Public Music Theory: An Introduction

Abstract

When the 2023 Society for Music Theory Program Committee met in New Orleans in November 2022 to decide the topic and format of the next year’s plenary session, we knew one thing above all: We wanted the participants to represent a broad swath of the Society.¹ We sought out people from diverse backgrounds and scholars from different ranks—junior scholars and senior scholars, as well as a graduate student. (Lydia Bangura, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, is the first graduate student to appear on an SMT plenary.) We were also determined to include someone doing music theory outside of academia, and were delighted when Cory Arnold, the creator of the popular YouTube series, 12tone, agreed to join the group. It was a joy to share the stage with Lydia and Cory, as well as with Alyssa Barna, J. Daniel Jenkins, and Harald Krebs, and to sit back and marvel at the wisdom and vision of their presentations.

This special issue of Music Theory Spectrum brings together an even wider array of perspectives on public music theory. The five plenary presentations are included here, in revised and expanded form, but so are eleven other essays that, together with the plenary talks, map the variegated landscape of this emerging subdiscipline.² Having read all of them, I am astonished at the many ways that people are doing public music theory today. They are making podcasts and YouTube videos. They are doing presentations for lay listeners, as Harald Krebs shows in his essay about the tools and techniques he has used to connect with community audiences.³ They are teaching music theory in non-academic settings, writing blog essays and “think pieces” for non-specialist publications, and even transcribing protest chants and sharing them with the general public, as Noriko Manabe describes in her essay in this volume.⁴ And this is to say nothing of historical examples of public music theory. Thanks to Miriam Piilonen, I now have a deep appreciation not just for the public music theory happening today but also for the public music theory from decades ago—and online public music theory, no less: As early as the 1970s, music theory “flashcards” were being coded for one of the first computer-assisted instruction systems called PLATO.⁵ Public music theory on the internet has been going strong for nearly sixty years!

More than the forms of public music theory represented in these essays, however, I am struck by the questions they raise—questions that extend far beyond the practice of public music theory and go to the heart of what it means to do music theory of any kind.

The first of those questions is: What does it mean to be a music theorist? A conventional answer might focus on those who have music theory credentials (PhDs in music theory) and work in academia (teaching at universities, presenting at conferences, publishing in music theory journals like the one you are reading now). Yet, as Thomas Christensen has noted, “hidden” music theory is often practiced by people without these credentials, in contexts far removed from the sphere of academic publishing—by choir directors teaching repertoire to a group of singers, for example, and by instrumentalists teaching private lessons.⁶ We should add high school AP music theory teachers to this list too, the very teachers that Michael Buchler urges professional music theorists to connect with so they understand “that ‘rules’ are not what we teach, and […] that while music theory can certainly draw upon formalisms and mathematics, it can also draw upon non-formal observation, empirical work, taxonomy, linguistics, literary criticism, ethnography. […] The list is endless.”⁷

If we think more broadly about how and where music theory can be practiced, the world is suddenly full of more music theorists than we ever imagined. Cory Arnold, for example, is indisputably a music theorist. Arnold doesn’t teach at a university, and doesn’t typically publish in academic journals; furthermore, as they note in their essay, the dynamic between a creator of YouTube videos and their audience is different from the dynamic between academic music theorists and their audiences.⁸ But music theory is indispensable to every 12tone episode. Oliveria Prescott, the British composer who published articles in popular Victorian periodicals, many of them geared toward women, was also a music theorist. Rachel Lumsden shows in her essay that Prescott did public music theory because she had no other option: As a woman, “she was not able to work inside the ‘safe haven’ of academia. […] Instead, she made music theory where she could—in the public sphere.”⁹ The term “music theorist” also applies to the “musicpreneurs” of Malia Jade Roberson’s essay, music educators who create short Instagram videos about songwriting, ear training, and other topics.¹⁰ The same could be said of Jacob Collier: William O’Hara writes about the “session breakdown” videos that Collier creates, using digital audio workstations (and the tools of music theory) to show how he constructs his pieces.¹¹

Even Stewie, from the animated series Family Guy, earns some music theory cred. J. Daniel Jenkins recounts a scene from the show where Stewie describes how to write a song, while singing and strumming a guitar, and implicitly references a number of music-theoretical concepts in the process, such as the idea that compositions are in a single key, that chord progressions are like journeys, and that major and minor chords can be marked with different emotional qualities.¹² (G major, Stewie sings, is “your cozy house where you live,” C major is when you “poke your head out your door,” A minor is when it’s “getting a little cloudy out here,” and a return to G is when “we go back to my house.”) Jenkins’s example of a cartoon music theorist may get a laugh, as it did during his plenary talk, but it makes a serious point: If you’re doing music theory, you’re a music theorist. End of story.

