ROBERT P.

MORGAN

How does one go about putting together a history of Western music theory? On the evidence of The Cambridge History of Music Theory, billed as `the first comprehensive history of theory to be published in the English language', today one does it with soul searching and a measure of self-consciousness. In his introduction, Thomas Christensen reminds us of Carl Dahlhaus's admonition that theory `is a subject that notoriously resists its own history', not least because its `subject matter has shifted so dramatically over time' (p. 1).1 Publications universally acknowledged as belonging to the discipline therefore may seem to have little to do with one another. As an example, Christensen cites three treatises by Thomas Campion, Rene Descartes and Robert Fludd written and published contemporaneously in the early seventeenth century, which he characterises respectively as `a practical guide for the novice composer', `a classic text of musical canonics' (defining and measuring intervals) and a neo-Platonic `paean to the harmonic cosmos' (p. 1). There are precedents for such a history, above all Hugo Riemann's Geschichte der Musiktheorie, published in 1898.2 But Riemann's history begins rather late (with the ninth century), and by current standards presents an inordinately personal and biased view of its topic, designed to give the impression that Western musical thought evolved inexorably toward, and found its culmination in, the author's own work. In addition, a fifteen-volume history of theory in Germany edited by Frieder Zaminer is now underway, with individual volumes devoted to particular periods, genres, geographical areas, specialised topics and critical assessments of the discipline.3 Conceived on a scale altogether different from Christensen's, it awaits completion. There are also a number of specialised studies in the discipline, many in English. Christensen's volume, however, like Riemann's (though without its prejudices) presumes to encompass Western music theory's entire history within a single cover. Given the present degree of specialisation in the field no single person could write a consistently authoritative account of this history. And since, over time, individual expertise has been increasingly channelled into circumscribed areas, Christensen has wisely decided to assign individual chapters to thirty-one specialists (twenty-six of whom teach in the United States or Canada, four in Great Britain and one in The Netherlands). The result is an extraordinarily rich and varied collection of more than a thousand pages: by any standard it is a milestone in English-language musicology. Who should review such a book? Aside from the fact that most of the usual English-language suspects participated in writing the volume, there is the
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inescapable difficulty that no one could do justice to the full range of its contents. I make no claim for the range of knowledge required to comment authoritatively on much of what is contained here. In general, I will refrain from judging entries as individual scholarly accomplishments, but focus rather on how, and how well, they contribute to the overall project. My comments are intended to give a sense of the volume as a whole: what it does and does not contain and what types of choice have been made. Finally, I will also comment on the historiographic aspects of the project. Organisation and Contents Christensen's long introduction, after a consideration of the etymology of the term `theory', offers an encapsulated account of the historical vagaries of its conceptions and reconceptions in relation to music. Christensen also notes the recent, somewhat surprising, establishment of the history of music theory as a central topic of scholarly interest, and acknowledges the influence of Dahlhaus (who probably had more to do with raising interest in the field than anyone else) on his own thinking: in particular, he observes that the history of theory cannot be adequately presented in simple chronological order but must be viewed in terms of a number of different, and often conceptually quite separate, `traditions'. This is reflected not only in the four unequal divisions that group the volume's contents but also in their titles: `Disciplining Music Theory', `Speculative Traditions', `Regulative Traditions' and `Descriptive Traditions'. Each division is chronologically ordered, reflecting Christensen's wish (despite Dahlhaus) to provide an overall historical survey: but this strategy also ensures that within the chronology there is a pronounced synthetic component. Part I: `Disciplining Music Theory' The first, shortest section comprises three `metahistorical' considerations of the various ways `theory' has been conceived and the often hidden presuppositions on which theorists have depended when trying to control or, in Christensen's word, `discipline' this unstable field. Leslie Blasius's `Mapping the terrain' examines the ways theorists have defined theory and orders the result in three chronological periods: antiquity to 1700 (`architectures and harmonizations'), 1700 to 1900 (`taxonomies and mechanics') and 1900 to the present (`histories and psychologies'). This underscores the field's stubborn resistance to neat categorisation, and highlights the diversity of theory's manifestations and the variable extent of its claims and ambitions. Robert W. Wason's `Musica practica: music theory as pedagogy', which also provides a historical summary, begins with the Middle Ages and limits its focus to practical theory and pedagogy. This covers a wide range of theorists who
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emphasised practice and instruction, from Zarlino to Nadia Boulanger and Hindemith, and defines a major sphere of music theory. Like Blasius, Nicholas Cook's `Epistemologies of music theory' distinguishes three chronologically distinct `traditions' (drawing, again, on Dahlhaus): a speculative tradition extending to the end of the Renaissance, focused on `abstract intervallic and scalar structures'; a more practical one in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, concerned with `codification and classification'; and an empirical and interpretative one from the late eighteenth century to the present, directed especially toward individual compositions. Cook also notes that tensions between `art and nature' promoted vacillations between empirical observation and speculative system building. Taking Rameau as the central figure `who established the discursive space within which [subsequent] music theory has operated' (p. 91), he traces a `constant epistemological transition from the outer world to the inner: from natural science and on to phenomenology' (p. 99), that issues today in a `performative' turn concerned more with convincing us of truths