Music Theory Blog
One of the main ways that Western society makes sense of its world is through discourse. From the ancient Greek dialectics to modern academic journals, the proposal of an idea and subsequent critical examination of that idea's merits and drawbacks has been the basic model of discovering deeper truths and enriching and bettering our experience as humans. I do not claim by any means to be changing the world in any significant way with this blog, but I do see my posts here as participating in the long tradition of critical discussion in the field of humanities. My main aim is to take a listener-centered approach to studying music in order to, quite simply, point out interesting ways that music is structured and offer enriched modes of listening and understanding the repertoire I discuss. In other words, music theory as it appears on this site is music appreciation on steroids. There are three primary brands of blog posts that I will share here:
My main scholarly interest at this point is in the ways that flow and sampling can become indicators of style in hip-hop from ca. 1988–present day. That being said, I'll post essays on all sorts of stuff here because, frankly, I love almost listening to, thinking's about, and writing about all types of music. Finally, a brief note about the nature of this music theory blog: while I do claim that my writing style here is mostly academic and "rigorous," I do not necessarily consider anything I post to be peer-reviewed journal material. The main reason for this is that I do not exhaustively cite scholarly literature in most of my posts. To be sure, I do engage with music-theoretical literature, but I also sometimes say things like "Beethoven's style of motivic repetition and variation influenced Schubert" without citing a source that supports or proves such a claim.
- Analysis-I've been trained over the past several years during college and my graduate work to date to closely study music (thanks to a number of brilliant and passionate teachers). What do I mean by music? Well, sometimes it means "sounds," sometimes it means "scores," and sometimes it means some made up cognitive construct that melds the two. The blog posts on this website will mainly be analytical studies of "music" in these various senses of the word; I get great joy out of closely studying music and sharing my observations about a particular piece or collection of pieces via harmonic, rhythmic, metric, melodic, formal, structural, textural, and hermeneutic analysis.
- Speculation-I am no historical musicologist, but from time to time I like to consider what a composer might have been thinking or how historical/biographical circumstances factor into their music and vice versa. I consider this aspect of my writing speculation. I will hardly ever devote an entire essay to speculation but it certainly pops its head up throughout my writing
- Opinions-Of all the academic fields that make up Western colleges and universities, music theory is perhaps one of the guiltiest for being detached from communities and the public. In order to push back on this "Ivory Tower Syndrome," I take the stance that music does not happen in a vacuum and that it is important to think about and discuss the relationships between music and its social, political, and economic surroundings. Sure, a Schenkerian analysis of a Beethoven symphony for its own sake is nice, but doesn't the world have enough of those? And wouldn't a discussion of the economic and racial implications of Billboard's treatment of "Old Town Road" be just as–if not more–worthwhile in today's day and age? Thus, I do, from time to time, express opinions that go beyond subjective musical taste in my writing on this site.
My main scholarly interest at this point is in the ways that flow and sampling can become indicators of style in hip-hop from ca. 1988–present day. That being said, I'll post essays on all sorts of stuff here because, frankly, I love almost listening to, thinking's about, and writing about all types of music. Finally, a brief note about the nature of this music theory blog: while I do claim that my writing style here is mostly academic and "rigorous," I do not necessarily consider anything I post to be peer-reviewed journal material. The main reason for this is that I do not exhaustively cite scholarly literature in most of my posts. To be sure, I do engage with music-theoretical literature, but I also sometimes say things like "Beethoven's style of motivic repetition and variation influenced Schubert" without citing a source that supports or proves such a claim.