Radical Music Theory: Abstract and Keywords

Radical Music Theory

Chris Stover
The Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory
Edited by J. Daniel Jenkins
Subject: Music, Music Theory Online Publication Date: Feb 2022

DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197551554.013.25
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter draws upon radical pedagogy, anarchafeminist theory, decolonial theory, and
more to begin to rethink what music theory teaching and learning is capable of as com
munity-facing, creative, transformative practice. It orbits around three interrelated fields
of activity through which music theory becomes essentially “public.” First is a refusal of
the theory–practice divide in favor of a prolonged commitment to the irreducible, produc
tive entanglement of the two: all theory is practice, and all practitioners produce theory in
some important way. Second is a reimagining of music theory as a space for dialogue
across and within diverse communities of practice. And third is positioning music theory
as transformative: not just descriptive of existing or historical practices, but as opening
onto ever new modes of creativity.
Keywords: radical pedagogy, anarchafeminism, decolonization, Freire, Dewey, Mbembe
Every sensation led to the memory of myriad others. Any pattern perceived could
be set beside any other, the relation between the patterns becoming a pattern of
its own, itself to be set aside another and related….1
Music theory has an ideology problem.
That is to say, music theory’s claims of enriching musical experience, its signature meth
ods of scaffolding knowledge (species counterpoint, four-part writing, tonal harmonic
function as a kind of narrative staging), and its insistence on its value as a tool for better
interpreting the music it describes have failed to imprint themselves in the brains, ears,
voices, and fingers of music students. Music theory’s claims may or may not be true: that
is not what is at stake here. But students have largely resisted its call: music theory, for
many or most, remains a confusing or irritating hurdle, in the way of and more or less ir
relevant to their primary practices. And not just students feel this way: Heidi Westerlund
and Lauri Väkevä emphasize the degree to which theory is perceived negatively within
certain communities of practice: “[f]or a practicing arts educator, the relationship be
Page 1 of 22
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tween theory and practice is often unproblematic: theory is considered to be irrelevant

for good practice.”2
There are exceptions, of course, and teachers are thrilled every time a student hears the
call and responds by signing up for that elective class or doing that honors analysis
project or, best of all, enthusiastically relaying how a concept they learned changed the
way they approached a musical passage for the better. Many music theory teachers have
experienced all of these scenarios, and while they are what makes the whole project of
music theory instruction worthwhile, they are also noteworthy for their comparative rari
ty.
Is the issue simply a PR problem? That seems unlikely: music theory teachers have not
only developed masterful techniques for presenting their materials and structuring their
teaching and learning activities to make them maximally engaging for students, but
demonstrate infectious enthusiasm for the subject matter and the project of teaching it.
We are exceptional proselytizers.
But then again, there are largely unacknowledged PR issues that do need to be contend
ed with. These have everything to do with how the relationship between music theory and
musicking practices is understood. And that relationship has everything to do with how
the word “theory” is being used, and what it means for the various stakeholders in the
knowledge-production project. To say there is little agreement on what “theory” means is
to comically undersell the problem: the issue is seldom touched. This is in part because
music theory—especially in undergraduate teaching and learning contexts—encompasses
such diverse topics as “music fundamentals” (itself a highly fraught term in need of con
testation), solfège and other aural skills frameworks, accounts of harmonic and melodic
syntax generalized from across a very small range of Western European and Euro-dias
poric compositional practices, systems for identifying formal archetypes and deviations,
and the like. Furthermore, the “music” of music theory establishes those Western Euro
pean and Euro-diasporic practices as an unmarked norm: the only music that does not re
quire within the academy an adjectival qualifier like “popular” or “world” or “folk” or “im
provised.” This is a process made invisible by universalizing, by making concepts like
pitch, interval, scale, meter, and accent foundational, and by overdetermining notation.
The invisibility and utter pervasiveness of these normalizing practices mean they tend to
go unnoticed; at any rate, they usually are not the reason for various distrusts of music
theory, at least overtly. But they do underlie those reasons, since the ways these normaliz
ing procedures construct their centers around certain practices and concepts banishes
other practices and concepts—including those in which many students are fluent—to the
margins or beyond.
Where is the “theory” in all of this? I have long begun my first-year music theory courses
with a class discussion on what everyone involved understands “theory” to mean, what
else it can mean, and what various definitions and usages might have to do with what
they think we will be embarking on as the class unfolds. We talk about folk-wisdom defini
tions: “well my theory is…”. We talk about what theory means in science, as a provisional
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explanation agreed upon by a community of expert insiders, at least until a better one re
places it. We talk (with as little jargon as possible) about critical theory, as different ways
of framing the world and the relationships that constitute it, and as different ways in
which meaning emerges depending on how the framework shifts. And we talk about how
what we’re doing in class is—to their slight disappointment—really what we might call
pre-theory; as I put it, “some of the things you need to internalize before you can then go
do music theory.” That’s not particularly helpful, of course, except perhaps to clarify what
we’re not going to be doing in class, but I also try to get them immediately interested in
the project of continually keeping the question open rather than striving to seek answers.
Importantly, the idea of pre-theory holds no matter what version of theory one might ori
ent toward when talking about music theory. Also importantly, all of these provisional def
initions are equally valid and equally relevant to music theory.3
The key point to clarify on that first day is that I am not the one with the answers. The on
ly thing that sets me apart from everyone else in the room is that, in all likelihood, most
of the time, I am the one who has been thinking about the project of continually keeping
the question open for longer. That’s all.4 The next most important thing is to radically re
sist the idea that there are particular right answers; rather, there are only provisional
right answers that function within and express very particular material conditions. The
idea here—my active project, the most important thing I can be tending in these early mo
ments together—is that our task is to displace the teacher–student hierarchy in favor of a
micro-community of practitioner-theorists—in favor of a community of praxis.
Praxis is very often misrepresented in contemporary scholarly literature, as a kind of