and less with imparting them. Part II: `Speculative Traditions' The seven essays in this section deal with the attempts in the earlier stages of western music theory to understand music as a reflection of a larger cosmic order. These are usually based upon the Pythagorean and Platonic belief that the essential features of reality are tied to numerical relationships that are harmonic in nature, an assumption which fuelled attempts to derive the pitch gamut from rational principles, and, more recently, to formulate mathematical models for pitch relationships found in particular compositions. Thomas J. Mathiesen's `Greek music theory' differentiates two approaches in Pythagorean thought: an `abstract and idealized' one associated with the Harmonicists, and a more systematic one attuned to `ostensibly musical phenomena' associated with the Aristoxenians. Calvin M. Bower's `The transmission of ancient music theory into the Middle Ages' charts the influence of these on two corresponding medieval traditions: musica, which linked music with science and the liberal arts; and cantus, which applied musica's a priori concepts to chant. The latter's shift from quantification to practice and function helped to resolve the troublesome tensions that existed between inherited tradition and contemporary practice, paving the way for the establishment of music theory in the modern sense. Jan Herlinger's `Medieval canonics' examines the practice of deriving fixed pitch gamuts through measurement of string ratios on a monochord, which having been transmitted from ancient Greece through Boethius, proliferated after 1000 and continued into the Renaissance. Later refinements in string-length measurement are detailed in Rudolf Rasch's `Tuning and temperament' through the use of mathematical root extraction in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
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logarithmic measurement in the seventeenth, and frequency measurement after 1800. The last, which eventually replaced string division entirely, also strengthened links between theory and practice. Penelope Gouk's `The role of harmonics in the scientific revolution' examines transformations in tuning brought about by the growth of scientific thinking during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She focuses on several seventeenth-century philosophical and scientific figures, including Robert Fludd, tied to the occult tradition associated with harmonics, Johannes Kepler, still convinced of music's connections with the cosmos, and surprisingly Isaac Newton, who, though lacking musical training, did not refrain from theoretical musical speculation. The mechanistic character of Newtonian thought, however, compromised the intellectual centrality of music, and by 1750 diminished its status markedly by bringing about its almost complete separation from scientific inquiry. Thereafter, the traditional concerns of speculative harmonics were fragmented into new disciplines such as acoustics and rational mechanics. Burdette Green's and David Butler's `From acoustics to Tonpsychologie' deals with a subsequent symptom of that process: nineteenth-century scientific investigations into the psychology of tone, which simultaneously reformulated questions formerly addressed by speculative harmonics and prefigured new ones related to music perception. Green and Butler distinguish two major approaches: the first, associated with Helmholtz, examines matters of harmony, acoustics and perception from a scientific and evidential perspective, stressing `natural law' and the physiology of the ear; the second, associated with Carl Stumpf, embraces a more `holistic' phenomenological approach dependent upon perceptual judgements reported by musically-aware subjects. The final article in this section, Catherine Nolan's `Music theory and mathematics', provides an overview of the Pythagorean legacy up to the present, and traces the evolution of mathematical contributions to Western music theory as manifested in the use of mathematical models, geometric images, the circle of fifths, Tonnetze, combinatorics and settheoretic and harmonic-transformational conceptions. Part III: `Regulative Traditions' This section is devoted to the practical, pedagogically-oriented aspects of music theory which have become increasingly central. Predictably, this is the longest section, and is divided into four subsections differentiated by concentration: `Mapping tonal spaces', `Compositional theory', `Time', and `Tonality'. The four essays in the first sub-section are concerned with attempts to codify compositionally significant pitch configurations, as opposed to the more abstract speculations found in the previous section. David E. Cohen's `Notes, scales, and modes in the earlier Middle Ages' discusses early conceptualisations
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of `discrete pitch, pitch space and pitch-intervallic scalar systems' (p. 307). Originating in Greek theory, this development underwent a significant evolution from the ninth to the eleventh centuries when Carolingian concerns for standardisation promoted efforts to fix specific pitches and intervallic distances and thus provided a more accurate delineation of the eight modes. Cristle Collins Judd's `Renaissance modal theory: theoretical, compositional, and editorial perspectives' picks up this thread in the sixteenth century at a point when modal theory had become especially complex and confused. She presents a `local study' centred on mid-sixteenth-century Venice, seen primarily through a single composer-theorist, Zarlino. This allows her to provide a surprisingly full picture of the many issues associated with modality's continuing links to chant theory and performance. Rejecting the idea that modality represents an all-encompassing `pre-tonal' system, Judd argues rather that a multi-faceted and ambiguous situation held sway in modal thought and practice until well into the seventeenth century. Gregory Barnett's `Tonal organization in seventeenth-century music theory' treats another puzzling period, during which modality was gradually and sporadically replaced by major-minor tonality. As he puts it: `at different times . . . and to differing degrees, one set of theoretical concerns . . . replaced another, such that the picture of tonal organization [and the] . . . language used to describe it changed almost completely' (p. 408). Barnett covers fugal practices, competing eightmode and twelve-mode theories, and the eventual emergence of the system of twenty-four transposable major and minor keys, representable as a `musical circle', that persists to the present day. Jumping forward some two centuries, Henry Klumpenhouwer's `Dualist tonal space and transformation in nineteenth-century musical thought' considers harmonic dualism. The dualist contention