Joint Meeting of the History of Theory and Disability Studies Groups of the American Musicological Society, Chicago, IL, 15 November 2024.
To expand the limits of the global history of theory, Daniel Chua and Alexander Rehding (2021) have drawn from speculative physics to suggest that the universe is fundamentally musical and therefore susceptible to an “intergalactic music theory of everything.” However, belief in music’s exceptional relationship with the “natural order” is not new (Rehding and Clarke 2001). It extends from Pythagoras’s resonance of the spheres, through Rameau’s treatise on harmony, and George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept—theories that have been respectively dismissed as scientifically dubious (Heller-Roazen 2011), racially problematic (Martin 2022), and neo-Romantic (Monson 1998). Such appeals have most recently been identified as a “barrier” to anti-racism for how they limit access to musical meaning by wielding “logical necessity” as a false aesthetic standard (Yust 2024). This short talk tries charitably to imagine how IGMTE’s quest “to boldly go where no [theorist] has gone before” can make theory more inclusive.