None of this, of course, means that we should abolish Master’s and PhD programs in music theory. We need specialized work that advances the field and communicates complex ideas to experts. We also need public music theory created by academic music theorists with a gift for distilling complex ideas into straightforward, user-friendly language. Alyssa Barna possesses this gift in spades, having written articles for outlets such as The Washington Post and Slate. In her essay, she makes a persuasive case that an engagement with public music theory underlines the importance of comprehensible prose, and that we should place more emphasis on cultivating clear writing styles in our graduate programs and our mentorship of junior faculty.¹³ We need the brave and honest work of Lydia Bangura, who uses her podcast to open a space for conversations about some of the most challenging issues facing our field, and who deliberately shows us her works-in-progress—even showing herself as a work-in-progress (as we all are, after all):

Oftentimes, in music-making, we are concerned with the exceptional. […] As music consumers, we only see the finished product––the final performance, the peer-reviewed article, the edited recording, and the completed dissertation. […] We do not always observe the process of getting to these exceptional musical moments. But through [Her Music Academia], I aim to unveil the process of music scholarship. […] These episodes are helpful for me as I consider my journey and progress, and my goal is to similarly prompt my audience to reflect on their own relationship to music and music theory.¹⁴

The takeaway from the essays in this issue isn’t that we should devalue the expertise gained from advanced study in music theory; it’s that we should recognize the different forms of expertise that appear in surprising places. Thinking more inclusively about what counts as music theory expertise allows us to expand the community of music theory, building bridges between academic and non-academic worlds, and developing new means of communication to connect with people who care deeply about music theory but inhabit spaces distant from national conferences and doctoral seminars.

This raises another question that guides many of the essays in this issue: How can public music theory help us to be more effective communicators? I already mentioned Alyssa Barna in this context, but she is hardly the only author to contemplate the new forms of music-theoretical expression enabled by public music theory. Benjamin Graf treats public music theory as a “way of understanding” and argues that to ensure that our work is understood we need to “be flexible and open to different terminology as well as various ways of describing events in music; do not let jargon and methodology be a barrier to understanding.”¹⁵ Daphne Tan also touches on the different modes of communication characteristic of public music theory. She muses upon the “attachments” that are so often expressed in music-analytical videos and podcasts—the joy and wonderment of discussing our favorite passages of music, the “oh, wow!” feeling we get when we hear something surprising or pleasing—but “often left unstated in academic analytical prose.”¹⁶ Not everyone will want to create free-flowing podcast episodes like the ones from Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding’s Switched on Pop, which are punctuated by what Tan calls “interjections of delight.”¹⁷ Still, engaging with certain forms of public music theory, she implies, might give us the impulse—and the permission—to express our own affective attachments more transparently, and more joyfully, in our analytical endeavors, no matter what kind of analyses we create.

Livestreaming has done that for Julianne Grasso. In her essay about the “Ludomusicology Thursday” livestreams that she does with three colleagues, where they play and talk about video games and their music, she highlights the sheer playfulness of the enterprise: “We joke around, we forget terminology, we’re sometimes wrong, we’re often exhausted, we revel in irrelevant details, and we fall easily down rabbit holes. We run to our nearest musical instrument to improvise over a track we’re analyzing.”¹⁸ While she initially felt she shouldn’t include this kind of work on her CV, she now celebrates its many benefits:

But we’ve increasingly embraced such a “low” mode of discourse as a useful approach that sparks further inquiry, if not different sorts of musical thinking entirely. […] I [now] consider even the most silly, lazy, or irrelevant stream broadcasts to constitute a “slow burn” of activating alternative modes of thinking that can fundamentally reshape our work as music theorists.¹⁹

