Again, the basic idea of Kraus’ interpretation is plausible. Yet to draw such a sweeping conclusion misses much of the complexity of the music at hand. Both W.G. Snuffy Walden’s West Wing theme and Michael Kamen’s Band of Brothers may present a simple façade, but each is actually saturated with gentle dissonances, in the form of suspensions - which arguably bear as much responsibility for the music’s affective signification as do any arpeggios, if not more.[23] And as Kraus’ essay continues, she builds an entire argument on the "major arpeggio" as a broad signifier, weaving it - via Moss’ comments - into a spurious history of American music, ignoring its status as a simple building block of harmony. Her point is not unappealing - she argues against predictable and reassuring narratives - yet it is made via an oversimplification of the materials of tonal music.

What is more, the essay’s exclusive focus on melody and harmony mirrors the institutional failures of music theory itself. This analysis of the West Wing and Band of Brothers themes relies upon melodic and harmonic elements, yet has nothing to say about, say, the common instrumentation of the piece, nor about the changes in ensemble texture, nor about the rhythms in which the pieces unfold. In this way, "thinkpiece theory" copies music theory’s own worst tendencies, reaching for a shallow hermeneutic grounded in the nearly fifteen-hundred-year-old writings of Boethius, and even pre-dating him.[24] Again in the thrall of science envy, music theory’s origins in mathematics prove to be one of its most appealing qualities to those writing pieces like Kraus’s; the sweep of strings and French horns never enters the discussion.

The Sharing Ecosystem

The online commentariat for which these essays are often written is one final aspect of online musical analysis that is worth considering. "Thinkpiece theory", like many forms of digital journalism, exists in an ever-expanding ecosystem of social media sharing, content curation, and linking or re-publication. Catchy "before-the-colon" titles (recall Pallett’s "Ecstatic Melodic Copulation") serve much the same purpose in online writing as they do in academic writing: to draw the reader in. The types of titles that stand out in the table of contents of an otherwise dry journal, or amid a long list of concurrent conference sessions, are also generally successful at drawing readers into websites, and enticing those readers to share content with their own colleagues, friends, or families via social media. Many online publications also host comment sections at the bottom of articles, or sometimes on a separate page. Readers, again, are encouraged to have their say in a manner that adds value to the site - by making its discourse more active and vibrant - and also increases the statistical metrics that measure the monetary value of a given site’s average user, for advertising purposes. The comments on the articles discussed here are extensive and varied. "Ecstatic Melodic Copulation", on the music of Daft Punk, has attracted 223 comments to date. Some commenters note that, while the essay is intended to be easily digestible, they still do not understand the technical terminology used. Sometimes this sentiment is expressed constructively, with earnest questions and suggestions; sometimes it is not. («I have no idea what this means», goes one single-line comment).[25] Other commenters, however, participate enthusiastically in the analysis, bringing their own existing musical knowledge or intuitions to bear. They argue over ambiguities of key and chord, quibble with technical details, or express admiration and agreement with Pallett’s arguments. One reader even expresses admiration for the discussion holding forth in the comments section: «Judging purely by the incredible comments section discussion, I would judge this theory-based music criticism experiment a rousing success».[26] (This echoes the "clickbait" attitude cited above, which counts statistically legible audience engagement as success.) Still more commenters argue that the music is simply not to their taste, and that the author, his readers, and even the publication outlet would be better off focusing on more worthy topics. «Breaking down the ingredients of spray cheese does not make it taste any better», wrote one commenter.[27] Here, again, we see that reified conceptions of "worthy" musical repertoire, and the implicit judgments made for or against certain genres by traditional conceptions of music theory, are reflected among the general public, who have somehow developed a two-dimensional conception of the disciplines of music theory and musicology as they actually exist.

