Hello present-day readers. I wrote this at a time when NYU’s music theory requirements were very different from what they are today. In general, university-level music theory pedagogy in the US has become significantly less Eurocentric since I wrote this. For clarity: I love music theory. I don’t love presenting the conventions of Western European historical musics as a normative rule set.
I am mercifully finished with music theory in grad school and couldn’t be happier about it. You may find this surprising. My blog is full of music theory. How could a guy who enjoys thinking about music in analytical terms as much as I do have such a wretched time in my graduate music theory classes? It wasn’t the work, I mostly breezed through that. No, it was the grinding Eurocentrism. Common-practice period classical music theory is fine and good, but as presented in a typical theory core, it’s dry, tedious, and worst of all, largely useless to a musician like me. The strict rules of eighteenth-century European art music are distantly removed from the knowledge that I need to do anything in the present-day music world (except, I guess, to become a professor of common-practice tonal theory.)
The title of this post is a reference to the Susan Sontag essay, “Against Interpretation.” She argues that by ignoring the subjective sensual pleasures of art and instead looking for rigorously logical theories of its inner workings, academics are missing the point. She calls scholarly interpretation “the intellect’s revenge upon art.” I’m with her. Music theory as practiced at NYU and elsewhere is the intellectual’s revenge on music. Sontag’s punchline is right on: “[I]n place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” Speak it, sister!
