Keynote 4. Epistemologies of Music Theory: Yesterday and Beyond

The capacious scope of our conference as envisioned in our call for papers may seem as audacious as it is futile. All the many anxious questions and paradoxes that have been proposed concerning the fraught epistemological basis of music analysis as practiced today can hardly be expected to be resolved over the three short days of our meeting. Of course, no one has suggested that such a resolution ...is — or possibly could be — the goal of this conference. On the contrary, I would suggest that the entire intellectual enterprise of music theory has historically contained within itself epistemological dilemmas and tensions, elements of its own self-negation to express this dialectically. In my keynote address, I would like to offer a rapid overview of selected historical moments of music theory on a global scale that illustrate this organic complexity. The many inter-related binaries that will be addressed by many of our speakers here — the universal and the particular; theory/practice; whole/part; ratio/sensus; emic/etic, etc. — may perhaps be seen from a global perspective to constitute less intractable barriers that need to be conquered than they are the very basis upon which musical knowledge may emerge.
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