Illustration of the Arca Musurgica by Fr. Athanasius Kircher, circa 1650
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 theories over two millennia.
This project will support the production of an ambitious anthology of translated sources covering the global history of music theory. Curated by Thomas Christensen and three senior project editors and supported by an international team of over a dozen associate editors 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 two millennia and stretching around the globe. A second step in the project is to make these primary sources (and potentially many more) available in an online database—both in their original languages and in English translation. A flexible, interactive platform will allow scholars to study these texts and related resources in various research and pedagogical settings. The project is well underway. It has been supported by a seed grant from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Esthetics 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. The full editorial team will first workshop translations and decide on specific editorial policies, both for the anthology as well as the accompanying database. They will then reconvene to celebrate the launch of the publication and the database with a major conference.
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...
Associate Professor of Music
University of Michigan
Nathan Martin's primary research interests are in the history of music theory and the analysis of musical form. Martin has published widely on Jean-Philippe Rameau’s theory of harmony, on the new Formenlehre, on Mozart’s operas, and on the musical writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. During the...
Assistant Professor of Music
University of California, Berkeley
Lester Hu is an assistant professor of musicology at the University ofCalifornia, 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...
