Doctoral Colloquium (Music) | Tobias Tschiedl
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Doctoral Colloquium: Tobias Tschiedl
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Music theory's multifarious formalisms (e.g. Babbitt 1960, Forte 1973, Lewin 1987, Tymoczko 2011) have sparked frequent critiques and reflections on the disciplinary outlook of music theory (Kerman 1980, McCreless 1997, Korsyn 2003). More recently, scholars have introduced increasing nuance through examinations of the historical backgrounds of such thinking, drawing on information theory, computer science and analytical philosophy (Kane 2011, Girard 2007, Schuijer 2008, Gleason 2013, Bernstein 2021). Bell (2019) crucially singles out the "computational attitude" in music theory, underpinned by an (implicit) "computational theory of mind" (Rescorla 2020; Fodor 1975).
However, given the scant explicit declarations of such an attitude among music theorists, it may be more accurate to speak of a computational paradigm (Kuhn 1970), established well beyond the disciplinary confines of music theory and thus not requiring immediate justification. I claim that this computational paradigm underpins formalist post-tonal music theory since around 1960, and lies at the heart of its characteristic difficulties with temporality and embodiment.
For demonstration, I turn to a case study of contour theory (focusing in particular on the contributions of Morris, Marvin and Quinn) to show how the chosen kinds of representation influence the theorizing of time and motion. In my reading, the computational theory of mind nudges these scholars toward an elision of temporality from analysis: First, in the conception of melody as an atemporal shape rather than a motion in time, evidenced in Morris's (1987) definition of contour in terms of a c[ontour]-space; second, in the assumption that abstract relations between symbolic representations are simply coextensive with the objects of perception: In Marvin's (1987) words, that one can "perceive [rather than merely think] equivalences."
This allowed formal machinery ultimately derived from twelve-tone theory to function as a model of music perception; simultaneously, it resulted in limiting the role of perception to pure contemplation and recognition of discrete score-objects, well suited to a conservatory culture focussed on remembrance rather than discovery, but ill equipped to address challenges from embodied and ecological psychologies, or to account for the role of time in music perception.
Tobias Tschiedl is a Ph.D. candidate in Music Theory at McGill. He has previously studied musicology and music theory in Vienna. His research focuses on musics of the 20th/21st century, both “popular” and “avant-garde”; epistemologies of music theory; computer-assisted music analysis; and musical temporality, embodiment, and motion.
His dissertation engages with the commonly held intuition that music has something to do with (physical) motion over time: It critiques available music-analytical tools as only inadequately accounting for that intuition, and in response attempts to devise new tools that explicitly borrow from physical models.