Keynote: "What’s left of music theory?"

Vijay Iyer
Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts
Department of Music
Department of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

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Who is the implied “we” of music theory? To whom does the discipline – i.e., “you” – feel accountable? Speaking not as someone beholden to the discipline, but rather as a member of its surrounding sprawl, its “orphanage” (as one of SMT’s founders once characterized our unruly horde of disciplinary migrants from “jazz, feminism, world music, and cognition”) – and also as a music-maker who creates, studies, and teaches – I aim in this talk to sort through some of the proliferating anxieties around music studies today. Zooming out from and historicizing this relatively young discipline, we can ask, what did music theorists wish to do? Before the internet, before downloads and streaming, even before the repercussions of desegregation and non-Western immigration had thoroughly caught up with the US academy, and more or less willfully self-isolated from many of the upheavals in the humanities of the last five decades – what did music theorists presuppose about what they could do and should do? And, what could a more expansive “we,” orphans included, do together?

To this end, I employ a critical concept of musicality – a generalized, embodied (which is to say, affective and temporal) relation that is entangled with but categorically distinct from both “music” (the object) and “musicking” (the activity). The goal is to pry loose some of the assumptions of music studies and propose a larger space of collective study, practice, and action.

About Vijay Iyer

Described by The New York Times as a “social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway,” composer-pianist Vijay Iyer has earned a place as one of the leading music-makers of his generation. His honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, three Grammy nominations, and the Alpert Award in the Arts. His newest album, Compassion (ECM, 2024), features his acclaimed trio with drummer Tyshawn Sorey and bassist Linda May Han Oh. His lush, expansive collaboration with Arooj Aftab and Shahzad Ismaily, Love in Exile (Verve, 2023), received two Grammy nominations and was named among the best albums of the year in Pitchfork and The New York Times.