A Bevy of Biases: How Music Theory’s Methodological Problems Hinder Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Abstract

This is an essay in response to and in broad support of Philip Ewell’s keynote, “Music Theory’s White Racial Frame” (SMT’s 2019 Annual Meeting) and essay, “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame” (MTO 26.2.4).  In that keynote and its companion essay Ewell notes how the repertoire we study and teach, as well as the theories we use to explain it, are manifestations of whiteness.  In this essay, it will first be shown that the repertory used in the development of theories of harmony and form, as well as (and especially) music theory pedagogy is comprised of a small, unrepresentative corpus of pieces from the “common practice period” of tonal music, mostly the music of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and only a small subset of their output.  Our over-reliance on this repertory stems from the conflation of implicit biases which stem from our enculturation as practicing musicians, explicit biases which stem from broadly held aesthetic beliefs regarding the status of “great” composers and particular “masterworks”, and confirmation biases which are manifest by our tendency to use only positive testing strategies and/or selective sampling when developing and demonstrating our theories.  The theories of harmony and form developed from this small corpus further suffer from overfitting, whereby theoretical models are overdetermined relative to the broader norms of a musical practice, and from our tendency to conceive of our theoretic models in terms of tightly regulated “scripts” rather than looser “plans.”  All of which means that simply expanding our analytic and/or pedagogical canon will do little to displace the underlying aesthetic and cultural values that are bound up with the core repertory of the analytic canon; we must also address the biases which underlie canon formation and valuation, and the methodologies which inherently privilege certain pieces, composers, and repertoires to the detriment of others.  It is thus argued that working toward greater equity, diversity, and inclusion in music theory, goes hand in hand with addressing some of the problematic methodologies that have long plagued our discipline.  Indeed, we cannot do the former without doing the latter.