doers of music theory must recognize that the conception of theory broadly speaking—as in continental philosophy, critical theory, etc.—is a big tent conversation that the humanities and humanistic social sciences share and contribute to. As such, being able to engage with theory in the work of music theory is a portal to our colleagues outside of many of our own departments and comfort zones. The siloing of music–theoretical discourse from the humanities—once a point of pride attesting to music’s remote and “therefore” exalted status among the arts—is a form of insulation not to be wished. To an extent, the sometimes-minimal desires of our field to learn from the timely conversations taking place outside of music altogether are responsible for the disciplinary embarrassments we endured concurrently with the Covid-19 pandemic and the intensified attention to our national grammars concerning race following the murders of George Floyd and other Black Americans. The fraught misunderstandings and amnesias within some responses to Philip Ewell’s 2019 SMT plenary talk concerning implicitly racialized and anti-Black logics within the field are the fruits of a decision among some scholars to narrowly construe the métier of music theory without venturing the intellectual curiosity to stay up to speed with evolving contemporary thought concerning politically-important categories.37 Of course a turn to humanistic theory is no disciplinary panacea, since theory often mobilizes a poor and sentimental understanding of music. It is no stretch of the imagination to say that flimsy uses of music, simply as a figure for something that our usual habits of intellection alienate us from, are widespread in theoretical discourses across the humanities. But when music theory enters into dialogue with theory in other disciplines, broadly speaking, we have opportunities to leverage musical expertise towards the theorization of the contemporary and its concepts. Naomi Waltham-Smith’s offering on “Sequence” (Chapter 20) takes as its premise an intriguing idea: that tonal sequences beckon the analyst to glimpse how the notionally mutually exclusive categories of sameness and difference are not merely dichotomous in their organization but are marked by an involutionary character, wherein repetition breaks out into divergence, and where outward difference discloses forms of continuity. Philosophically astute readers will recognize the trace of Jacques Derrida’s “deconstructive” style of thought. Derridean deconstruction refers to a way of thinking about terms and/or concepts and their relation to those terms and/or concepts which they would seem to oppose (and which always have a way of infiltrating the original). The chapter illustrates this principle of a concept’s inevitable contamination by its seeming antithesis by noting how the variations in a tonal sequence are held in a curious tension to the underlyingness of its repetitive logic. The characteristic repetitiveness of sequences (which typically are not longer than three sequential units) serves as the very ground for the sequence’s harmonic alterations, transpositional maneuvers, suspensions of tonic directedness, manipulations to senses of forward-moving temporality, and other such defenses against boredom. Explicit mention of this deconstructive framework, however, is absent in the text of Waltham-Smith’s essay and absent in the citational apparatus. Specters of Derrida nonetheless make their subtle presence known through their conspicuous explicit absence—conspicuous because those music theorists with philosophical curiosities may indeed already be aware of Waltham-Smith as a keen musical reader of French post-structuralism. I would conjecture that there was some editorial pressure to keep the deconstructive argument relatively implicit, though to my mind the deconstructive themes of the chapter are quite clear even without explicit attribution for those who have ears to hear it. While it is understandable that some might be put off or intimidated by post-structuralist treatments of procedures of tonal sequence, Waltham-Smith’s chapter gets readers to think in a way that can be described as deconstructive, and lowers a barrier towards achieving a greater comfort with wading into the big-tent conversation called theory. In the CCMT’s penultimate chapter, “What is Music Anyway,” philosopher Andrew Bowie approaches a foundational question that the field both almost always bypasses, and always, always presupposes. Bowie begins by conceding that any approach to defining music by seeking its necessary and sufficient definitional features is bound to fail—and the scope of the question leads to a sense of the chapter sprawling and cohering only loosely. He