Music Theory’s Funhouse Mirror

The case studies undertaken in this essay reveal that the methodological issues that have often fueled disciplinary controversy within music theory are also, in many ways, vitally important outside the academy. The most fraught interdisciplinary relationships of music theory and musicology - with feminist criticism, with the philosophy of science - and the attendant controversies over the ontological status of music and the propositional status of music theory, are played out frequently, and in public, by non-academic writers on websites like Slate and Vox.

As Bonnie Gordon [2017] has written, scholars and teachers need to be diligent in equipping their students to recognize the ways in which various ideologies cloak themselves in music and spectacle, or even lie in plain sight, unexamined or taken for granted.[28] The same might be said of the tropes and tendencies of music theory, reflected as they are in the habits of thought, and writings, of journalists, amateur musicians, and non-academics. Declarations like Owen Pallett’s (about the «excellence and supremacy of the rules of Western music theory») ought to give us pause, and rouse us to action. Music theory’s history, its epistemologies, and its outlook on musical ontology are intertwined with larger cultural currents. Repeated without consideration by untrained writers in popular essays, these cultural ideas come to overwhelm music theory as it is practiced in the academy, producing problematic or overreaching arguments like those cited in this essay. This is not to say that all scholars have accepted popular music on equal terms with the Classical canon; in some corners, the innate supremacy of one genre over another is taken to be a defensible, attractive argument; take, for example, a 2016 paper in the journal Philosophy (the official journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, in London) entitled How Classical Music is Better Than Popular Music [Young 2016]. But to assume that the academy ignores and disdains pop would be to ignore the inroads made over the past few decades, by many exciting voices in the field.

This is also not to say that those lacking academic training, or those who view the discipline differently, do not have a right to use, or write about, music theory; empowering others to express their musical ideas, after all, is one of the highest goals of most professors, and one of the most important reasons to teach music theory. It should serve, however, as a call to arms to theorists and musicologists, who may want to have greater control over how their discipline - their research - is reflected in public. As have many humanities disciplines, musicology and music theory have begun tentatively to reach out to broader publics, striving to bring the lessons of the music classroom to those outside the walls of the academy. It is clear from the examples cited in this essay that there is great demand for sophisticated explanatory writing on music; it is also clear that music theory scholars, trained in the nuances of analytical language and well-versed in the cultural and historical weight borne by various metaphors for describing musical experience, have much to offer to the current state of discourse. Gordon’s injunctions might well be adapted to the persistence of certain intellectual ideologies evident in the amateur and enthusiast writings that currently represent music theory on Internet platforms.

The problem of the instrumentalization of theoretical knowledge, for example, runs rampant in these examples. In many of these essays - as indicated by the ubiquitous phrase "using music theory", - this disciplinary knowledge is treated as an unimpeachable authority, an external reference that justifies, reinforces, or explains the intuitions of readers, or even writers. The scientific image of music theory that arose with Milton Babbitt’s circle after World War II persists, unchallenged, in the minds of many. Indeed, one of the most vivid lessons of the case studies described here is the degree to which the ways music has been described over the past 300 years (from metaphors of gravity and natural order, to hermeneutic readings of tonal attraction-as-desire or modal-inflection-as-signification, to essentialist readings of gender binaries) have taken hold in popular discourse about music - often without the corrective re-examinations and contextualizations that have occurred in musicology and theory only for the past 30 years or so. Owen Pallett’s casual declaration of purpose in his Lady Gaga essay, for instance, reinscribes outdated divisions between the body and the mind, between affect and intellect. "Our mission", he writes, is «to dissect chart-topping pop singles and weigh their trembling flesh on the scales of Western music theory» (Pallett 2014c).[29] His choice of metaphor is no accident: popular music, ascribed to bodies that move - and which in this case tremble with intensity or desire, or perhaps simply the suspicious excess of mass popularity - is to be objectified, rationalized, and judged by the cold empiricism of music theory.[30] 

