Thomas Christensen
Research Project
Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory
Project Team:
2023 – 2026
Key Question
What insights can be gleaned by studying the full range of music theories from across the world?
Project Summary
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.
Research Team
Carmel Raz
Carmel Raz
Research Group Leader of Histories of Music, Mind and Body
Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics
Lester Hu
Project Narrative
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.
Thinking Music: Prospects for Global Histories of Music Theory
Conference
Thinking Music: Prospects for Global Histories of Music Theory
This conference explored how people from around the world understand music and use it to make sense of their lives.
Thinking Music Editorial Workshop
Workshop
Thinking Music Editorial Workshop
This workshop brought together a group of scholars for intensive collaborative editing on a volume about the global history of music theory.
New Sources in the History of Music Theory
Workshop
New Sources in the 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.
Paris Workshop
Paris Workshop
A workshop at the University of Chicago Center in Paris enabled the research team to advance editorial work on the volume.
Discussion with Gerhard Kubik
Discussion with Gerhard Kubik
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 ...
Frankfurt Workshop
Frankfurt Workshop
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.
Thinking Music: Prospects for Global Histories of Music Theory
Conference
Thinking Music: Prospects for Global Histories of Music Theory
This conference explored how people from around the world understand music and use it to make sense of their lives.
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.
Thinking Music Editorial Workshop
Workshop
Thinking Music Editorial Workshop
This workshop brought together a group of scholars for intensive collaborative editing on a volume about the global history of music theory.
New Sources in the History of Music Theory
Workshop
New Sources in the 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.
Paris Workshop
Paris Workshop
A workshop at the University of Chicago Center in Paris enabled the research team to advance editorial work on the volume.
Frankfurt Workshop
Frankfurt Workshop
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.
Discussion with Gerhard Kubik
Discussion with Gerhard Kubik
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 ...
Reading List
Christensen, Thomas S.
The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory Cambridge University Press, 2002 ReadChristensen, Thomas S.
Fragile Texts, Hidden Theory Musica Humana 3, no. 2 (2011): 177–207. ReadHu, Lester
Chinese Ears, Delicate or Dull? Toward a Decolonial Comparativism Journal of the American Musicological Society 74, no. 3 (2021): 501–69. ReadMartin, Nathan John
Toward a “Global” History of Music Theory Journal of Music Theory 66, no. 2 (2022): 147–87. ReadRaz, Carmel
How the Sheng became a Harp Sound Studies 6, no. 2 (2020): 239–56. ReadRaz, Carmel ; Cohen, David E.; Grant, Roger M.; Hicks, Andrew; Martin, Nathan J.; Mutch, Caleb; Wald-Fuhrmann, Melanie; Wörner, Felix; Zayaruznaya, Anna
Going Global, in Theory International Musicological Society Blog: Musicological Brainfood 3.1 (2019). ReadIrving, David R. M.
Rethinking Early Modern ‘Western Art Music’: A Global History Manifesto International Musicological Society Blog: Musicological Brainfood 3.1 (2019). ReadBlum, Stephen
Music Theory in Ethnomusicology Oxford University Press, 2023 ReadCurrie, Gabriela; Christensen, Lars
Eurasian Musical Journeys: Five Tales CambrIdge University Press, 2022 ReadExplore
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