highbrow synonym for practice. I am using it in a precise technical sense, however, fol
lowing Paulo Freire’s usage. For Freire, praxis is a fluid, ever-moving synthesis of action
and reflection, not in a simple dialectical relation in which each stage builds upon the
previous (action–reflection–action–reflection, etc.), but in which each is intimately imbri
cated with the other. Reflection is a form of action and vice versa.5 Action as a form of re
flection is a bit harder to conceptualize. It requires keeping in mind a robust conception
of embodied, enacted cognition or of radical materialist philosophy, in which, as Chiara
Bottici describes, not only is the mind “just the body that is felt and thought,” but also
that a kind of inverse holds true: imagination (the focus of Bottici’s argument) is “a form
of bodily awareness” that furthermore requires “awareness of both our body and the oth
er bodies with which we come into contact.”6 While there is ample room in Freire’s peda
gogy for traditional solitary modes of reflection—reading, thinking, writing—the reflec
tion that constitutes transformative praxis is, for the Brazilian theorist, necessarily dialog
ical and situated within a community of practice. One of the questions I will be asking be
low is where those communities ought to be, for music theory, and how to nurture them.
Reflection in praxis is dialogical. What is the role of the teacher in this dialogue? Certain
ly not Nietzsche’s Socratic “fencing master” wielding reason at the expense of affect and
validating only that knowledge which can be demonstrated dialectically. Debate is not dia
logue, and critique is not knowledge. Dialogue means relinquishing power, relinquishing
the very role of “teacher”: Freire’s originary move is to reconstrue teachers and students
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as “teacher-students” and “student-teachers,” each participant fully able and encouraged

to play both roles, each fully committed to growth through the dialogic process.7 In music
studies, including music theory, this means meeting students where they are—geographi
cally, politically, culturally, aesthetically—striving to understand the structures and drives
that animate and contextualize their musicking practices, and working from there to en
rich and expand those practices. As Freire explains, “the requirement is seen not in terms
of explaining to, but rather dialoguing with the people about their actions. In any event,
no reality transforms itself, and the duty…of ‘explaining to the masses their own action’
coincides with our affirmation of the need for the critical intervention of the people in re
ality through praxis.”8
This, then, leads to the question: what does all this have to do with Public Music Theory?
The short answer is: everything. The longer answer unfolds across three interrelated
fields of activity, which the remainder of this chapter will develop. First is a prolonged
commitment to the folding of theory and practice inextricably into one another, as praxis.
This will involve rethinking from the ground up what music theory is, what kinds of activi
ties it encompasses, and what kinds of desired results it expresses. It involves, concur
rent with this rethinking, constructing new forms in which teaching and learning can cre
atively proliferate according to the individual needs of its participants.
The second field of activity is the dialogic project itself. As a community of what we might
now start calling (following Freire) “radical music theorists” develops an ever-evolving
sense of what music theory should be and do, we engage in rich, thoughtful dialogue with
those that are being asked to use it, in line with (and stemming from) their needs as indi
viduals within their communities of practice. We listen to our interlocutors and we adapt
our methods, examples, assessments, and outcomes accordingly. We resist stultifying
“learning outcomes” determined (sometimes years!) ahead of time, just as we resist the
empty signifiers like “critical thinking” that so often comprise those outcomes (or, if we
like them, we fill them properly with prompts for meaningful, manifold engagement). Im
portantly, this dialogue is not simply with students in the classroom: communities of prac
tice are fluid, their borders are porous, and they overlap in untold ways. Performance and
academic colleagues, local educators, former and potential future students, local culture
bearers, amateur and professional musicians of all stripes: there are many actors for
whom music theory ought to matter.
The third field of activity turns to the mattering of (public) music theory, which involves
thinking creatively and productively about how music theory can be harnessed to trans
form musicking worlds and can extend beyond music into ever bigger transformative ac
tions. To paraphrase one of Karl Marx’s most famous aphorisms: music theorists have on
ly interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. This is where the
Freirean project I have been hinting at becomes a radical music theory: in what ways can
music theory contribute to liberatory politics? I take as axiomatic the possibility that it
can, so it is important not to interpret my question as a metaphor or a utopian overselling
of music theory’s transformative potential. But that potential is absolutely predicated on
the first two fields of activity; music theory’s current ideologically-neutered status is, at
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least in the eyes and ears of diverse arrays of practitioners, too far from social reality to
have an impact, transformative or otherwise. But for just one example, if we believe
(which we may or may not) Jacques Attali when he suggests that musical structures antic
ipate social ones, and if we believe (which we ought to) that what music theory does best
is clarify and explain musical structures both ordinary and wildly divergent, then music
theory ought to have a role in diagnosing social structures in quite nuanced and produc
tive ways. But not only that: if we believe that theory and practice are fully implicated in
one another and have the potential, as praxis, to lead toward the creative production of
new forms, textures, and expressions, then music theory ought to have something to say
about new liberatory social formations.
All three of these fields of activity, which I will develop in turn through the rest of this
chapter, are founded on experience and interaction. As John Dewey defines it, “an experi
ence is always what it is because of a transaction taking place between an individual and
what, at the time, constitutes his environment.”9 Music theory is an interactive endeavor,
and so, of course, are its objects: musical compositions, performance practices, listening
relations. For Dewey, learning happens through interactive experience in a “situation”;
situations, in turn, are both what we find ourselves in and what we strive to seek out, to
understand (through analysis of “significations” rather than simple empirical facts10), and
to transform. “[T]he concrete situation which begets oppression must be transformed”11;
our first step ought to be recognizing how the core music theory classroom—in its func
tionings, but more important, in its significations—might just be one of those concrete sit
uations in need of transformation.
Interlude 1: Artistic Research