that major and minor triads are equal, symmetrically-related manifestations of a unitary harmonic source was developed by Moritz Hauptmann, Arthur von Oettingen and Riemann, partly in response to the acoustical discoveries of Helmholtz. Klumpenhouwer summarises the mysterious transformational types underlying Riemann's harmonic system and notes the important influence of his thought on recent `neo-Riemannian' developments in the United States. The next subsection, on compositional theory, turns from the abstract to theoretical matters concerned with the control of pitch relationships in specific compositional practices. Sarah Fuller's `Organum discantus contrapunctus in the Middle Ages' distinguishes three stages in early polyphony: (1) organum-insymphoniae, beginning in the ninth century and limited to single-line, noteagainst-note elaborations of chant, mainly with perfect fifths and fourths in parallel motion; (2) musica mensurabilis, from the mid-thirteenth century, which allowed for more differentiated durations in the added voice; and (3) contrapuntus, or simplex discantus, from the mid-fourteenth century, which reverted to
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an exclusively consonant, note-against-note texture, but now with both perfect and imperfect intervals and taken as the foundation for a varied polyphonic surface. Although Tinctoris, in his Liber de arte contrapuncti (1477), associates the last of these types with compositions written down by master composers, Fuller notes that in its earlier stages, this tradition was concerned more with performance and `musical production' (adding parts to a given cantus) than with free polyphonic composition. Peter Schubert's `Counterpoint pedagogy in the Renaissance' carries this line forward, arguing that, while contrapuntal writing was increasingly codified during the later period, theory's primary concern was not so much with control of dissonance and voice leading as with a range of procedures grouped around the concept of suggetto, a melodic subject expressible variously as a brief single voice, a duo, or even an entire polyphonic composition. Schubert considers a number of practices, including contrapunctus simplex (Fuller's third stage), florid counterpoint, modal influences, imitation in duos and pairs of duos, double counterpoint, and the rhetorical concept of composition as an `assembling of fragments'. Albert Cohen's `Performance theory' stresses western music's reliance on oral traditions and improvisation. As the only chapter devoted to performance practice, it opens with a brief survey of early manifestations in medieval organum and discant, whose texts he describes as 'little more than the codification of existing principles for extempore elaboration of chant' (p. 535), and closes with a word on modern developments, such as the `positivistic' turn toward fully notated scores, use of chance procedures, and the influence of technology. Cohen's main concern, however, is with the Baroque, reflected in his discussion of Marin Mersenne`s comments on performance, and in his treatment of thorough bass and the melodic-embellishment practices of the time. The next essay is the first devoted to a single theorist. Ian Bent's `Steps to Parnassus: contrapuntal theory in 1725 precursors and successors' examines Fux's abstraction of the rules of counterpoint reduced to their basic principles and set out in a pedagogically-graduated sequence. While noting that this idea was not unprecedented, Bent stresses that no previous theorist had gone about it in such a systematic manner. Since the practice of teaching counterpoint in Fux's laboratory-like formulation proved enormously popular, his legacy is examined in considerable detail, with a commentary on subsequent figures seen as occupying either Fuxian or non-Fuxian camps. Finally, John Covach's `Twelve-tone theory' moves on some two hundred years and is less concerned with twelve-tone practice (since, according to Covach, twelve-tone music failed to establish itself as a `marker' of modernism) than with what Covach calls `the twelve-tone idea' as an area of theoretical speculation. He is especially interested in this idea as an abstract, non-motivic conception of the chromatic aggregate as `background' from which `modal' chromatic material can be derived. This results in an alternative to the `canonic' Schoenbergian history,
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one that foregrounds a theoretical line extending from the early work of Herbert Eimert and Josef Matthias Hauer through Richard S. Hill and George Perle to Milton Babbitt. Part III's third subsection, `Time', consists of three essays on rhythmic theory, the first of which, Anna Maria Busse Berger's `The evolution of rhythmic notation', guides us through the labyrinths of early rhythmic thought and notation. She details the initial, rudimentary notational system that emerged in thirteenth-century Paris, linked to modal rhythmic measurements and developed in response to western music's evolution from a largely oral to a written tradition. Although this extremely restrictive approach soon underwent improvements, loosening its ties with specific rhythmic values, it was only fully dissolved in the ars nova of the early fourteenth century, whose less constrained system allowed freer combinations of duple and triple values. After discussing the introduction of proportional notation, Berger credits Tinctoris, writing in the fifteenth century, with bringing order to the profusion of notational signs used for rhythmic purposes. William E. Caplin's `Theories of musical rhythm in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries' traces the transformation of Renaissance mensural practice into the modern rhythmic system of accentuation, metres and durations, bringing about equality between duple and triple divisions, clear distinctions between simple and compound metre, and eventually leading to theories of metrical accentuation. He then concentrates on the eighteenth century, when theorists began thinking of phrases rhythmically, as groups of measures, a tendency expanded during the following century and culminating in Riemann. Subsequent approaches are detailed in Justin London's `Rhythm in twentieth-century theory', which subsumes a number of more recent approaches under four overarching categories: theories of musical time and motion influenced by scientific ideas; Schenkerian approaches to rhythm; architectonic or hierarchical theories influenced by linguistics and gestalt psychology; and post-tonal rhythmic theories. The final subdivision, `Tonality', fills in the `common-practice' gap between the seventeenth century and harmonic dualism left hanging in the first subsection. Brian Hyer's essay, also titled `Tonality', is a general introduction that tracks the term's origins, its associated rhetoric (tonality as `God-given', `natural', etc.), its emergence during the seventeenth century, and its eventual formulation as a `monotonal' subordination of all events to a single tonic. Hyer also examines various nineteenth-century developments that undermined traditional tonality, eventually leading to the Schoenbergian notions of suspended, floating and multiple tonality. Joel Lester's `Rameau and eighteenthcentury harmonic theory', the second essay on a single theorist, focuses on his work in relation to predecessors and followers. Lester notes that, despite Rameau's originality, his great strength as a theorist was to unite many previously independent theoretical concerns, including thorough bass, fundaMusic Analysis, 24/iii (2005)
