MUSIC THEORY AND PHILOSOPHY

Music theory is one of the oldest traditions of writing about music, even if now it is one of the least understood outside of professional musical studies. From one perspective, music theory defines the basic materials and concepts by means of which music is composed, performed, heard, and discussed: intervals, scales, rhythms, meters, register, and so forth. From another perspective, music theory addresses emergent properties of musical organization, speculating on higher levels of musical organization that reflect on the nature of musical understanding: principles of scale generation, chord roots, hyper-metrical design, formal continuity, and so forth. In both its practical and its speculative modes, music theory is a type of thought about music that permeates all aspects of musical activity: composing/creating, performing, listening as well as the attendant discourse about music. And as a type of contemplation on the nature of musical experience, music theory has strong points of similarity to philosophy: both conceptualize the nature of the human experience of and with the world.