It is not difficult to draw a line between appeals to natural order - and to music theory as a reflection of such order, as in many of the articles cited above - and reductive essentialisms or cultural chauvinism. It is striking, for example, to see how quickly Arnold Schoenberg moves from the assertion that the analogous tensions between dominant and tonic, and tonic and subdominant are «like the force of a man hanging by his hands from a beam and exerting his own force against the force of gravity» to his assertion, only a page and a half later, of the supremacy of the Western scale. The discovery of the major scale, he writes «was a stroke of luck»; the fact that other cultures, such as «the Arabs, the Chinese and Japanese, or the gypsies» have employed different ones is one reason why «their music has not evolved to such heights as ours» [Schoenberg 1978, 23 and 25].[31] 

Yet, if the reception of music theory and analysis in online venues is any indication, it seems that a large number of readers and listeners to music - perhaps a majority - are likely to hold some sort of "folk theory" about music, and about a variety of musical topics: perception, expression, the place of music in culture, the relationship between music and text, the assumed separation of musical syntax from musical meaning, the innate and inarguable supremacy of certain musical traditions or repertoires over others, and many other topics.[32] Such ideologies are the very web of culture that musicologists address when they write about cultural context, and music theory is not immune form their effects. Music theorists and musicologists attempting to engage the public might be tempted to hide their disciplinary apparatus and training: to simplify their arguments, or gravitate towards "the music itself", rather than complicated framing, out of a sense that critical discourse and academic theorizing are less palatable to outside readers. I would argue, however, that they should resist this impulse. While those rising to the challenge of engaging readers and interlocutors outside of traditional disciplinary boundaries should be careful to write clearly and attractively, they should perhaps feel less pressure than they may currently, to hide their disciplinary expertise, or to paper over the methodological disputes and uncertainties that characterize professional academia, in favor of presenting a simplified, unified view of the issues. But perhaps public music theorists and musicologists should place greater emphasis on their own methods, and the debates which unfold in seminar rooms and at professional conferences. Rehearsing the disciplinary paradigm shifts that led, over hundreds of years, from Fludd’s mysticism to the present, might help to counteract that the popular notion that music theory and its objects are fixed and objective.

Meta-disciplinary reflection is in fact essential to moving any field forward, whether it happens in academic journals or the general press. One of the most fascinating rhetorical turns in Kofi Agawu’s 1997 essay Analyzing Music Under the New Musicological Regime finds him arguing that the New Musicologists to whom he is responding - Susan McClary, Lawrence Kramer, and others - frequently employ the very analytical methods that they critique. He writes:

New Musicologists and music analysts, then, are not natural enemies; to Agawu, they are often engaged in the same endeavors. Yet the former group, by ignoring the current disciplinary concerns of music theory, end up both reifying outdated paradigms, and fruitlessly critiquing them, as strawmen.

The same might be said of the body of "thinkpiece analysis" described here; and, more importantly, the same opportunity is available. The writers cited here rely almost exclusively on conventional methods, and their insights as a result bear the weight of conventional biases, such as regressive forms of Cartesian dualism, reductive and binary hermeneutics, and smug declarations of the superiority of western music and music theory. The proliferation of online musical writings seems to indicate that there is great demand for well-informed musical analysis, particularly with regards to popular music - a demand which is currently being filled by journalists, amateurs, and musicians without extensive academic training. While we should welcome a broad audience to write about and engage with music, musicologists and theorists are also in a unique position to provide greater historical context, and argumentative rigor, and theoretical sophistication. In recent years, the field of music theory has embraced a broad variety of diverse research topics and repertoires, yet the image of the discipline being presented in popular outlets - presented, it should be noted, by non-theorists - is one of staleness and rigidity, as either a set of regulatory guidelines or a mysterious decoder ring yielding deep meaning with minimal effort.

