1858 saw the premiere of Les Trois Nicolas, a little-known opéra-comique by the composer and instrument collector Louis Clapisson. The plot of the opera is a highly fictionalized episode from the life of the eighteenth-century composer Nicolas Dalayrac. To this end, Clapisson’s score included several scenes of what we might call “historically informed performance”: in Act II, the singer Trial gives a singing lesson at the harpsichord; in the ballet that opens Act III, a dancing master plays a gavotte upon a pochette (a small fiddle) for the dancers. These two rather remarkable uses of historic instruments went unremarked upon in the early reviews. Three years later, Clapisson sold his substantial instrument collection to the state, which became the foundation of the Paris Conservatoire’s instrument museum. With the opening of the museum in 1864, the pochette that was used in Les Trois Nicolas—a rare Stradivarius pochette—became inextricably linked to the opera. I contend that the instrument was not heard as a “historical” instrument in Les Trois Nicolas; its use, however, was soon retroactively understood as a historical revival. In other words, the timbre of the pochette may have been striking, but it didn’t necessarily sound old; oldness had to be made. This minor opera and its tiny instrument ultimately make visible the formation of a modern notion of technological temporality in music.

As many scholars have noted, music theory is constantly mediated through technologies and objects. Musical activities and experiences resist the stability required of a measurable, analyzable object—an ephemeral social act that fades with its sound waves and lives on only in human memory. Music theory has therefore always worked through proxies: the objects and technologies that make music possible, that remain after the music dissipates, and that trace the human presence within music-making. Greek nomenclature, Guido’s staff, Franconian durations, music boxes, player pianos, vinyl records, digital spectrograms, statistical corpora, generative computer programs, and even written descriptions of musical experiences. Each of these has given us something durable to examine, and have provided the foundation of our field.

But of course, as many scholars have noted, music theory’s true focus is the visceral, hedonistic experience of music. We read one another’s scholarship, revisit historical treatises, and connect with our students because this work deepens the life of musical objects. Because a chart, a spectrogram, or a graph can show us how to listen more deeply, feel more fully, and open a musical experience to a wider audience. Plus, we are attuned to compare these musical objects with the musical experiences they reference, and to criticize and identify these technologies’ limits and failings. Through a series of case studies—medieval neumes, a player-piano roll, and a computational model of music cognition—my talk will trace the tension between the observable object and felt experience within our field’s analytical capacities.

Generative AI systems are, I will argue, music theory’s newest analytical objects. In one sense they are simply the latest entries in this long lineage. Like notation and recording before them, they are relics of how humans make and understand music. But AI lodges into an object something earlier technologies only gestured at and never achieved: musical creation itself. I will trace the lineage of music theory’s exposure to this idea through dice games, statistical analysis systems, and simple generative programs. My talk suggests that our next frontier is critically and skeptically applying music theory’s oldest skill to this newest technology: analyzing musical AI systems as relics of the human thought and creativity of which they are the automated evidence.

This presentation approaches the question of technology’s effects on musical creation and experience from an oblique angle. Its focus is not solely on the impact of specifically musical tools or instruments, but on technology broadly construed. While the latter can be defined in many ways, under capitalism one of the most important is as a labor-saving device. The imperative that tools and machinery should serve to increase productivity, doing more with a constant or diminishing expenditure of labor, has shaped music in far-reaching if often indirect ways. Drawing on the economist William Baumol’s theory of the cost disease, initially formulated with reference to the performing arts, I first consider how the labor-intensive character of much musicking has positioned it as profoundly uneconomical relative to other, more productive sectors – though by the same token this casts music as a potential site of resistance to capitalist drive to maximize efficiency. At the same time, music is not entirely immune to the systemic demand to increase productivity. The second part of the presentation thus turns to intensified pressures being placed on musicians to accelerate production workflows and the technologies that promise to aid in this task, most notably generative AI. Yet whatever effect AI tools may have in quickening the tempo of music production, the expenditure of time necessary for its consumption remains a stubborn constant. What this points to is a dialectical relation, one that connects in complex and often contradictory ways the organization of time within musical experience – from the smallest rhythmic detail to large-scale formal processes – to the temporalities of capitalist production and circulation.