What insights can be gleaned by studying the full range of music theories from across the world and throughout history?
This project will produce and digitize an ambitious anthology of translated sources covering the global history of music theory – the first-ever attempt to compile an annotated reader illustrating the rich diversity of the world’s musical thought over more than seven millennia.
This project seeks to capture the range and variety of human music theorizing with two fundamental interventions. First, it aims to expand the range of available sources over time and place by moving beyond the canon of European theoretical treatises on which the history of music theory, as practiced in the Anglophone academy at least, has traditionally focused. Thinking Music will therefore include a greater number of music-theoretical texts and inscriptions drawn from musical cultures around the world from antiquity to 1914. Excerpts from these sources will be presented in English translation (many for the first time) along with scholarly annotations, commentary, and relevant bibliography.
Second, we seek to move beyond textual sources as the sole repository of music-theoretical knowledge by considering more ephemeral sources, material artifacts, and non-discursive evidence. Rather than imposing a fixed definition of music theory in advance, we instead wish to encourage a broader conception of what it means to “theorize” in music. In the ca. 250 diverse entries in our volume, we seek to show the manifold ways in which the notion of “music theory” might serve as a productive and creative heuristic for musicians and scholars alike. In other words, we hope to expand the field’s purview so as to recognize and appreciate music-theorizing wherever and however it has occurred, to look for new sources of music theory and theorizing, and to learn to listen in other ways.
Curated by Thomas Christensen (Avalon Foundation Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago) and two senior project editors and supported by an international team of over a dozen associate editors and more than 100 contributors specializing in different languages and cultures, the anthology will be the first-ever attempt to compile an annotated reader illustrating the rich diversity of musical theories over seven millennia and reaching around the globe. A second step in the project is to make these primary sources (and potentially many more) available in a searchable online database—both in their original languages and in English translation.
The project has been supported by a seed grant from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany, allowing the research team to define the scope and organization of the reader and to assemble a team of associate editors. With support from the Neubauer Collegium, the team will bring this vision to reality, with a major international conference in Chicago planned for the spring of 2025 to celebrate the launch of the publication and the database.
Avalon Foundation Professor of Music and the Humanities
University of Chicago
Thomas Christensen is a specialist in the history of music theory. He is the author or editor of over sixty publications, including Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1993), The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (2002), and most...
Research Group Leader of Histories of Music, Mind and Body
Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics
Carmel Raz leads the research group “Histories of Music, Mind, and Body” at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany. Before coming to Frankfurt she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Columbia University Society of Fellows. She holds a PhD in music theory...
Assistant Professor of Music
University of California, Berkeley
Lester Hu is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of California, Berkeley. He has held the Luce/ACLS Early Career Fellowship in China Studies, the Townsend Fellowship, the CLIR/Mellon Fellowship, and the Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship. His articles have appeared in the...
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
This workshop brought together a group of scholars for intensive collaborative editing on a volume about the global history of music theory.
This event helped editors and contributors to a forthcoming volume on the global history of music theory workshop drafts and identify next steps.
A workshop at the University of Chicago Center in Paris enabled the research team to advance editorial work on the volume.
In December 2023 research team leaders Thomas Christensen and Carmel Raz visited African music scholar Gerhard Kubik in Vienna along with Moya Malamusi, a Malawian cultural anthropologist and...
The project's first workshop brought the founding editors and contributors to the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
This workshop brought together a group of scholars for intensive collaborative editing on a volume about the global history of music theory.
This event helped editors and contributors to a forthcoming volume on the global history of music theory workshop drafts and identify next steps.
A workshop at the University of Chicago Center in Paris enabled the research team to advance editorial work on the volume.
The project's first workshop brought the founding editors and contributors to the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
In December 2023 research team leaders Thomas Christensen and Carmel Raz visited African music scholar Gerhard Kubik in Vienna along with Moya Malamusi, a Malawian cultural anthropologist and...