There is thus a great need, and great opportunity, for scholars to present their own vision of music theory to the public. If some popular online outlets are willing to devote significant resources to publishing essays on music theory, and in other cases are willing to engage in extensive meta-methodological reflections (as with the many self-conscious essays published by FiveThirtyEight, reflecting on their own methods of statistical analysis), perhaps it is time to propose that the two editorial impulses be unified. Given the rise of the public humanities and the documented demand for thoughtful coverage of music and the arts, perhaps it is time for a form of public music theory that does not only analyze music using conventional methods, but that lays bare those methods and exposes them for what they are - theories, which are provisional and in need of constant evaluation and revision. We should, in other words, not merely teach our students and our readers to use our tools; we should proudly show them how the tools were crafted, how they may be maintained and honed, and - most importantly - how new tools may be forged, to handle new musical challenges.

References

Abad-Santos A. (2017), How ‘Despacito’ Became the Biggest Song of 2017. «Vox», August 29, link.
Adams K. (2009), Flow in Rap Music, «Music Theory Online», 15/5.
Adams K., (2015), What Did Danger Mouse Do? The Grey Album and Musical Composition in Configurable Culture, «Music Theory Spectrum», 37/1, pp. 7–24.
Agawu K. (1997), Analyzing Music Under the New Musicological Regime, «Journal of Musicology», 15/3, pp. 297–307.
Boethius A. M. S. (1989), Fundamentals of Music, trans. by Calvin Bower, New Haven, Yale University Press.
Brubeck D. (2002), 1959: The Beginning of Beyond, in Cooke – Horn (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, pp. 177–201.
Bungert J. (2016), ‘When You Got the Yams’: Flow, Form, and Social Message in Kendrick Lamar’s ‘King Kunta’, paper presented to the Popular Music Analysis Interest Group of the Society for Music Theory, Vancouver, B.C., November 5.
Carlson D. (2003), The History of Online Journalism, in K. Kawamoto (ed.), Digital Journalism: Emerging Media and the Changing Horizons of Journalism, Lanham, MD, Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 37–55.
Christensen T. (1993a), Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press.
Christensen T. (1993b), Music Theory and Its Histories, in C. Hatch – D. W. Bernstein (eds.) Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, pp. 23–51.
Cohen D. (2012), The Blessay, Personal blog, May 24, link.
Cohen D. (1993), Metaphysics, Ideology, Discipline: Consonance, Dissonance, and the Foundations of Western Polyphony, «Theoria», 7, pp. 1–85.
Cox A. (2006), Music and Embodied Cognition, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press.
Cross I. (1998), Music Analysis and Music Perception, «Music Analysis», 17/1, pp. 3–20.
Currie J. (2009), Music After All, «Journal of the American Musicological Society», 62/1, pp. 145–203.
Cusick S. (1994), Feminist Theory, Music Theory, and the Mind/Body Problem, «Perspectives of New Music», 32/1, pp. 8–27.
Davies N. (2009), Flat Earth News, London, Random House.
DiNardo J. (2006), Freakonomics: Scholarship in the Service of Storytelling, «American Law and Economics Review», 8/3, pp. 615–626.
Donadio R. (2006), The Gladwell Effect, «The New York Times», February 5.
Foucault M. (2005), The Order of Things, London, Routledge (orig. ed. 1966).
Fludd R. (1617–18), Utriusque cosmi maioris sclilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technical historia, Oppenhemii, Aere Johan-Theodori de Bry, Typis Hieronymi Galleri.
Gladwell M. (2000), The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, New York, Little Brown.
Gladwell M. (2005), Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, New York, Little Brown.
Haglund D. (2014), «Why ‘Think Piece’ is Pejorative, «Slate», May 7, link.
Heller-Roazen D. (2011), The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World, New York, Zone Books.
Heidegger M. (1996), Being and Time, transl. by J. Stambaugh, Albany, State University of New York Press (orig. ed. 1953).
Heidemann K. (2016), A System for Describing Vocal Timbre in Popular Song, «Music Theory Online», 22/1.
Heller M. C. (2016), Between Silence and Pain: Loudness and the Affective Encounter, «Sound Studies», 1/1, pp. 40–58.
Hermann J. (2014), Take Time, «The Awl», link.
Hindemith P. (1945), The Craft of Musical Composition, Book I, transl. by A. Mendel, New York:, Associated Music Publishers, Inc. (orig. ed. 1937).
Huron D. (2006), Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.
Hyer B. (1996a), Before Rameau and After, «Music Analysis», 15/1, pp. 75–100.
Hyer B. (1996b), Second Immediacies in the Eroica, in Ian Bent (ed.) Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, pp. 77-104.
Johnston J. – Forde S. (2017), Introduction: Churnalism: Revised and Revisited, «Digital Journalism», 5/8, pp. 943–946.
Johnson S. B. (2005), Everything Bad is Good for You, New York, Riverhead Books.
