Nathan Martin
University of Michigan
Lester Hu
University of California, Berkeley
Organized by the AMS History of Music Theory Study Group
The proposed session will introduce the Expanded Anthology of Sources in the History of Music Theory, a project that aims to capture the range and variety of human music theorizing by offering excerpts (with commentary) of more than two hundred documents selected from across the world’s musical traditions. Curated by a team of over thirty scholars, the volume will present a multitude of perspectives on the discipline of music theory, its concepts, and its practice. The documents range from organological images to pedagogical heuristics and ethnographic accounts, with selections from major music-theoretical treatises given alongside close readings of cultural artefacts and ethnographies. The session will begin with a discussion exploring the methodological challenges our editorial team faces in compiling a sample of music theoretical artefacts that does not take literary texts as its baseline (30 minutes) followed by a presentation of sample entries from the anthology (60 minutes).