The latest issue of Music theory spectrum arrived in my mailbox and I immediately turned off Mythbusters to see what's hot in our field.
It struck me that the first two articles could not be more different from one another. The first is an article by Jay Hook on cross transformations. He extends some ideas of David Lewin and offers ways of relating triads to seventh chords. There are more theorems and proofs and variables and Cartesian products than you can shake a stick at. The next article is by Jocelyn Neal on narrative in country music. No lemmas or proofs here, but narrative analysis of a genre that is not often subject to music-theoretical analysis. The final article is by Richard Bass and it discusses resolutions of seventh chords in late nineteenth-century music. There are a number of book reviews, two of which I'll mention because they help make my point. The first is Rick Cohn's review of Lerdahl's Tonal pitch space; the second is Justin London's review of Lawrence Zbikowski's Conceptualizing music. Both are books that are steeped in cognitive science and apply two very different paradigms to music analysis.*
My point is that while many music students probably see theory as Roman numerals and sonata form, and many other folks still see music theory as Schenker and/or sets, there's a heck of a lot going on in our field to the point where it's hard to imagine what unites the work of the authors listed above (other than the deliciously lime green cover of this issue).
So, what is it that separates music theory from musicology? Or from ethnomusicology, for that matter? Put another way, what makes one a music theorist? Is it what our degree says we are? Is it what we teach to undergraduates? Is it what genre(s) we study? Is it a matter of self identification (a speech act)?
*I confess I haven't read this issue cover to cover, so my apologies if my summaries are a bit crude.
It struck me that the first two articles could not be more different from one another. The first is an article by Jay Hook on cross transformations. He extends some ideas of David Lewin and offers ways of relating triads to seventh chords. There are more theorems and proofs and variables and Cartesian products than you can shake a stick at. The next article is by Jocelyn Neal on narrative in country music. No lemmas or proofs here, but narrative analysis of a genre that is not often subject to music-theoretical analysis. The final article is by Richard Bass and it discusses resolutions of seventh chords in late nineteenth-century music. There are a number of book reviews, two of which I'll mention because they help make my point. The first is Rick Cohn's review of Lerdahl's Tonal pitch space; the second is Justin London's review of Lawrence Zbikowski's Conceptualizing music. Both are books that are steeped in cognitive science and apply two very different paradigms to music analysis.*
My point is that while many music students probably see theory as Roman numerals and sonata form, and many other folks still see music theory as Schenker and/or sets, there's a heck of a lot going on in our field to the point where it's hard to imagine what unites the work of the authors listed above (other than the deliciously lime green cover of this issue).
So, what is it that separates music theory from musicology? Or from ethnomusicology, for that matter? Put another way, what makes one a music theorist? Is it what our degree says we are? Is it what we teach to undergraduates? Is it what genre(s) we study? Is it a matter of self identification (a speech act)?
*I confess I haven't read this issue cover to cover, so my apologies if my summaries are a bit crude.