Kerman J. (1980), How We Got Into Analysis and How to Get Back Out, «Critical Inquiry», 7/2, pp. 311–331.
Korsyn K. (2003), Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press.
Kramer L. (1992), Haydn’s Chaos, Schenker’s Order: or, Hermeneutics and Musical Analysis: Can They Mix?, «19th-Century Music», 16/1, pp. 3–17.
Kraus R. (2017), How Music Reveals the Pitfalls - and Possibilities - of Patriotism, «Los Angeles Review of Books», June 1, link.
Kuchera B. (2016a), Marvel is making the best Superman movies, «Polygon», November 16, link.
Kuchera B. (2016b), How Music Makes Captain America a Hero and Superman a Mope, «Polygon», link.
Lakoff G. – Johnson M. (1980), Metaphors We Live By, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press.
Lavengood M. (2017), A New Approach to the Analysis of Timbre, Ph.D. diss., CUNY Graduate Center.
Lehrer, Jonah. 2007. Proust was a Neuroscientist. Boston: Mariner Books.
Levitt S. D. – Dubner S. J. (2005), Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, New York, William Morrow and Co.
Levitt S. D. – Dubner S. J. (2009), Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance, New York, Harper Collins.
Lewin D. (2006), Studies in Music With Text, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press.
Lucas O. (2014), Maximum Loudness Yields Maximum Results, «Journal of Sonic Studies» 7, link.
McClary S. (1991), Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
McClary S. (1993), Narrative Agendas in ‘Absolute’ Music: Identity and Difference in Brahms’ Third Symphony, in R. Solie (ed.) Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, Berkeley, University of California Press,pp. 326–344.
Metzger P. (2016), The Millennial Whoop: A Glorious Obsession with the Melodic Alternation Between the Fifth and the Third, «The Patterning», August 20, link.
Michaels S. (2016), Pop music these days: it all sounds the same, study reveals, «The Guardian», July 27, link.
Momigny J.-J. (1803–06), Cours complet d'harmonie et de composition d'après une théorie neuve et générale de la musique, Paris, the author.
Moreno J. (2004), Musical Representations, Subjects, Objects, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press.
Nobile D. (2016), Harmonic Function in Rock Music: A Syntactical Approach, «Journal of Music Theory», 60/2, pp. 149–180.
Ohriner M. (2016), Metric Ambiguity and Flow in Rap Music: A Corpus-Assisted Study of Outkast’s ‘Mainstream’, «Empirical Musicology Review», 11/2, pp. 153–179.
Pallett O. (2014a), Skin Tight Jeans and Syncopation: Explaining the Genius of Katy Perry’s ‘Teenage Dream’ - Using Music Theory, «Slate», March 25, link.
Pallett O. (2014b), Ecstatic Melodic Copulation: Explaining the Genius of Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’ - Using Music Theory, «Slate», March 28, link.
Pallett O. (2014c), Bad Romance, Great Tritone: Explaining the Genius of Lady Gaga - Using Music Theory, «Slate», March 31, link.
Ragusea A. (2015), All I Want for Christmas is Diminished Chords, «Slate», December 18, link.
Rameau J.-P. (1737), Génération harmonique, ou Traité de musique théorique et pratique, Paris, Chez Prault fils.
Rameau J.-P. (1750), Démonstration du principe de l’harmonie. Paris, Chez Durrand & Chez Pissot.
Robinson N. J. (2016), Keeping the Content Machine Whirring, «Current Affairs: A Magazine of Politics and Culture», February 24, link.
Saridou T., Spyridou L.-P., Veglis A. (2017), Churnalism on the Rise? Assessing Convergence Effects on Editorial Practices, «Digital Journalism», 8/5, pp. 1006–1024.
Scott B. (2005), A Contemporary History of Digital Journalism, «Television and New Media», 6/1, pp. 89–126.
Schoenberg A. (1983), Theory of Harmony, transl. by R. E. Carter, London, Faber and Faber (orig. ed. 1911).
Siapera E.–Veglis A. (2012), The Handbook of Global Online Journalism, Hoboken, Wiley-Blackwell.
Surowiecki J. (2004), The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter Than the Few, and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations, New York, Doubleday.
Tagg P. (2014), Everyday Tonality II: Towards a Tonal Theory of What Most People Hear, New York and Huddersfield (UK), The Mass Media Scholars Press.
Taleb N. N. (2007), The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, New York, Random House.
Tomlinson G. (1993a), Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Tomlinson G. (1993b), Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies: A Response to Lawrence Kramer, «Current Musicology», 53, pp. 18–40.
Weber G. (1817–21), Versuch einer georgneten Theorie der Tonsetzkunst, Mainz, B. Schott.
Young J. O. (2016), How Classical Music is Better Than Popular Music, «Philosophy», 91/4, pp. 523–540.
Zbikowski L. (2005) Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, Analysis, AMS Studies in Music, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press.
n.a. (2016), The Secret Chord That Makes Christmas Music Sound So Christmassy, «Vox», December 21, link.
n.a. (2017),The Secret Rhythm in Radiohead’s ‘Videotape’, Vox», August 4, link.

