In 1966, the African American pianist Cecil Taylor responded to comments by John Cage and other white composers on jazz: “Right away, when they talk about music, they talk in terms of what music is to them. They never subject themselves to, like, what are Louis Armstrong’s criteria for beauty…Because they simply don’t recognize the criteria” (Spellman 1966). This talk takes Taylor’s concept of “criteria” as a framework for reframing formalism in light of recent global and antiracist music theory.

Over the past decade, music theorists have turned to parameters as an organizing principle to accommodate the field’s expanding plurality of methods and repertoires (Rings and Rehding 2020). Parameter-based approaches to meter, timbre, and texture have also been used to decenter Western art music by facilitating cross-cultural comparison. While I strongly support these efforts, Taylor’s critique reminds us that musical terms and parameters are not neutral; they can function as sites of colonial and racial imposition. Contemporary parameter thinking is conceptually indebted in part to Cage and other avant-garde composers who sought distance from the European canon and from humanistic concerns (Piekut 2013; Kahn 1999). Parameters alone, I argue, have limited utility for antiracist scholarship.

By contrast, Taylor’s “criteria for beauty” enables a formalist interrogation of the intersection between musical systems and musical individuals. It is precisely at this intersection that power intercedes in the act of music-making. Taylor’s formulation expands “the music itself” beyond style and technique to include life histories, listening practices, aesthetic commitments, and ethical philosophies. More broadly, his emphasis on criteria resonates with African American jazz traditions of individual expression through improvisation—practices shaped in response to Jim Crow–era policing of Black artists’ musical and personal freedoms (Veal 2024). Rather than abandoning parameters, Taylor’s concept shows how individual expression and collective listening practices generate shared musical parameters from within specific communities. Where formalism is often defined by generalizable principles internal to stylistic competence (Lee, Ewell, and Hatten 2023), this talk proposes decoupling formalism from system-building alone and developing formalisms attentive to how individual agency reshapes musical systems and their attendant power differentials.

This paper explores how racial segregation in U.S. barbershop quartet singing was facilitated and legitimized through the formalization and institutionalization of the musical style in the mid-twentieth century. During the “golden age” of barbershop (c. 1890–1920), both white and Black quartets practiced the four-part, a cappella close-harmony tradition. Notably, James Weldon Johnson observed in 1929 that one could “pick up four colored boys or young men anywhere” and likely find a quartet. However, following the 1938 founding of the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America (SPEBSQSA)—originally an all-male, all-white fraternal organization—the discourse shifted. A growing consensus suggested that barbershop was exclusively the domain of white Americans and that Black Americans were incapable of singing “proper” barbershop harmony. This segregationist logic was bolstered by music-theoretical practices within the white barbershop community.

Building on previous scholarship on race and barbershop music, I begin with an overview of vernacular theorizations by Black intellectuals such as Johnson, Alain Locke, and R. Nathaniel Dett. These frameworks offer insight into the distinctive barbershop sound before it was codified through a segregationist lens. I then narrate key events following SPEBSQSA’s founding that demarcated the boundaries of the style along racial lines. For instance, the exclusion of the African American quartet Grand Central Red Caps from a SPEBSQSA contest was justified by the claim that Black singers were only capable of singing Negro spirituals. By the late 1940s, official style treatises encouraged dominant-seventh (“barbershop seventh”) chords and circle-of-fifths motion while discouraging “modern” harmony associated with Black-coded genres. By 1957, the slogan “keep it barbershop” reflected an ideology of musical purity. Archival documents reveal white officials’ beliefs that barbershop harmony was “not instinctive or natural” to Black Americans. Drawing on arranging manuals and literature on Jim Crow America, I demonstrate how whitewashing the music theory of barbershop allowed the Society to assert the practice as exclusively white. Broadly, this paper illustrates how formal musical systems function as tools of power and exclusion, deepening our understanding of how the “possessive investment in whiteness” (Lipsitz 1998) shapes American music historiography.

This presentation builds on music theory’s recent antiracist efforts by examining how music theoretical categories and observations appear in historical documents of Atlantic colonialism and transatlantic slavery. In such materials, formal and technical discussions of music sometimes take place, showing up in ways that trouble formalism’s presumed boundary between musical structures and the worldly conditions amid which such structures are performed and apprehended.

As a case study, I examine French botanist Jean-Baptiste Thibault de Chanvalon’s account of enslaved Africans’ music-making in his 1763 travelogue,Voyage a la Martinique. Unlike many early modern European travelers, whose comments on non-European musical practices were often fleeting and scanty on details, Chanvalon listened closely—even analytically—to what he heard on his family’s Martinican plantations, describing his sonic recollections in structural terms. Recounting songs from a wedding for two enslaved people, he documented features legible within present-day analytical categories: text setting and syllabification (“they lengthen or shorten the words…to apply them to the tune”), short cyclical forms (“five or six measures are the whole span of the song”), antiphonal repetition (“three or four words… are repeated alternately by those present and by the one who sings”) and consistent duple meter (“Their airs are almost always in two beats”).

Crucially, Chanvalon understood the textual, cyclical, antiphonal, metrical features he heard during the wedding as phenomena that could be incorporated into plantation sugar production. He extrapolated that the “continual repetition of the same tones” could “occupy them, and make them work or dance for entire hours.” In the same passage, he claimed that enslaved people performed nearly all strenuous labor to song, “in cadence,” such that the music’s “measure [i.e. meter] becomes a governing force.”

