About

Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory seeks to capture the range and variety of human music theorizing with two fundamental interventions. First, it aims to expand the range of available sources over time and place by moving beyond the canon of European theoretical treatises on which the history of music theory, as practiced in the Anglophone academy at least, has traditionally focused. Thinking Music will therefore include a greater number of music-theoretical texts and inscriptions drawn from musical cultures around the world from antiquity to ca. 1914. Excerpts from these sources will be presented in English translation (many for the first time) along with scholarly annotations, commentary, and relevant bibliography. Second, we seek to move beyond textual sources as the sole repository of music-theoretical knowledge by considering more ephemeral sources, material artifacts, and non-discursive evidence. Rather than imposing a fixed definition of music theory in advance, we instead wish to encourage a broader conception of what it means to “theorize” in music. In the ca. 300 diverse entries in our volume, we seek to show the manifold ways in which the notion of “music theory” might serve as a productive and creative heuristic for musicians and scholars alike. In other words, we hope to expand the field’s purview so as to recognize and appreciate music-theorizing wherever and however it has occurred, to look for new sources of music theory and theorizing, and to learn to listen in other ways.

Curated by Thomas Christensen (Avalon Foundation Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago), Lester Zhuqing Hu (Assistant Professor of Music, the University of California, Berkeley) and Carmel Raz (Assistant Professor of Music, Cornell University and Research Group Leader, the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics), and supported by an international team of a dozen associate editors and more than 150 contributors specializing in different languages and cultures, the anthology will be the first-ever attempt to compile an annotated reader illustrating the rich diversity of musical theories over seven millennia and reaching around the globe. We intend to publish the reader as an online book, allowing us to make these primary sources available in a searchable open-access database featuring audio, video, and side-by-side original language and English translation.  

The project has been generously supported by the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago. We plan to launch the first edition of the book in 2025. It will be published by the University of Chicago's Online Publication Service.