Artistic research has not taken root very firmly in the United States, but it has
been developing rapidly in Europe, Latin America, Canada, Australia and New
Zealand, Singapore, China, and elsewhere. In the UK and Australia, it is often re
ferred to as “practice-based research”;12 in Canada “research-creation.”13 A com
mon thread through all artistic research endeavors is that research involves the
production of new knowledge (premised on the idea that knowledge is something
produced rather than, say, unearthed), and that acts of artistic creation can be,
under certain conditions, forms of knowledge production. As Erin Manning de
scribes, making is a form of thinking, and research-creation as a form of inquiry
requires an understanding of the role of the body and bodily actions in constitut
ing knowledge forms and processes. The hyphenated forms I have foregrounded
here are important: there are endlessly valuable artistic practices that are simply
that: art; similarly, there are many significant music-scholarly practices that don’t
reach the hyphenated space of artistic research, and don’t intend to. By carefully
and creatively bringing theory and practice into dialogue, one implication of a rad
ical music theory project is to transform it fundamentally into the sphere of artis
tic research. This, I believe, is the proper place for music theory, even at the level
of core undergraduate teaching and learning: if music theory is transformed into a
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nimble, fluid, adaptive project of situated, dialogic, critical, action-oriented praxis,

then from day one it will be directed toward the production of new knowledges,
specifically as a project of attending to, reflecting on, practicing, and sensitively
redirecting existing knowledges.14
Theory and Practice

Conventional wisdom—especially that of those who refuse music theory’s appellation—is
that theory follows practice. Some innovative activities occur, enacting a rupture with
earlier practices, and the next generation of theorists figure out what it was that hap
pened. Innovation sediments into a new practice, which is eventually disrupted by the
next innovators, rinse and repeat. Theorists don’t have a whole lot of agency in this ac
count, or if they do their agency is dependent on the “makers.” It shouldn’t have to be
said that this model is largely divorced from reality. The model does, however, do real
work in the world, and contributes to the general mistrust of theory among different mu
sicking constituencies.
Freire does not use the words theory and practice, preferring “reflection” and “action.” In
his model for critical pedagogy, “action and reflection occur simultaneously.”15 This marks
a break with the conventional story, but the nature of the break, why it is needed, and its
implications require some context and explanation. By dislocating action and reflection
from their traditionally separate domains, Freire is posing a new kind of pedagogical
model that begins—and continues—with dialogue. I’ll turn to dialogue as praxis in the fol
lowing section. Specifically, Freire seeks to transform the conventional teaching and
learning situation in which theory operates in the service of and informs practice. Theory
in this case has been carefully developed in advance, and is brought to bear on the latter
in order to enrich practice. Both theory and practice operate teleologically: there is a spe
cific goal shared by participants, which could be the unearthing of knowledge or the de
velopment of a particular skill. Freire wishes to replace this model with one in which the
ory and practice are folded into an active, creative project of posing problems. “Problem”
has a specific technical meaning: problems are particular kinds of situations or orienta
tions in which teacher-students and student-teachers come into dialogue around a shared
object of inquiry. The object mediates the dialogue, and both theory and practice emerge
from the lively process of working through the problem.
Dewey, similarly, locates problems as foundational spaces for imbricating theory and
practice. For Dewey, problems are “the stimulus to thinking” that emerge within a radi
cally present situation.16 The conditions found (and enacted) in present experience then
point toward new problems, which “[arouse] in the learner an active quest for informa
tion and production of new ideas.”17 It is the teacher’s job to ensure that problems
emerge that are within the capacities of the students. New information and new ideas
then “become the ground for further experience in which new problems are presented.
The process is a continuous spiral.”18 This is a powerful concept: from here Dewey em
phasizes a connection to “real life” that troubles the naïve idea that the classroom is
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somehow outside of real life, again, resisting the artificial distinction between theory and
practice.
Freire’s (and likewise Dewey’s) concept of problems as the spacetime of dialogic reflec
tion and action (or theory and practice) is deeply phenomenological. “Consciousness is
something to be grown and tended; consciousness is consciousness-of (and proceeds
through intentionality); knowledge is produced through communication (and communica
tion transcends language). Communication operates through transindividual acts of co-
cognizing: the “cognizable object … intermediates the cognitive actors.”19 Again, like any
phenomenological engagement, this is a highly creative process that produces ever new
knowledge-configurations, and a resistant process that, if tended, disallows sedimenta
tion into new laws. The teacher’s task is clear: “[t]he role of the problem-posing educator
is to create, together with the students, the conditions under which knowledge at the lev
el of the doxa is superseded by true knowledge, at the level of the logos.”20 Stefano Har
ney and Fred Moten emphasize a similar lawlessness as an activist imperative: “[w]hat
the beyond of teaching is really about is not finishing oneself, not passing, not completing;
it’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and
passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the
kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood.”21 This is precisely not
to deny agency, of course. But it is to open onto a dialogic, transindividual agency that re
sists (neo)liberal atomization and the kinds of solipsistic realities that we so often find
ourselves in. For Freire, as for Harney and Moten, reality is not simply unveiled; it is not
there to be found, through hermeneutic practice. Reality is produced relationally. The
teacher’s role—again, simply as the one who has been keeping the question open for
longer—is to help supply students with tools to critically intervene in reality and to act in
ways that draw creative reconnections, always opening onto new possibilities.
Music theory’s particular stance on the theory–practice relation is ripe with potential for
and as transformative praxis. But a few preliminary moves are needed to get there. The
first move is to recognize students as individuals that more or less fail to conform to the
essentialized “types” ascribed to them (you’re a chamber music violinist, you’re an opera
singer, you’re a jazz drummer, etc., with all the conscious and subconscious assumptions
that accompanies each of those labels). Every individual student will or will not adhere to
a given program of expected needs in a unique (and changing) constellation of ways.
Even the most homogeneous roomful of Beethoven-focused pianists will (and should) ap
proach their musicking practices differently and will have different uses for the ways the
ory and practice converge. Multiply this exponentially for a complexly diverse student co
hort. It also means understanding musicking practices on their terms, and understanding
that ready-made explanations will always fail to completely reach musical reality. It
means engendering new valuation systems, many of which will directly contradict and
contest existing ones: notions of structural integrity or organic cohesion or balance ac
cording to Enlightenment (or Classical) principles do untold violence to musicking prac
tices that might not live up to—and that were never intended to live up to!—their aesthet
ic criteria. To this point, I would argue that Schenkerian or neo-Riemannian analyses of,
for example, jazz might actually be more insidious than the continued exaltation of the
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figures of Europe’s white male historicity, since they are essentially making arguments by
exception: here’s an example by an <insert minoritized social group> composer whose
work holds up to the hegemonic valuation system.22 This amplifies a related concern Ngu
gi wa Thiong’o makes explicit, which is how within a colonial regime vernacular utter
ances are made to speak on behalf of hegemonic ideas and ideals: “African languages
were still meant to carry the message of the bible. Even the animal tales delivered from
orature, which were published by these presses in booklets, were often so carefully se
lected as to make them carry the moral message and implications…of a white God in hu
man affairs.”23
I am not using the word “violence” above lightly. Achille Mbembe theorizes three modes
of colonial violence that ought to be taken seriously when considering the ways in which
our disciplinary assumptions and teaching practices often function. First is the assertion
of a “right to conquest” that would both “create the space over which it was exercised,”
and in doing so validate its own existence, proclaiming its “sole power to judge its laws.”
The second mode is to legitimize the first in order to “justify its necessity and universaliz
ing mission—in short, to help produce an imaginary capacity converting the founding vio
lence into an authorizing authority.” And third is the inauguration of a broader cultural
imaginary that would “ensure this authority’s maintenance, spread, and permanence.”24
Translating Mbembe’s concepts into music theory terms reveals precisely how theory and
practice have been strategically untethered such that the former is able to claim hege
monic power over the latter. Music theory (I’m using the disciplinary term as a singular
pronoun intentionally) has very carefully created the space within which it becomes, by
its own performative proclamation, necessary—music teaching and learning needs music
theory since music theory alone can judge the laws by which its musics function. This
turns into the invention of capacities—well of course students need to master four-part
writing: it makes them better musicians. The axiomatic nature of this claim amounts to a
master class in fabulation, and serves to reinforce music theory’s self-proclaimed hege
monic position. And the process continues: music theory functions as an auto-reifying
force and as a continuous invention of benchmarks for what it means to be a properly lit
erate musician.
Most important, though, this is violent because of the way hegemony displaces and even
erases constellations of cultural- and microcultural practices, sweeping them away with
its powerful reifying machine. Here Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s forceful language be
comes valuable: “[i]n order for the settlers to make a place their home, they must destroy
and disappear the Indigenous peoples that live there…. Settlers become the law, sup
planting Indigenous laws and epistemologies.”25 As a hegemonic juridical force, music
theory remakes individual musicking practices and perspectives in its own image. It do
mesticates and civilizes those practices, which in the process are “made pre-modern and
backward. Made savage.”26 Or as Ngugi wa Thiong’o puts it, “[w]e have already seen
what any colonial system does: impose its tongue on the subject races, and then down
grade the vernacular tongues. By doing so they make the acquisition of their tongue a
status symbol.”27 A music-theoretical praxis, proceeding in dialogue between teacher-stu
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dents and student-teachers around shared problems imagined and implemented from
within that dialogic spacetime, is absolutely crucial for beginning to redress some of the
violence the reifying machine has wrought.
At the time of this writing, the discipline of music theory is at an exhilarating and precari
ous crossroads. There is real talk of decolonizing curricula and method, of diversifying
repertoires and entrance requirements and assessment models, of deconstructing and
even dissolving canons. There is even, at the margins, some talk of un-disciplining music
studies by turning to hybrid inquiry-spaces like Artistic Research, which among other
things aim specifically to collapse the theory-practice distinction in untold productive
ways.28 Much excellent work is happening, and of course there remains much to be done.
Interlude 2: Theory as Practice

In 2018, I presented a concert that I dubbed “Celestial Africa,” built around new
arrangements or reimaginings of works by Black American composers on outer
space themes. The performers were all white (hard to avoid in a bourgeois school
of music in the US southwest) but the composers—John Coltrane, Julius Hemphill,
Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and Mary Lou Williams—were black. I played multiple roles
in the production: I transcribed the source materials, arranged or recomposed
them for the new context, solicited the performers, ran rehearsals, and conducted
and played for the concert. There was an overt Afrofuturist orientation to the pro
gram, which was developed overtly during a pre-concert public conversation I fa
cilitated immediately prior to the performance.
From the standpoint of (public) music theory, something this concert aimed for
was to nurture modes of rethinking what musical “works” are and what consti
tutes their boundaries. The framework through which many of us have become ac
customed to relating to composers and their compositions is as interpreters that
make audible different meanings that are somehow already there in the musical
structures and their histories of performance practices. But it is always already a
hallmark of African and Afro-diasporic musical ontologies (as with many global
oral/aural traditions) to be much more radically manifold: so much so that a given
performance of a “work” might not always be immediately apparent to an out
sider. The nominally same Ashanti song from Ghana might be hardly recognizable
two villages down, or fifty years later. Likewise with a blues song from the early
twentieth-century United States. Duke Ellington wrote many new arrangements of
his hit songs, and the history of jazz arranging is one of producing new glosses on
existing material, sometimes quite radically different from the original. “The
preservation of black social life is articulated in and with the violence of innova
tion.”29 This was largely the theme of the pre-concert discussion. For the seven
“pieces” we performed at the concert, different modes of engaging “the work”
emerged. Hemphill’s “Dogon A.D.” unfolded like a relatively straightforward jazz
performance, with a fairly faithful rendition of the song’s head and collective im
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provisation over its one-chord, asymmetrical groove. Likewise Sun Ra’s “Tapestry
for an Asteroid,” which was mostly a reorchestration of the original version. At the
other end of the spectrum, we played Williams’s “Virgo” (from her 1945 Zodiac
Suite) in a brand new arrangement that I made for the occasion, which extended
Williams’s already broadly trans-historical approach to musical syntax and signifi
cation into further contemporary registers via metric modulations and other com
positional techniques, and rhythmic and metric impulses from contemporary Black
American practices.
As public music theory, then, this project thematized the musical work as, essen
tially, a motile multiplicity. This is true of all musical works, of course, but not al
ways overtly so. By engaging the work of African-American composers, we were
able to show, through practice, how what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari de
scribe as a minoritarian language is always, necessarily collective.30 Ellington,
Mingus, Sun Ra, Taylor: they did not just compose music, they composed for and
with specific collaborators—Harry Carney, Dannie Richmond, John Gilmore, Jimmy
Lyons—all of whom had an active hand in the creation of the “work.” Further
more, collaborations transcend simple diachronic teloi. Like the acts of renaming
that mark rites of passage across many African and Afro-diasporic cultural prac
tices, the kinds of fabulatory reinscriptions that define new arrangements in jazz’s
manifold histories are immanent transformations that expand identity without los
ing it.
Dialogue
I asked earlier where music theory’s praxis should be located. The answer needs to be—
and this is what makes this project a specifically public music theory—out there in the
communities, with the people, operating in dialogue with many different interlocutors.
The first community—the first “public”—of public music theory is the students in a music
theory class. Every student comes from somewhere, brings a history and genealogy and
an array of skills, interests, passions, expectations, questions, fears. Each student brings
a cultural perspective that has coalesced from a life of negotiating many overlapping mi
cro-cultures, each partially conditioning the subject that particular individual is in a
process of becoming (or resisting).
In the early pages of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire underscores the impor
tance of coming to know, through dialogue, those individual and cultural and micro-cul
tural perspectives and how they have come to be shaped:
It was nevertheless imperative, first, to know whether this thesis and proposition
coincided with the reading of the world of [those] to whom I was speaking; sec
ond, it was incumbent upon me to be more or less abreast of, familiar with, their
reading of the world, since only on the basis of the knowledge in its content, or im
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plicit in it, would it be possible for me to discuss my reading of the world, which in
turn maintains, and is based on, another type of knowledge.31
Given time and other structural constraints, it may be impossible to really get to know all
of one’s students in a sufficiently rich way, but from a Freirean perspective that may not
quite be the point. Dialogue toward emancipation (which is what I’m getting at here) pro
ceeds as the posing of a problem around a shared object, which, in the problem’s enact
ment, collapses theory and practice into one another as new creative activities. The ter
rain of the shared object-space is where the multiple genealogies of different participants
can meet and proliferate into ever-new expressive constellations. This is all part of the di
alogic process, part of the getting-to-know, through musicking praxis. Each individual’s
genealogy has an effect on how the problem is posed, negotiated, and worked through.
Imagine, for example, a problem posed through collaborative dialogue that involves co-
composing a new piece of music according to criteria provided by all the members of a
class project, each expressing a desire to better understand some aspect of music that is
important for their own personal growth. The instructor’s initial prompt might simply be
to ask each participant to provide one germ of an idea that connects to something they’re
working on. One student might be interested in microtiming displacements in hip-hop
beat making. Another is working with their private teacher on music-text relations in or
der to make better-informed interpretative decisions. A third is struggling to work
through a particularly challenging passage in a recital piece they’re preparing. A fourth
has recently discovered hexatonic techniques for jazz improvisation. A fifth is striving to
internalize how harmony functions in neo-soul music. And so on. The conversation be
comes one of imagining ways in which these different inquiry spaces can have something
to do with one another, through the enactment of a shared project. The students and in
structor communicate with each other and slowly develop a working plan based on the
compositional “problem” they have created together. They then set out to work through
that problem. Importantly, the point is not to “solve” the problem, whatever that might
even mean, but to see what directions it leads their creative “making-as-thinking” as indi
viduals and as a collective. Ideally, they should design the output together too, which will
be different for each group of participants. Part of that output could be reflective, each
participant thinking and writing about how they grew or changed through the process.
Another part could be outward-reaching: finding and interviewing someone from each
student’s extended community that they could gain new insights from. Throughout the
process, the instructor might be prompting the others toward music-theory “making-as-
thinking,” which is to say, toward modes of thinking and doing that continually keep in
mind questions of musical structure and process, including potentially unthought-of ones.
As Gloria Ladson-Billings insists, “the multiple ways that this notion of pedagogy shifts,
changes, adapts, recycles, and recreates instructional spaces [ensures] that consistently
marginalized students are repositioned into a place of normativity.”32
It is crucial, then, as a specifically public music theoretical praxis, to move beyond the
classroom to the different communities and micro-communities that its participants con
nect to (or that they might wish to connect to). The task of individuals reaching out within
Page 11 of 22