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mental generation, chord inversion, cadential practice and major and minor key systems. Integrating these with his own conception of fundamental bass progression, Rameau achieved an explanation of melodic and harmonic motion of unprecedented precision. Lester also details Rameau's enormous influence on subsequent harmonic developments, including scale-degree and functional theory, and fundamental bass theory itself. David W. Bernstein's `Nineteenthcentury harmonic theory: the Austro-German legacy' takes up the three schools that grew out of these lines of influence, all centred despite their French origin in Germanic countries. Beginning with scale-degree theory, he details Georg Josef Vogler's and Gottfried Weber's conception of tonality as a community of chords erected on all diatonic scale degrees, a position leading to the use of Roman numerals and (in Weber) to the first Tonnetz, or abstract chart of chords ordered by relational proximity. Subsequently Simon Sechter and Karl Mayburger extended Rameau's theory of fundamental bass progression to include more chromatic relationships, and Riemann developed a chord-based theory of tonal harmony dependent upon three basic `functions': tonic, dominant and subdominant, the latter two symmetrically positioned at the upper and lower fifth from the first. Bernstein closes with Georg Capellen's and Schoenberg's end-of-century attempts to replace Riemann's dualism with monistic harmonic systems capable of generating a wider range of harmonic possibilities. In his `Heinrich Schenker', William Drabkin notes that Schenker's mature theory, with which he is commonly equated, was preceded by a sizeable body of less systematic work that is itself of considerable interest, and preferred by many. The mature theory is itself summarised with explanations of critical Schenkerian concepts, often with discussion of their origins in the earlier work. Schenker's historical and intellectual background is also examined, as is his posthumous reception (especially in the United States), along with various more recent extensions of his work. Part IV: `Descriptive Traditions' The somewhat confusing title of the book's final section is a catch-all for disparate, mainly twentieth-century approaches grouped in two subsections: `Models of music analysis' and `Music psychology'. Patrick McCreless's `Music and rhetoric', after briefly surveying rhetoric's origins in antiquity and revival in the Renaissance, focuses on its extension in the baroque concept of musica poetica. Three pivotal figures are discussed Joachim Burmeister, Johannes Lippius and Christoph Bernhard with tabular listings given for musical figures used by the first and last. McCreless notes Bernhard's centrality in this tradition, as the first theorist to associate figures with specific styles and to suggest that the apparent licenses of seconda practica were in fact grounded on prima practica conventions. Although the waning of rhetoric was
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already evident in the writings of Johann Mattheson in the early eighteenth century, and its fate sealed by the ascendancy of text-independent `absolute music', its importance as the first systematic framework for work-specific musical analysis was considerable; and it has recently enjoyed something of a revival. Scott Burnham's `Form' addresses the `sprawling' growth of formal analysis that, since the later eighteenth century, flourished in response to music theory's newly developed `work concept'. Initially restricted to shorter formal units, its subsequent extensions during the nineteenth century responded to the growth of organicist conceptions of musical structure. Burnham, taking sonata form as his example, traces the turn from a primarily harmonic conception of form to a thematic and rhythmic one. Tovey's and Schenker's `challenges' to this tradition, the former focusing on more particularised stylistic matters, the latter viewing form as a mere surface manifestation, are noted, as are recent attempts to return to the eighteenth-century idea of form as a principally tonal phenomenon. Jonathan Dunsby's `Thematic and motivic analysis' closes the subsection with consideration of various post-nineteenth century frameworks for analysing music's thematic dimension: developing variation (Schoenberg), concealed patterns (Rudolf Re ti), functional relationships (Hans Keller), prolongational structures (Schenker), set theory (Allen Forte) and semiotics (Nicolas Ruwet). The opening essay of `Music psychology', Lee Rothfarb's `Energetics', examines the pervasive idea that music communicates motion, a conviction that has a long pedigree from antiquity to medieval pitch theory, baroque rhetorical conceptions, tonal harmonic theory and nineteenth-century formal dynamics. Rothgeb's main concern, however, is the establishment in the early twentieth-century of a well-defined `energist' analytical tradition (the term was coined by the historian of music aesthetics, Rudolf Schafke), based on the assumption that music communicates underlying `forces'. This plays an essential role in the thought of August Halm, Schenker, and especially, Ernst Kurth; and it is also evident in Arnold Schering's musical hermeneutics and Hans Mersmann's phenomenology, as well as in more recent developments associated with theorists such as Wallace Berry and Leonard Meyer. In the book's final essay, `The psychology of music', Robert Gjerdingen points out that, whereas questions pertaining to music's relation to the human mind are deeply embedded in the western tradition, the psychology of music as a distinct field has had a relatively brief history. After noting anticipations in Francis Bacon and John Locke, Gjerdingen turns to two contrasting late nineteenthcentury Germanic developments associated with Wilhelm Wundt and Stumpf: empirically-oriented Tonpsychologie and conceptually-oriented Musikpsychologie. Additional sections address American `functionalism' (Carl Seashore), behaviourism and recent work in cognitive psychology.

