Doctoral Colloquium (Music): Justin London (Carleton College)

 

 

In his essay, “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame” Philip Ewell pointed out some of the problems of racial bias in music theory and analysis (MTO 26.2.4).  In this presentation some of the underlying causes of those problems will be described.  Music theory is a largely inductive practice, derived from a small, unrepresentative corpus of pieces from the “common practice period” of tonal music. We (mis)use this repertory due to a combination of implicit biases that stem from our enculturation as practicing musicians, explicit biases that stem from broadly held aesthetic beliefs regarding the status of “great” composers and particular “masterworks”, and confirmation biases that are manifest by our tendency to use only positive testing strategies and/or selective sampling when developing and demonstrating our theories. The theories of harmony and form developed from this small corpus further suffer fromoverfitting, whereby theoretical models are overdetermined relative to the broader norms of a musical practice.  All of which means that simply expanding our analytic and/or pedagogical canon will do little to displace the underlying aesthetic and cultural values that are bound up with the core repertory of the analytic canon, and that working toward greater equity, diversity, and inclusion in music theory goes hand in hand with addressing some of the problematic methodologies that have long plagued our discipline. Indeed, we cannot do the former without doing the latter.