Music Theory and Its Histories

Abstract

"Historicizing" music theory conflicts in a fundamental sense with the ontological claims of theory to historical transcendence. This chapter examines the putative dilemma be-tween "historical" and "theoretical" readings of music theories and analyze its conceptual and empirical ramifications in practice. It presents the basic polarity Carl Dahlhaus sets up between theoretical and historical ontologies, but recast his arguments in terms that better address issues in American musicology. The chapter considers ways in which the apparent incompatibility between presentist and historicist inter-pretations of music theory can be mediated. Since music theory has long turned to science for heuristic models, it is not surprising that the first real histories of music theory from the nineteenth century reflected the Whiggish biases of contemporaneous histories of science. Invoking Heidegger's famous hermeneutic circle, Hans-Georg Gadamer shows how historical understanding is gained in a dialectical process.

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