notes that musics might more profitably be regarded as sharing what Ludwig Wittgenstein called “family resemblances” to denote patterns of similarity based on a sufficient number of characteristic “symptoms” present (rather than the sharing of necessary and sufficient features).38 The invocation of Wittgenstein is indicative of a larger theoretical theme of the chapter: the relation of music and language. Bowie, nodding to recent (re)considerations of music’s “ineffability,” notes how music has been characterized as fleeing from being contained by the semantic meanings that have been discerned within it.39 This semantic excess and unmasterability before interpretative apparatuses—and the humility these traits of music demands—are as much a knowledge of music as the many messages that have been adduced positively from it. But defining music and language as each other’s foils has its shortcomings. While the idea that music, in its ineffability, cannot be exhaustively spoken for would seem to demarcate its distance from language, language houses its own ineffabilites: in the ways in which utterances always pose the possibility of producing unknown effects, unknown misfires, incomplete revelations. So, music and language share, in albeit different ways, an ineffability that communication in its fullest sense is always riddled with. Bowie also rejects reductionistic views of music as being reducible to the synaptic activity it incites (associated in the chapter with Steven Pinker’s “auditory cheesecake hypothesis”), and he harbors a skepticism towards the lofty and sentimental ideals of music as inherently a vehicle for freedom and inwardness. But if the chapter demonstrates how music fails to sustain its reduction to the themes and messages it seems to transmit—or to the physiological processes (neural or otherwise) it involves, or for that matter to the cultural circumstances which it may seem to disclose—Bowie ultimately enunciates a stimulating possibility. When the condition of the world reaches our ears filtered through the accent of musical sound, musical intellection, and musical performance, we achieve knowledges of the things music is connected to (like politics, language, nature, historical milieus, etc.) that we never quite would have had access to without music. This, to my appraisal, demonstrates a point that Bowie seems quite committed to: that music is marked by a singularity and autonomy that can nevertheless coexist with music’s entanglement with its social, material, and ideological contexts. If this is so, then music theory does not only signify theorizing about music in the familiar sense, nor even bringing less familiar conceptual interventions like post-structuralist theory to music: music theory might also mean treating musical attention, listening, and doing as catalysts for philosophical, critical, normative, and diagnostic theorization about the world that is given. CONCLUSION The CCMT is a rich springboard for critical and metatheoretical reflection, but if I have emphasized these threads to the exclusion of others, readers can be assured that contained within the volume are also hundreds of pages of stimulating discussions of “the notes.” The handbook’s intervention lies with how it both articulates the structure and history of music-theoretical concepts while also prompting ways to reimagine music theory in the twenty-first century—a new music theory that might operate outside the thrall of the dubious, if once vaunted, autonomy from the unsettling demands of the social and the ever-changing landscape of contemporary thought. There are some for whom an expansion of focus beyond the “traditional” moorings of music theory may bespeak a dismal state of disciplinary “decline”—a possibility raised for instance in recent dustups on the now-retired SMT-Discuss forum (http://discuss.societymusictheory.org/discussions), which themselves call back to the rancorous discussions around Schenkerian analysis weighing upon music theory’s 2020–present discourse. But my advice to reactionaries and naysayers would be to turn that frown upside down, to remember that the definitions of any field that were operative among its communities of practitioners in the days of anyone’s graduate education were never promised to remain regulative forever—nor could they ever truly have been the priorities of time immemorial, besmirched by some putative fallenness of the contemporary. If there are those now wondering whether music theorists are transforming like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa into non-practitioners of music theory because the field is becoming more ambitious as to what it claims as its domain and purview, they can be answered simply. What is changing is