Thinking Music: Prospects for Global Histories of Music Theory

This conference explores the ways people from across the world and throughout history have thought about music and have used such thinking to make sense of their worlds. What insights emerge, we ask, when music theory is no longer treated as an insular and elite discipline of scholarship, but as culturally embedded ways of knowing, feeling, and world-making in both discursive and embodied forms? What methodological challenges must we confront in order to reconceptualize abstract notions of “music” and “theory” in an expanded epistemic as well as cultural landscape?