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Commentary It would be easy to find fault with some of Christensen's choices. There are chronological gaps in the sections (to cite just one instance, there is no essay on the early history of work-oriented analysis), one could question the location of particular essays (why is the article on `performance theory' located in `Compositional theory'; and why are articles on dualist tonal space and nineteenth-century harmonic theory placed in different sections?), and perhaps there is an overemphasis on post-renaissance German theory (at the expense of, say, French or Italian theory). Some will find that too much space is allocated to tuning theory (though, curiously, twentieth-century microtonal tuning is completely ignored), and others may question the value of the two principal metatheoretical ruminations in the `disciplining' section; still others will regret the absence of an article on the close yet intricate connections that have linked music analysis and music theory. The fact that `Compositional theory' contains no synoptic treatment of its twentieth-century manifestations, a matter of considerable theoretical interest, is disappointing. (One must make do with Covach's rather special treatment of twelve-tone and serial thought, along with London's sparse comments on twentieth-century rhythm.) From my experience, I know that an editor must make difficult decisions; and this is surely exaggerated when the historical-geographical scope is as great as it is here. As a whole I find the book both remarkably well thought out and impressively realised. If one accepts it for what it is, the book succeeds admirably; and I doubt that it will be soon surpassed. But I must say that its aim is decidedly restricted. Although any one-volume survey covering such a vast chronological spread is bound to be confined, what is notable here particularly in view of current intellectual tendencies is that music theory is largely limited to its more technical dimensions, and that its application is circumscribed by western art music as traditionally defined. Since it is highly unlikely that anyone other than a reviewer will read the book straight through, its primary use will probably be as an aid to research and as a source of information on specific topics. (It is too long and covers too much ground to be useful as a textbook.) But for anyone, student or professional, who wants to explore the history of a particular theoretical or compositional idea, it will be a welcome companion. Using titles, index, cross-references and the extensive bibliographies included at the end of each entry, readers will be able to discover a wealth of information on countless topics, along with ample suggestions for further study. However, not all chapters fulfil their function equally well. A general complaint expressed by many contributors is that the topics and historical periods they cover are too complex and diverse to allow for an accurate picture in the space provided. In her chapter on medieval polyphony, for example,
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Fuller notes that, while Riemann could view its history in terms of an ever closer approximation of universally valid laws, the modern writer, aided or is it burdened? by the wealth of subsequent scholarship, is confronted with a radically different and much less manageable picture:
[T]o read even a handful of theorists from the ninth through the fifteenth centuries is to become aware that goals vary, that those who write on procedures for organum, discant, or contrapunctus are largely concerned with quite elementary training in the production of many-voiced music, and that the conventions they relay cannot be held universally valid for their time but relate to particular practices in delimited cultural strata and geographical locales . . . . The practices described in the extant treatises doubtless shaped the basic sensibilities of young musicians . . . but the sphere of these practices had to do chiefly with oral polyphony and (to varying degrees) theoretical principle and only partially overlapped the sphere of written composition. (p. 499)

Similarly, Schubert, referring to his treatment of contrapuntal pedagogy in the Renaissance, remarks: `For each theorist included here, there is another whose ideas make equally valuable contributions to the picture as a whole, whether in basic concepts, terminology, or examples. No single theorist tells us everything we want to know, and there is little consensus among them' (p. 528). The most successful articles, I find, face up to this problem, limiting their scope so as to allow for a more orderly presentation. Fuller's and Schubert's chapters are exemplary, as are, among many others, Berger and Caplin on rhythmic theory, those by Mathiesen, Bower, Herlinger and Rasch on the earlier phases of the speculative tradition (though here this judgement may be influenced by my own deficiencies in this area), and Bernstein's thoughtful and efficient presentation of nineteenth-century Austro-German harmonic theory. The three chapters by Bent, Lester and Drabkin devoted to single figures Fux, Rameau, and Schenker have an obvious advantage in this regard, and all are first-rate. As part of his consideration on Schenker, for example, Drabkin is able to include and comment upon the complete first four graphic levels of Schenker's monumental analysis of the first movement of Mozart's G minor Symphony, K. 550, along with the Urlinie-Tafel for the first 132 bars; and he provides Schenker's middleground graphs for several other pieces. Bent's sweeping chapter on Fux, with its wide-ranging treatment of both predecessors and followers, is one of the gems of the collection. On the other hand, Wason, assigned the daunting task of surveying the entire pedagogical tradition, must deal with so many different theorists, with such diverse aims (Guido of Arezzo, Zarlino, Rameau, Koch, Riemann, Schoenberg and Schenker are some of the more prominent included), as to preclude doing them justice, and his article leaves the reader with an unfocussed idea of the topic as a whole. One also wonders why this chapter, so different from its two companions, appears in the `disciplining' section. An