---

[1] John DiNardo [2006, 616–617] takes this critique even further, describing the book as a "hagiography" of Levitt.

[2] Other books cited by Donadio include Gladwell [2000], Gladwell [2005], Johnson [2005], and Surowiecki [2004]. Further examples of the genre published after Donadio’s essay include Lehrer [2007], Taleb [2007], and Levitt and Dubner [2009].

[3] It is instructive to compare this critique with Kevin Korsyn’s [2003] characterization of the "ideology of the abstract" in contemporary academia. Korsyn writes that academic work is reduced «to an ever-smaller nucleus, exemplified by the abstract as a textual genre. Musical research today involves the circulation of abstracts, by which knowledge is summarized, paraphrased, boiled down so that it can assume a portable form in the competition for cultural capital, becoming a kind of currency» [Korsyn 2003, 23–24].

[4] "Welcome to Quartz", https://qz.com/about/.

[5] While this headline appears atop the article itself, the html title tag (which appears at the top of the web browser, and in web searches) reads "The Theory of the ‘Millennial Whoop’ Might Be the Key to a Hit Pop Song".

[6] Social media statistics have been included only when available on the article itself; many websites do not post these statistics.

[7] All citations in this paragraph refer to articles listed in Table 1, above.

[8] On "churnalism", see Saridou et al.) [2017]. Most treatments trace the origin of the term, and its popular application, to Davies 2009.

[9] For the original Guardian piece, see Michaels [2012]; for the research study, see Serrà et al. [2012].

[10] See, inter alia, Christensen [1993a, 188–190] and Hyer [1996a, 93–97].

[11] See Foucault [2005, 22]: «The relationship of emulation enables things to imitate one another from one end of the universe to the other without connection or proximity … in this way it overcomes the place allotted to each thing. … [E]mulation is a sort of natural twinship existing in things». For more on the influence of Foucault’s Renaissance, Classical, and Modern epistemes as they relate to the history of music theory, see Moreno [2004].