By reading Chanvalon’s descriptions of plantation soundscapes as vernacular musical theorization, I argue that formal listening practices were embedded in—and helped rationalize—the subjugating logics of plantation capitalism. His structural descriptions of enslaved peoples’ music did not merely document sonic structures; they participated in naturalizing racialized regimes of unfree labor. Recognizing such records as part of a broad history of music theory reveals how formalism and material/ideological power co-produce each other.

Theorists of musical form (historical and contemporary) often use empirical methods to make sense of individual works. Even when they are historically situated and explicit about their core repertoire—that is, when they endeavor to recouple form and context—contemporary theories of form tend toward a discourse of demonstration (e.g., Hepokoski and Darcy 2006, Caplin 2008, Arndt 2018, Greenberg 2022). In my panel talk, I term these discursive habits formalisms of knowing because the principal mode of inquiry involves technical musical analysis against a background of theoretical conventions, and because the discursive style is monologic: a demonstration of what the theorist can know or show to be known. Representations of musical form are acts of knowledge production, but the knowledge they can (and cannot) produce tells us something about the habits of our discipline. If our theoretical principles and analytical demonstrations find their roots in exclusion, their influence promotes exclusion: not only of repertoires, but of particular kinds of knowledge. Adapting the scholarship of Helen Ngo (2017), Simone Brown (2015), and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2003), I describe the discursive and structural habits of theories of musical form. I situate these habits of knowledge-making within what Marcia Citron ([1993] 2000) terms a “disciplinary canon” in order to propose reimagined habits of formalism that might contribute to counter-canonic modes of constructing meaning. I contemplate antitheses to each component of formalisms of knowing: namely, informalisms of knowing and formalisms of not-knowing.

What opportunities and even imperatives might our discipline’s most canonical repertoires afford for reimagining formalism? Accepting the paradoxical (Daughtry 2013) and ambiguous moral implications (Lee 2025) of musical objects, this talk explores one way in which canonical repertoires can be applied towards the formation of a more inclusive and critical field. Such repertoires, I argue, are uniquely positioned to illuminate how power is recursively embedded within music theory’s ontologies—how our syntactic categories are aesthetically empowered.

I take as an example the Allemande of the C minor French Suite by J.S. Bach and focus on a single sonic feature that holds intense aesthetic sway: the poignant 9-8 suspensions that form periodically between the upper and lower voices. Instead of taking for granted the aesthetic and syntactic persuasiveness of this contrapuntal pattern, I attempt a critical formalism that attends to the “ConteXTs” (Lewin 1986) that enable these suspensions to be heard as coherent, meaningful, expressive in the first place. These contexts include technologies from counterpoint and tonal theory such as “dissonance,” “syncopation,” “consonance,” and “resolution”—what would in Lewin’s formal model be tagged as types of “theoretical context.” But we could also easily push beyond the bounds of Lewin’s phenomenological model to include constructions that are less comfortably technical and more ideological or even religious in tenor, such as “imperfect,” “perfect,” “offensive,” “pleasing,” “beauty” (Mann 1971). All of these discursive frames form part of an intellectual infrastructure without which the structure of a Bachian suspension could not exist nor be perceived as aesthetically and syntactically empowered as such. Canonical repertoires, given their pervasiveness and recognizability not only as sound but as expressions of culturally sanctioned ideas and ideals, are poised to support a stretched sense of formalism that is rigorously attuned to musical structure even as it chases after a more capacious understanding of what structure is and how it comes to be.

This talk examines the way precolonial African musics—ranging from pre-colonial matepe music from the Korekore region in northern Zimbabwe and amadinda music from the Kampala region in southern Uganda from the era before the destruction of the Lubiri Court—pose a challenge to, if not conceptually invert, the Newtonian-inflected European relation of rhythm and meter. Newton’s theory of time—grounded in force and geometry—proffered an abstract measure for locating and coordinating events. Matrices for framing musical time were theorized along similar lines; and, along with pitch templates, instruments, devices, etc.—were standardized and scaled. Key technological artefacts for keeping time in music emerged throughout this period—Winkel’s musical chronometer of 1814, Maelzel’s newly-patented metronome of 1816. Likewise, music’s metric division was re-theorized as a kind of undifferentiated flow of absolute time [“Zeit”], intercalated by an isochronous circular time that was subdivided by accen­tuations grouped in two, three, and four beats [“Tackte”] (Kirnberger).

In contrast to the Euro-industrial conception of it, consolidated in the modern Enlightenment era, “melo-rhythmic” (Nzewi, Omojola) entities in Bugandan amadinda and embaire music, as well as matepe and mbira of Zimbabwe, often remain stable, while metric schemes are meticulously rotated. In these precolonial musical forms, furthermore meter itself is mostly crafted as an algorithmic transformation of a rhythmic interaction. This paper describes the systems that undergird their performance practices, demonstrating, 1. how interlocking polyrhythmic parts elicit beat entrainment patterns set adrift of the embodied movements of performers; and 2. how procedures for pitch transposition rotate distinct metric schemes, effectively recouping a kind of melo-rhythmic identity under various transformations. Instead of relativizing Euro-industrial practices of meter (and its attendant rhythm-concept) the talk hopes to Africanize those metric practices that go as universal; and thereby to decenter Eurogenetic legacies of musical time.