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analogous problem arises with Covach's treatment of twelve-tone theory, a subject that would seem, on the face of it, to be concerned with a much more circumscribed area. His decision to provide an alternative perspective forces him to treat too cursorily a number of theorists who will be little known to most readers. Schoenberg, whom most will think of first and foremost in connection with the topic, receives relatively short shrift, with much of the segment bearing his name devoted to his pupil Erwin Stein. (Covach allots Babbitt more space than anyone else.) Given its emphasis, this entry would be more appropriately located within the `tonal mapping' section than in `compositional theory'. Similarly, London's reduction of the complexities of twentiethcentury rhythmic theory to four categories that have overtly fluid boundaries (as he himself seems to recognise) and that cover a confusing breadth of possibilities hinders adequate presentation. Albert Cohen's chapter, the only one concerned with the theory of performance practice, is regrettably thin. One might also raise questions about the extensive overlapping among entries. My general impression, however, is that this is an advantage. The fact that critical figures like Zarlino and Riemann, for example, who have no entry of their own (or for that matter Rameau and Schenker, who do), appear prominently in several different entries, often at considerable length, provides a valuable multiple perspective on their work. Problems of repetition are often neatly negotiated (Mathiesen, in his article on Greek theory, focuses on the origins of a number of concepts that helped shape the birth and development of music theory in the West, while Bower concentrates on their transmission in the work of prominent theorists during the Middle Ages). Similarly, the first two sections of Rasch's article, devoted to later Pythagorean and justintonational tunings involving monochord division, overlap with Herlinger's entry on harmonics but concentrate on two sixteenth-century theorists (Glarean and Salinas) who are absent from Herlinger's account. Most of the essays are consistently `presentational': they seek to offer essential information rather than argue for some special interpretation of their topic. Readers will find the essays dealing with areas in which they have particular expertise relatively non-controversial; they give up-to-date data but do not unnecessarily grind axes. There are exceptions. Nolan's article on mathematical applications in music theory, which provides a very effective survey of some of the ways mathematical thought and numerical conceptualisation have contributed to the discipline, also argues repeatedly for the usefulness, even essentialness, of that methodology's `generalizing power'. Dunsby's `Thematic and motive analysis' is exceptional for a different reason. It provides very little basic information about the analytical approaches he surveys, evidently assuming the reader will be fully acquainted with them. Shunning exposition, Dunsby offers a series of fearfully dialectical meditations on the advantages, disadvantages and assumptions associated with each. In his
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treatment of `semiotic' approaches, for example, almost half his space is given to a discussion of the general semiotic conception of signs as `arbitrary' in nature, having both `synchronic' and `diachronic' implications, and being either `paradigmatic' or `syntagmatic' in function. When Dunsby finally turns to musical applications, he opens with the following, not atypical paragraph:
It is a hallmark of such studies that comparisons, that is, music-analytical statements about similarity and difference, are explicit, so that for example the approximations and excesses of informal critical language as well as the positivism of `pure' (one might even say, non-Schenkerian) formal theory are equally shunned, the one because of the semiotic ideal of precision, the other because of the ideal of consistency. The `explicit' entails not only the metaphors and metalanguages themselves of technical musical description and explanation, but also their epistemological status: it entails the attempt at a continuous awareness of what kind of knowledge they are and from what kind of knowledge they are derived; in the semiotic `tripartitional' analysis of any signifying process knowledge is regarded as being inevitably some combination of the poietic, the esthesic, and the `neutral'. It is an incidental result of this interrogatory character of music semiotics that any particular inquiry can necessitate the process of relatively large amounts of information. (p. 921)

This will not be of much use to most readers, I suspect (though some already conversant with the topic may find it stimulating). Dunsby subsequently reprints and comments on a brief melodic analysis by Ruwet, but offers nothing concrete about the form it has been given or the properties it contains, or how it differs from a non-semiotic analysis. A Word on Historiography The final section of Brian Hyer's `Tonality', entitled `Historiography', is also exceptional. His aim, unlike Nolan's or Dunsby's, is essentially critical in nature. What he says is interesting because it is unlike anything else in the volume and because it appears to call into question the very assumptions upon which the book was conceived, including the previous sections of his own essay. It provides a useful source for considering certain historiographic issues central to the entire collection. The first paragraph of this essay, quoted in its entirety below, is directed at an aspect of Hyer's topic, but its ramifications, as will become evident, go far beyond it:
The diachronic account of tonal music given in the preceding section is most often related in terms of musical evolution as continuous progress, a master narrative in which the historical course of tonal music is directed toward its own end, depicted either as a completion or (as is more common) a tragic demise. In either case, the telos of these stories reflects (perhaps ironically) the strong forward momentum toward a cadential goal so often thought to be an essential