[12] See Weber [1817-1821, 203], as well as significant commentary in Hyer [1996b, 94–97]; Lewin [2006, 53–67]; Huron [2006, 7–18]. ITPRA stands for the five chronologically ordered phases of Huron’s theory of expectation: Imagination, Tension, Prediction, Reaction, and Appraisal.

[13] On IV – I resolutions in pop music, see Tagg [2014, 366–370, 416–420, and 425–430]. From the perspective of harmonic function, Nobile [2016, 158–160] argues that classically "pre-dominant" chords such as IV and even ii, can often take on a dominant function in pop music (as in The Beatles’ Nowhere Man and Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here), while V chords often serve as pre-dominants.

[14] Aspects of the "rock dorian" type of Tagg’s [2014, 381 and 447–448] "non-classical tertial harmony" can be found in selections as diverse as the folk tune Scarborough Fair, the Kingston Trio’s Greenback Dollar, and Santana’s Oye como va.

[15] The diminished vi chord is show in brackets because Tagg [2014] focuses primarily on major and minor triads.

[16] On the use of depth by prominent theorists such as A.B. Marx, Heinrich Schenker, and Arnold Schoenberg, see Watkins [2011].

[17] See Christensen [1993, 11]. Rameau [1750] received an official endorsement, in the form of a statement from Académie member Jean le Rond d’Alembert, praising it for presenting music as "a more geometric science … to which the principles of mathematics can be applied", in contrast to previous accounts "guided by arbitrary laws or blind experience".

[18] See Rehding [2003, 15–35].

[19] See Babbitt [2003, 191–201]. The legacy of these appeals to science have often been the subject of critique: see Kerman [1980, 313–318]; Brown and Dempster [1989] and Maus [2004, 13–43].

[20] See Kerman [1980, 313–314].

[21] For an especially memorable formulation of this sentiment, see Agawu [1997, 299].

[22] See, inter alia, Kramer [1992]; Tomlinson [1993a, 20–43]; Tomlinson [1993b, 21–24]; Christensen [1993b]; and Currie [2009, 145–157].

[23] On the perception of suspensions and their relationship to the ITPRA model and musical enjoyment, see Huron [2006, 309–312].

[24] See Boethius [1989]. On the prevalence of these ideas throughout the history of music theory, see Cohen [1993] and Heller-Roazen [2011].

[25] Pallett, "Ecstatic Melodic Copulation", Slate. Comment by user "The Burning", July 9, 2014.

[26] Pallett, "Skintight Jeans and Syncopation", Slate. Comment by user "Dan Conley", April 2, 2014.

[27] Pallett, "Skintight Jeans". Comment by user Zardoz, April 1, 2014.

[28] The nerve that is touched by musicology’s explicit entries into politics is also evident in the reactionary comments that many entries in Musicology Now (the official, public-facing blog of the American Musicological Society) receive, urging scholars to "stick to the music": it seems that at least some in the general public cling to the notion that aesthetic autonomy is necessary in order to guarantee the supremacy of Classical music, as part of a unified project of conservative aesthetics and conservative politics.

[29] On this topic and its encoded gender dynamics, see Cusick [1994, 16–22].

[30] As McClary [1991, 79] writes: «in Western culture, music itself is always in danger of being regarded as the feminine Other that circumvents reason and arouses desire. Hence the ongoing academic struggle to control music objectively».

[31] Schoenberg continues by speculating that «imperfect instruments» or «some other circumstance which cannot be investigated here» might also be responsible for the failures of other musical cultures.

[32]On folk theories and folk psychology, see Cross [1998, 4–5].

Copyright (c) 2018 William O'Hara


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

---

 

Analitica - Rivista online di studi musicali

 

 

 

 

Se non diversamente indicato, i contenuti di questa rivista sono pubblicati sotto licenza Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.

ISSN: 2279-5065