not primarily the theorists, but theory itself—its disciplinarity, its questions, its concerns, its priorities, its intellectual desire. The transformation is a belated one that can hardly be said to have occurred overnight as it was with Kafka’s protagonist. If some defenders of music-theoretical statuses quo are disappointed by the many pages in which the CCMT “drifts” from a precise focus on the familiar or the putatively uncontaminated sphere of “the music itself,” I would remind them that the Scholastic-Thomistic tradition would similarly scorn today’s music theory for its forgetting of the heavens. The statement on The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory from the SMT awards celebrates its authors by way of an admonishment to its readers: “if we understand and teach these so-called fundamentals as immutable entities [which the authors avoid], we bypass essential disciplinary questions,” which ultimately are questions for and of the ongoingness and futurity of the discipline. This is simply the normal mechanism of how a discipline perdures across time. So, if we as the practitioners, aspirants, and advocates of fields of study don’t ourselves metamorphose while fields and corpora of knowledges inevitably do—because disciplinary history, like any history is, axiomatically, thus—then what are we but crumbling statuary, pale and brittle, shuddering against the winds of change? Footnotes 1 Boyle et al. (2021). 2 Adorno (1974, 50). 3 Wynter (2003). 4 Spillers (1987). 5 Moten (2003). 6 Lowe (2015). 7 See Quijano (2000) for an analysis of how colonial power consists in significant part in the power to install regulative hierarchical distinctions between the colonizer and colonized. 8 Marx (1977, 751). 9 See Issar, Brown, and McMahon (2021), and Singh (2017). 10 See James (1963 [1938]), and Robinson (2000 [1983]). 11 Devine (2019). 12 See Luke (2020). The “Anthropocene” is the name geologists have given to designate a new geological epoch defined by the climatic changes induced by the activities of some humans. 13 Zalasiewicz et al., (2017, 88). 14 Christensen (2001), and McAuley et al. (2021). 15 Boyle et al. (2021, [1.13]). 16 In this connection, see Robinson (2020). 17 Agawu (2017, 51). 18 See Latour (2018), where he distinguishes between a globalization-minus and globalization-plus wherein the first designates a globalization that seeks to smear European standards over the whole of the Earth as a regulative fiction and the latter describes a realization that Europe is simply one of many polities from which we may learn. 19 Chakrabarty (2000). 20 See, in this connection, the foundational contemporary theorization of neoliberal life in Brown (2015) and a musical treatment of the topic in Ritchey (2019) 21 Rahn (1993). 22 Walker (2007, 278). 23 Nandy (1995, 46). 24 Leydon (2002, 14). 25 Burnham (2002, 903–904). 26 See, for example, Foucault (1979, 27–28). 27 Hanslick (1986); Marx (1856); Adorno (1978); Attali (1985). 28 Crawley (2016). 29 See treatment of musical work ontology with respect to the repertoire of jazz standards in Kane (2018). 30 Massumi (1995). See also the excavation of affect theory’s historical origins in ideas of music, vibration, and sound in Grant (2020). 31 Eidsheim (2019). 32 On the early modern, colonial origins of these techniques of beholding and mastering the natural world in terms of categories and hierarchies, see Ferreira da Silva (2015), Wynter (2003), and Martinez (2008). 33 Kennaway (2012, 1). 34 See Tomlinson (2007), especially. 35 Earhart (1924, 520). 36 See Fanon (2008), especially chapter 5. 37 Ewell (2020) describes tough but necessary pills for the field to swallow concerning the unmarked racializations that music theory inherits from the fact that it takes place within and alongside historical processes and structures. 38 Wittgenstein (1953, §65–67). 39 On musical ineffability, see Abbate and Gallope (2021), who clarify that music’s ineffability is not an injunction to a pious silence in the face of how music exceeds description, but an invitation towards a loquacious scrutiny of the limitations that make this so—an opening towards an effusive theorization of the ethical stances commanded by that which exceeds intellectual and sensorial mastery. 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TI - Music Theory Splintered Up, Not Broken Down: The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory. Edited by Alexander Rehding and Steven Rings
JF - Music Theory Spectrum
DO - 10.1093/mts/mtab020
DA - 2022-01-29
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/music-theory-splintered-up-not-broken-down-the-oxford-handbook-of-pN1RDJj0VO
SP - 173
EP - 186
VL - 44
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -