What Kind of Theory is Music Theory? Epistemological Exercises in Music Theory and Analysis. Ed. by Per F. Broman and Nora A. Engebretsen.
Raymond Monelle · Music and Letters · 2009
Can music theory be ‘scientific’? Milton Babbitt famously said in 1972 that ‘there is but one kind of language, one kind of method … whether in music theory or anything else: “scientific” language and “scientific” method’ (quoted on p. 11 in this volume). But clearly, music theory differs from natural science in a number of ways: first, the role of intuition is different, in that verification in music depends on intuitive judgements, while intuition for the scientist is subject to empirical testing. In a nutshell, scientific theory is objective while musical judgements are subjective. And second, scientific judgements are general, yet music is valued for its uniqueness. We value a symphony of Brahms, not because it resembles symphonies by Beethoven, but because of its differences; a tune by Gershwin, not because it resembles Gershwin's other tunes (or Kern's, or Berlin's), but because of what makes it special. The compulsion to attribute objective empiricism to theories of art is sometimes stigmatized as ‘scientism’. Several of the authors in this collection of items by scholars active in Sweden and the USA refer to this habit, and to the desire to convert musical study to other, related studies, like mathematics, cognitive science, psychology, or neuroscience. The key article here is, perhaps, Elisabeth Kotzakidou Pace's study of ‘The techne of music theory and the epistemic domain of the (Neo-) Aristotelian Arts of Logos’. This traces the history of our epistemological tradition, beginning with Aristotle's distinction of λóγος, reasoned discourse, and , making anew (usually, and misleadingly, translated ‘art’). Logos is concerned with things that cannot be otherwise; thus, it embraces natural science and mathematics. Techne deals with things that come into being and are contingent, and thus could have been otherwise, like poetry or sculpture. These things are valued for their uniqueness, not their investment in general principle. However, there are two technai which form master arts because they underlie not only artistic enterprises but rationality itself: dialectic and rhetoric, called the ‘Arts of Logos’. This pair formed the core of the medieval trivium.