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attribute of tonal music. While these histories are sometimes recounted as technological allegories in which tonality collapses, breaks down, or wears out from overuse, it is more common to imagine them as genetic narratives, organic processes of growth and decay, birth and death. (p. 745)

This may seem unobjectionable yet it is already overstated. Few today would describe the development of tonality in terms of `completion' and `tragic demise'. But Hyer ventures onto considerably thinner ice when, subsequently, he attempts to flesh out this argument and draw conclusions about the sorts of assumptions we make in charting the history of tonality. He begins by questioning tonality as a topic: `[C]omposers, music historians, and music theorists have tended to exaggerate the importance of tonality as a theoretical construct. The entire historical account in the previous subsection [his own brief survey of the history of tonal `practice'] could be rewritten without reference to the idea' (p. 746). He then offers three reasons why one might reject an evolutionary view of tonality and, more broadly, `the application of evolution to cultural phenomenon in general' (p. 745): it makes us ignore the fact that composers are human agents with particular historical intentions; it obscures the complexities of historical process by identifying a dominant `mainstream'; and it privileges later practices over earlier ones. It is not clear to me why any of these conclusions need follow, since `evolution', tonal or otherwise, does not have to be conceptually tied to `progress' or to a dominant mainstream, nor need it be unaffected by human agency. Hyer, moreover, gives little indication of how he, or anyone else, might actually rewrite his previous account without using the concepts of `tonality' and `evolution', however they might be defined. His statement that `the history of tonality is better understood in terms of specific harmonic practices rather than immutable laws' is no help, since there is no reason why one cannot create an evolutionary narrative based on practices rather than laws. Indeed, that would be consistent with the way most, if not all, theorists and historians now think about tonality. (Does anyone believe today that there are `immutable' musical `laws'?) Hyer's objection to the organic, biological narrative is therefore based on a misconception: that organicism, instead of being a more-or-less useful metaphor, obligates one to join evolutionary processes with scientific notions of `necessity'. Surely we know now that the organicist metaphor, while drawn from the natural sciences, takes on a very different, non-scientific meaning when applied to music. Despite Hyer's claim, no one believes that tonality `no longer exists'. All one has to do is open one's ears to what is going on in the musical world to realise how absurd such a position would be. (Even traditional, `common-practice' tonality continues to be taught in many classrooms.) The point should be that, while tonality still exists, it exists in a context that has radically altered the meaning of tonality as a musical and social phenomenon. Tonality is now part
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(even if, assuming a much broader definition than Hyer's, it is the dominant part) of an enormously expanded set of possibilities a situation that, for example, makes us newly conscious of how difficult it is to draw a sharp line between what is and what is not tonal. There is a certain validity in Hyer's objection (in the paragraph quoted above) to the kind of evolutionary narrative that has sometimes been associated with tonality's history in the past: as ineluctable progress toward an idealised goal that, once attained, gives way to a process of gradual (and regrettable) decline. What is problematic is his objection to the theoretical concepts of tonality and evolution themselves. When he complains, for example, that tonality is `an ideological as well as a theoretical concept' (p. 747), the incongruity of his position within the context of this book becomes conspicuous: all theoretical concepts, including those used throughout this survey, have an ideological dimension. Constructs like `tonality' or `evolution' are not given `neutrally' as pre-existing features of the world, but are imposed upon it to give it shape and meaning. One indication of tonality's unreliability, Hyer remarks, is the fact that ideas about tonality have been `appropriated for both conservative and radical aesthetic agendas'; but that charge could be levelled equally against almost any theoretical idea found in this book. Even something as basic as the distinction between consonance and dissonance, for example, though still virtually universally accepted (even in this post-Schoenbergian age) has been consistently reinterpreted to accommodate changing musical circumstances; and it has also been used on numerous occasions to bolster both `conservative' and `radical' musical causes. This does not make it any less useful, or even essential, for writing a history of western music or its theory. All of Christensen's authors use such constructions, whether self-defined, borrowed from others, or lifted from one of the book's theoretical `traditions'. They are indispensable to the entire project. Yet Hyer holds up a different ideal: a `disinterested view of the historical past' (p. 749), even `a neutral account of music history' (p. 750). If this means avoiding musical constructs such as tonality, however, there simply is no such thing (or to the extent that there is, it is of little interest or use to anyone). The editor and authors, for example, have had to make countless choices: what to include and exclude, what to emphasise, which categories to use in organising their material, and so forth. Whether their concern is with the history of tonality, the evolution of medieval contrapuntal thought, transformations in tuning, or differences in the way rhythm is organised, their evolutionary narratives are in that sense `ideological'. They make their descriptions meaningful by placing them in conceptual structures that are, by definition, `loaded'. One is at liberty to reject one of more of these structures, but to reject one is inevitably to assert another.
