Bach: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute invites submissions for a special issue in September 2027 dedicated to the theme of “Bach and the ‘New Theory’.” The phrase is Giorgio Sanguinetti’s (2014), used to describe the arrival of (re)new(ed) approaches to phrase-level schemata (Gjerdingen 2007) and their German equivalents Satzmodelle (e.g. Schwenkreis, 2018), alongside concurrent developments in Italian and Austrian partimento traditions. Then and now still “not unified” in any systematic way, the “multifaceted ‘new theory’ … has taken on [these] different names … [as] part[s] of the whole.” That whole is not a theoretical system but a common set of beliefs and methods also shared by several other developments in the theory and analysis of music from the long eighteenth century that have taken place over the last decade-and-a-half to two decades (Byros 2017): the renewal and extensions of Leonard Ratner’s topic theory (Mirka 2014), the new Formenlehre (Caplin 1998, 2013, 2024; Hepokoski and Darcy 2006, Hepokoski 2021; Burstein 2020), and, closely related to partimento, solfeggi (Baragwanath 2020). All five, schema theory, topic theory, the new Formenlehre, partimenti, and solfeggi, share the same microtheoretic impulse that explicitly underlies Robert Gjerdingen’s Music in the Galant Style: microtheories united by a common goal of reconstructing an emic and “historically informed” perspective (largely by way of corpus analysis and often complemented by historical writings) without succumbing to the grand-narrative tendencies of macrotheories, as exemplified by the one paradigm formerly dominant, Schenkerian analysis, which has been displaced by these new developments (Byros 2017).
Under the new theory’s light, the musical currency of the era, the “building blocks” of musical style equally available to Bach and his contemporaries alike, have been made tangibly known to present-day musicians and scholars and in ways arguably unprecedented in (post-)modern times. But the absence of a cohering principle in this “new theory” (apart from considerations of method) has left lasting questions for Bach’s music, which has long been valued and extolled both for its musical expression and its compositional logic—its exemplification of art as rational contemplation and a kind of musical science (Forkel 1802; Rochlitz 1807; Wolff 1991, 2001). If the internal, systemic unity of Schenker’s late theory was taken all too easily, and ultimately misguidedly, as a metaphor for musical unity, the new theory has also remained silent on these more urgent artistic matters—how, for example, the various parameters it studies were holistically combined in the hands of a Bach to form a musical work. And despite their methodological commonalities, any such considerations of the “work concept” (Goehr 1992) and its attendant questions of musical value and aesthetics will reveal important differences that nonetheless exist among the new theory’s constituents: whereas the new Formenlehre and topic theory have directed their attention to the later part of the eighteenth century still with a “great works” mindset of analysis and criticism, much of the work in schema theory, partimento, and solfeggio has outright questioned the work concept (Sanguinetti 2014; Gjerdingen 2007) when not laboring largely with the music of Kleinmeister, leading the late Bach scholar and organist Peter Williams (2013) to question whether in the cobbling of many such examples “any real musical initiative is evident.”
With this special issue, the BACH Journal seeks to open and define a space for understanding Bach’s relationship to these recent developments: how, on the one hand, the “new theory” can shed light on Bach’s music and creativity, but also how, from the other way round, in the very matters of art and aesthetics which took hold in the eighteenth century, Bach’s example may present unique challenges to these microtheories as they are currently formulated.
Prospective articles may address any aspect(s) of Bach’s music and creativity to one or more constituents of the new theory. Abstracts should be ca. 1000 words and can include 1-2 additional pages of supplementary materials such as examples and figures. These should be sent to bachjournal@bw.edu by 15 December 2025. Authors of accepted abstracts will be expected to complete their articles by February 2027. Completed articles should be 7000–12,000 words.