their extended communities to help engage a shared musical problem is a possible step.33
Another is to reach out to culture bearers and invite them into the dialogue—to the class
room, of course (and pay them!), but also on their home turf, on their terms (but also fol
lowing Freire’s imperative not to simply invert the power dynamic and create a new cen
ter). This amounts to a next-order displacement of music theory’s civilizing/domesticating
force. Dialoguing with folk wisdoms, indigenous sciences, minor gestures, and fugitivi
ties; taking seriously the ways diverse modes of thinking and doing can potentially dis
place hegemonic forms. And then practicing that fugitivity: “minor science is animated by
the praxis of fugitivity”; “a mystically inflected science, a fugitive science [is] oriented to
ward the praxis of freedom.”34 The music theorist has a facilitating role to play here too:
do the work of bringing people together, and then get out of the way; learn through dia
logue; become a teacher-student; continually reexamine oneself and one’s beliefs; relin
quish power; but also engage in critical thinking, embuing that effort “with a profound
trust in people and their creative power.”35
This is not just a social justice imperative either: dialogue has crucial aesthetic implica
tions. As Ngugi wa Thiong’o suggests, “[t]he most important breakthroughs in music,
dance and literature have been borrowed from the peasantry…. It is the peasantry and
the working class who are changing language all the time….”36 It’s not really about inclu
sion or diversification at all: it’s about co-learning, enriching experience, creating new sit
uations and new problems and new collaborative spaces and techniques, about shedding
deeply engrained assumptions and value systems, about wonder, about remaking the
world.
Freire’s dialogic project, built carefully around concrete, local, practicable problems, is a
way to subvert and remake music theory’s colonizing, civilizing, domesticating force. It is
a disruptive project, and must be. As Moten and Harney write:
[w]e are disruption and consent to disruption. We preserve upheaval. Sent to ful
fill by abolishing, to renew by unsettling, to open the enclosure whose immeasur
able venality is inversely proportionate to its actual area, we got politics surround
ed. We cannot represent ourselves. We can’t be represented.37
Representation is, of course, one of music theory’s most powerful moves. Music theory’s
politics as a civilizing or enclosing force—colonizing the land, enacting the enclosure, but
also inaugurating the undercommons—“we got it surrounded” now inverted; its manners
and modes of regulating bodies are in trouble, because it’s quickly becoming clear that
music theory’s own undercommons (for just one example, those musical parameters typi
cally banished to “secondary” status) doesn’t submit well to subjection by quantification
or formalization. Hence the insubstantiality of analyses of timbre or the reduction of mi
crotiming elasticities to deviations from gridded norms. Music theory is not yet up to the
task of engaging its own undercommons, because it has not yet divested from its repre
sentational imperative. But this just amplifies the need to rethink music theory as an es
sentially public, diverse, nimbly creative practice that resists at every moment of its en
Page 12 of 22

