Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Despite the diversity of musical thought across historical and cultural spaces, much of what is nominally titled "music theory" concerns only a small sliver of this intellectual tradition, to the neglect of source documents from many of the globe's language groups and communities.And while music theorists have increasingly looked to interrogate and move beyond the field's historic Eurocentrism (Ewell 2020; Li 2022), endeavors to do so are limited by three challenges.First, publications and teaching materials on traditions beyond those of the Western European art music tradition and its adjacents are considerably more difficult to locate, scattered as they are across disparate archives, libraries, journals, private unpublished records, interviews, and oral pedagogies and histories (Cunningham et al. 2020).Second, many of the world's musical cultures record and disseminate musical knowledge primarily through oral/aural means, which have not conventionally been viewed as legitimate modes of scholarly insight within Western academia (Cusick 1994; Mahuika 2019).And third, many music-theoretical discourses live in linguistic enclaves, which limits the possibility of building relations among music theory's global communities and lends itself to the privileging of knowledge production in European languages.[2] This special issue, the first published installment of a larger digital humanities project we have named "Music Theory in the Plural" (MTitP), strives to address some of these challenges.This project spun out of the lightning talk panel, "Translations of Underrepresented Languages in Music Theory," organized by guest editors Chris Stover and Anna Yu Wang for the 2021 business meeting of the Society for Music Theory's Analysis of World Musics Interest Group.Buoyed by the energy of that meeting, the first formal event of MTitP was launched in 2022, an eponymous virtual symposium of fifteen speakers from institutions in five countries, jointly hosted by Griffith University and Harvard University.Then, in 2023, with guest editor Edwin Li on board as a third project lead, we organized the panel "Redefining Music Theory Through Translation" for the Society for Music Theory annual conference, which contained the early versions of three papers in the present issue.
Source: Music Theory Online
DOI: 10.30535/mto.30.4.6
Authors: Edwin K. C. Li, Chris Stover, Anna Yu Wang
Language: English
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4409016930