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My intention is not to argue for historical relativism. Issues of music theory and its history stem from a real, external musical world, independent of the scholars who write about them, and they can be rationally debated (otherwise, why is music worth arguing about?) But in order to discuss these issues, interpersonally and meaningfully, we make assumptions and formulate conceptual frameworks with which to think and write. What is disconcerting about Hyer's position, then, is that he dismisses an interpretation with which he disagrees as ideologically tainted while maintaining that his own is ideologically innocent, absolving him from any need to debate. One can perhaps recognise the source of this position in the evident inconsistencies of his own argument, as when he states that the historical narratives of tonality fail `to account for the continuous use' of tonal resources in twentieth-century music, but then in the very same sentence refers to a `renewal of tonal resources', or two sentences later to the `re-emergence of tonal idioms within the postmodern avant garde' (p. 750). Similarly, immediately after acknowledging jazz's `ongoing experiments with atonal idioms', he baldly states that in jazz `[tonality] has never loosened its grip on the musical imagination' (p. 746). These reflections on the historiographic nature of Christensen's History suggest that there may be a critical omission in his table of contents: a `metatheoretical' chapter examining the concept of theory from a more fundamental perspective than the editor in his introduction or the authors of the `disciplining' section provide. Such an essay would undertake a truly fundamental examination of `music theory', not simply in terms of how it has been conceived within a particular group of western `traditions', but directed rather to how it could be conceived or perhaps even should be conceived.4 Such an essay might have examined recent developments in musicology that have raised questions about the entire theoretical discipline as traditionally constituted, and could point out that the word `theory' has been (and in general continues to be) used in our discipline in a much more restricted sense than in other humanistic fields in which it has come to represent a virtually unlimited set of interdisciplinary concerns intended not only to investigate but also to interrogate basic assumptions. This would bring out questions that are largely ignored here: what sort of thinking is theoretical thinking; for whom is theory written; for what purpose is it written; what do different genres and cultures of music tell us about inherited theoretical assumptions; how do differences in ethnic, gender and sexual identity impinge upon theory; to what extent do theoretical pronouncements merely bolster entrenched positions; and what might a truly alternative theory look like? It could also address an additional question that, though clearly relevant (and pressing), has also been skirted: to what extent have more recent compositional developments `avant-garde', `experimental', `postmodern', `crossover', `world-music', etc. served to transform our conceptions of theory, indeed our very sense of what music is and what is worth saying about it?
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Admittedly, such a chapter would seem out of place in this traditionally conceived survey, both disturbing and distorting; and I understand why it was not included. But I also wonder whether we have not reached a stage in our discipline where we can no longer afford to exclude such questions questions that, assuming a more catholic perspective, are of as much `theoretical' concern as any touched on in this volume.

Conclusion Cambridge University Press should be commended for producing this extraordinary book. Its size and weight alone provoke wonder. In addition to a generous quantity of musical examples, there are numerous graphic illustrations taken from treatises discussed within its pages. Many of these are not only conceptually helpful but of considerable visual interest, even beauty. (One of the more pleasing aspects of music theory's evolution is that so much of it has been realised with the aid of striking visual presentations of tunings of the monochords, relations between music and cosmic ratios, musical circles, formal charts, and prolongational reductions, to name only a few). There are also many tables containing information to help readers find their way through what might seem to be impenetrable thickets of information. Another welcome feature is the use of boxes to separate tangential but related material from the main body of the text. Many of these cover an odd but pleasingly disparate group of topics, including the history of early music printing (Judd), the influence of Roman measurements on rhythmic concepts (Berger), chromatic and enharmonic divisions (Herlinger, quoting Christian Meyer), notational methods suggested for twelve-tone notation (Covach), and Tovey's analysis of the first movement of Beethoven's Op. 10 No. 1 (Burnham). In closing, and to underscore some of the aesthetic-historiographic issues raised, I quote an especially revealing passage from Bower's essay. Although it refers to the Pythagorian myth of the divination of harmonic ratios from the weights of a blacksmith's hammers, it states an important truth applicable to many of the theories covered by this volume and provides one reason why it is such a valuable publication:
The roots of this myth so fundamental to the history of Western musical thought are buried within ancient values and archetypes that can never be fully fathomed. The empirical data offered in the myth is wholly specious. . . . However, the myths and dreams of a civilization are judged not by their empirical truth or falsity, but by the expression of intellectual and spiritual complexes they reveal within a culture. (p. 143)

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NOTES
1. Though these are Christensen's own words, their reference is to Dahlhaus's `Was heisst ``Geschichte der Musiktheorie''?', in Ideen zu einer Geschichte der Musiktheorie, ed. Frieder Zaminer, Geschichte der Musiktheorie 1 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985), p. 28. Hugo Riemann, Geschichte der Musiktheorie im IX.-XIX. Jahrhundert (Leipzig: M. Hesse, 1898). Geschichte der Musiktheorie, ed. Frieder Zaminer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984 ). The first edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 1980) revealed a similar lack: as was noted by at least one reviewer, it contained no general entry on `music'. (This lapse was remedied in the revised 2001 edition by an unusually wide-ranging article by Bruno Nettl.)

2. 3. 4.

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