actment any formalization-drive or taxonomical impulse, in favor of a radical envoicing of

difference and subalternity.
In fact, and in all seriousness, there might not be a better place to practice “thinking [and
doing] with the people” than music theory.38 The stakes are relatively low: lives and liveli
hoods are not in the balance. But more important, “the people” are themselves a loose- or
tightly-knit community of experts at doing whatever it is they are doing, or they are on
self-determining paths toward expertness. But that “whatever is it they are doing” is im
portant because it varies wildly. A violinist with professional chamber music aspirations.
A guitarist interested in the therapeutic value of singing for people with Alzheimer’s. An
organist stepping cautiously into the world of stylistic improvisation. A composer with a
keen ear for video game action sequences. A saxophonist obsessed with Ernst Levy’s har
monic concepts. A trombonist tackling the melodic and rhythm world of choro. What can
a music theorist possibly have to say to all of these different individuals with diverse
needs and interests?
What should be apparent is the paramount importance of resisting top-down teaching-to.

Of assuming that there are ready-made canonical knowledges that all members of this mi
cro-community need to internalize and “master.” This is work that must continue to be
done through any decolonial project. Instead of assuming that certain kinds of historical
ly-grounded (European, white, male, bourgeois) practices—four-part writing, diatonic and
chromatic harmonic function, prolongational techniques, Formenlehre—are, axiomatical
ly, the right tools for remaking the worlds of diverse musicking participants, we need to
be assessing—through prolonged, multidirectional dialogue—what it is each participant
needs for their current and future goals (including yet-unimagined ones). Assuming from
the start that there are ready-made templates that can send them on their paths is not on
ly paternalistic in the extreme, it enacts precisely the kind of situation that alienates the
student from their own musicking self. As James Baldwin would characterize the entirely
unsuprising response, “it’s a great shock. It’s very hard to relate yourself to this. You
don’t know what it means. You know—you know instinctively—that none of this is for
you.”39
Interlude 3: Alienation
I come from a white suburban working-class background. I went to public school,
did pretty well, could have been a more engaged student. I came to music through
band, and not long after through jazz band, which grabbed me somewhere around
age fourteen. I had had no substantial music background prior to taking up the
trombone in grade six, an instrument a friend and I picked largely because it
meant we got to sit in the back. I was already a voracious listener. My musical in
terests in grade six ran along a wide range of rock and punk styles. My musical in
terests by early high school were a version of the same, along with an increasingly
intense affinity for jazz and, soon, experimental improvised music. I had very sup
portive music teachers all along the way, and by the time I commenced university
Page 13 of 22

