Musiktheorie ist Musiktheorie ist Musiktheorie

Music theory has acquired a unique position in between many fields, most notably composition, historical and systematic musicology and music pedagogy. Motivated by the topic “music theory and interdisciplinarity”, this essay explores the fields spanned by today’s music theory in seven short chapters. The first chapter describes changes of the discipline in German-speaking countries since the 1960s and its development from a simple synonym of practical harmony and a propedeutic means for music analysis to a postmodern, rich and scholarly ambitous field that can hardly be reduced to a common denominator. In the second chapter the author, drawing on Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, argues that music theory should not limit itself to purely “technical” issues, but must also address emotional or expectational realms of musical meaning. The third chapter further explores this point by discussing the opposition between musical theory and practice, suggesting that music theory indeed has the potential to let these two poles stimulate one another. The same is true for the often debated divide between “artistic” and “scholarly” aspects of music theory, explored in the fourth chapter: They are not mutually exclusive, but rather always have influenced each other, as evidenced by eighteenth-century treatises. Exchange with related disciplines such as music psychology has increased since the 1960s, as chapter five summarizes, although the relationship between music theory and musicology sometimes remains problematic. In the sixth chapter, a short analytical approach to four examples from the standard repertoire (Schubert, Bach, Brahms, Mozart) attempt to demonstrate the potential of specifically music-theoretical viewpoints. The final section advocates the strengthening of a specific profile for music theory: The liberation from dogmatic thought and systematic rigour should not lead us to overstretch music-theoretical questions.