This is not to say that public music theory is without potential shortcomings. Megan Lavengood documents the harassment that all too often appears in public online forums, which she has experienced firsthand, and which deters scholars from sharing their work in those forums at all. “Public music theory in online spaces will attract more harassment than traditional academic scholarship,” she writes. “Mild harassment is tolerable enough, but sustained and egregious harassment can scare off good public music theorists.”²⁰ To mitigate these dangers, she says, we need to “model ideal community behavior,” as well as craft and publicize codes of conduct that can remove abusive content and bad actors from these online spaces. We also need to ensure that public-facing scholarship is taken seriously as scholarship and valued in the promotion and tenure process. (The creation of two peer-reviewed publications in public music theory—SMT–V and SMT–Pod—as well as an SMT publication award for public-facing scholarship obviously bodes well, but there is still more work to do to ensure that the high-level publications in these journals, an in other public-facing outlets, are legible as bona fide scholarship to internal and external evaluators.) Clifton Boyd also draws our attention to the practices of public music theory that can result in harm or oppression—cases where public forms of music theorizing can reinforce racial or social inequities, mischaracterize and marginalize repertoires, and be fueled by political motivations. He cites Kofi Agawu’s claims about the colonizers who sought to “keep Africans trapped in a prisonhouse of diatonic tonality,” as well as Roger Grant’s writing on the Jesuit missionaries who taught galant style to the Chiquitano Indigenous people in modern-day Bolivia in part to further colonial aims.²¹ He also references his own work on barbershop music, which reveals the distorted, historically inaccurate, and sometimes downright racist views about the incompatibility of barbershop music with Black musicmaking that are spread in oral conversations and written correspondence. The result is a private form of theorizing that doesn’t benefit the public but instead does real harm to it.²²

The lesson to be learned from this issue, therefore, is not that public theory is a panacea, a magic wand we can wave to cure all of music theory’s ills and ensure that our work speaks to the masses.²³ Nor is it that we should all be doing public-facing scholarship. Rather, the lesson is that we should take seriously the questions that public theory raises and, in our own authentic ways, think carefully about how those questions might enrich the kind of work that we do, no matter its medium, its purpose, its subject matter, or its intended audience.

For my part, these authors have above all encouraged me to interrogate some of the binaries that have shaped my understanding of the field that I love and the work that I do. If one theme emerges most prominently in these essays, it is a call to use public music theory to break down the division between “insiders” and “outsiders.” Here is but a sampling of passages that make this case:

For a truly engaged public music theory it’s not enough, I think, to just translate our research into a more easily consumable chunk of knowledge (after all, what really is easy?). Nor is it enough to do what seems like the opposite: to sit down with a “non-theorist” and affirm the validity of their reactions to and interpretations of music. Both activities reify the “ivory tower” by maintaining the role of “professor” as one who wields structural and epistemological power over others. […] A more transformative approach, one with more radical and political potential, is a music theory that is inherently, irrevocably “public” in that knowledge is created and questioned together (Julianne Grasso).²⁴

Public music theory—and its associated liminal spaces—thus presents an opportunity to question the very foundations of our discipline, and to break down traditional binary divisions between public/private, uneducated/educated, amateur/professional (Rachel Lumsden).²⁵

A false dichotomy between music theory insiders (those at universities) and outsiders (everyone else) risks a blurring of lines between the discipline of music theory as an idea, and the actual doing of music theory (Miriam Piilonen).²⁶

Regardless of what we each individually decide is the best path forward [for public music theory], I would encourage all of us to carry the critical lens that has been so valorized in the field since our 2020 (or 2019) moment into our engagement with and practice of public music theory, always with an eye toward building a more equitable and just community together—with the public (Clifton Boyd).²⁷

Reading these words reminds me that what I have found most invigorating about doing public music theory is not just creating something for “outside” audiences in a one-way exchange—releasing an episode of Resounding Verse, my podcast about poetry and song,²⁸ or publishing a webpage about a composer on Art Song Augmented, my web forum devoted to marginalized song composers.²⁹ It’s fostering conversations with those audiences, and discovering that they have as much to teach me as I have to teach them. “They” are my students—I often do podcast episodes about songs I have used in my classes, and incorporate students’ ideas into the episodes. “They” are performers—more and more, I have teamed up with singers and pianists to commission recordings of hitherto unrecorded works for Art Song Augmented, joining forces to spotlight underexplored repertoire in our own unique ways. “They” are even my friends and family who have often wondered what exactly I do for a job but now tell me (freely, movingly, sometimes even music-theoretically) what they love about the music I’m exploring—my mother, for example, is not a trained music theorist, but since I launched my podcast we have had more conversations about music than ever before, and her comments often make me go back to a song and hear something I had never noticed or inspire an idea for a new episode.

These are very small steps. But taking them, and contemplating the even more imaginative examples of community-building represented in the pages of this special issue, has broadened my view of what public music theory—and music theory—can be.

Works Cited

Footnotes