study, where I became a double major in trombone performance and music theory
and composition, I had what were considered to be very strong fundamentals. I
liked music theory very much, and I was good at it.
It is highly likely, as I began university study, that I had never heard an entire
Mozart symphony, Beethoven string quartet, or Brahms sonata. I most certainly
had never heard a Verdi opera, and Schubert’s songs were entirely unknown to
me. I was familiar with precisely two compositions by Tchaikovsky, one by
Shostakovich (the fifth symphony, first movement only), and a smattering of other
“masterworks,” because I had played wind ensemble transcriptions of them. I had
deeply internalized a few works by Stravinsky and Varèse because Frank Zappa
named them as influences, but Mingus’s, Sun Ra’s and Taylor’s fugitive logics
were much closer to my being.
The biggest part of my self-education during that time, then, became redressing
what I perceived as a crippling lack, a deficiency I needed to overcome that other
wise would prevent me (so I learned to understand) from achieving my goals of be
coming a top-caliber professional musician. I heard the hegemonic call, I believed
that there were right repertoires and frameworks and methods and modes of be
ing and doing, I developed opinions about which Chopin performance was best
and argued about the inevitability of Schoenberg’s self-proclaimed emancipatory
innovations. I labored to reshape my mind and body to be the kind of musicking
subject I felt I needed to be. I colonized myself, in a word. But I was, and am, al
ways a stranger in that world….
Theory Matters
All music study, including music theory, aims at constituting bodies as musicking bodies.
We all begin as comparatively unmarked bodies from a musicking perspective, and as we
hear, move to, and possibly begin to play music our bodies change. Sometimes our actual
physical shapes change.40 We transform our bodies through iterative processes, rehears
ing needed gestures until they become internalized as habit, as part of our body-vocabu
lary. All of this is conditioned by what Chiara Bottici calls a “complex dynamics of imagi
nary identification” through which one comes to recognize not only the what-they-are-be
coming but also what is understood to be correct or proper becomings: images of what
one thinks they ought to be like when they have achieved a particular task. “We constant
ly meet and recognize or misrecognize ourselves in certain body images.”41 As Bottici de
scribes, processes of individuation unfold through the ways mental (i.e. body images) and
material (i.e. bodies proper) forces interact; this interaction is what Spinoza calls
“imagination” (which Bottici re-theorizes as the “imaginal,” which “does not make any on
tological assumptions as to the real or unreal status of images”).42 There is a built-in futu
rity here: the mutual impingements of body images and bodies open onto the possible.
What happens, then, when certain kinds of images are centered and others foreclosed?
Page 14 of 22

This is the very real danger of a music-theory pedagogy that centers certain constella
tions of practices, methods, repertoires, and histories, and makes others invisible or
worse. It amounts to the enactment—the iterative, body-constitutive performance—of cer
tain “right” ways of hearing, doing, and learning. Mbembe refers to this as “establishing
specific relations of subjection.”43 These become images that imprint on bodies and con
struct them as certain kinds of musicking bodies that hear according to specifically these
schemas, that move in specifically these kinds of digital configurations, that cleave to
specifically these kinds of aesthetic trajectories. In more insidious terms, this “leads to a
sense of dissociation from the body, which becomes reified, reduced to an object with
which the person ceases to be immediately identified.”44
The challenge—and this amounts to another way of expressing the breadth/depth conun
drum that all diversification projects face—is how to nurture pedagogical situations that
remain radically open to diverse modes of hearing, doing, and learning, but to do so in a
way that can “guarantee continuity in space and time to such ongoing processes.”45 This
is a highly impractical project. But as Emma Goldman writes, “[a] practical scheme … is
either one already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under the existing
conditions; but it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to.”46 The truly radical
project, for music theory as for any critical pedagogy, ought to enable “the freest possible
expression of all the latent powers of the individual.”47 This requires creating and main
taining situations in which each individual is “free to choose the mode of work, the condi
tions of work, and the freedom to work”48 in order to maximize personal growth within
their community contexts. This aligns with my own long-held desideratum of discovering
what kinds of needs and desires each individual student brings to their study of music,
and then helping them facilitate the conditions within which they can do that, ever better.
(Dewey describes this as “the progressive development of what is already experienced in
to a fuller and richer and also more organized form.”)49 But Goldman’s position goes
much further: to enable the “freeest possible expression” also means helping each stu
dent open onto un-thought-of possibilities, onto the what-else of creative expression.
Here Freire’s pedagogical intervention (and likewise Rancière’s) becomes increasingly

important. The teacher’s role, for Freire as for Rancière, is a kind of facilitator, a purvey
or of prompts to move thought and action beyond the known, to stimulate new thought
that leads to new knowledges. Freire proceeds dialogically and dialectically. I’ll save di
alectics for another essay, but Freire’s dialogical method is absolutely crucial to his
project.
Music studies, music theory included, do need to be about reshaping bodies. But the
process needs to unfold in consultation with practitioners, in communities, according to
the particular wants and needs of individuals as they are coming to understand them, and
directed toward creative outcomes. Should music theory also be about transforming those
outcomes, and thereby transforming communities and the individuals that constitute
them? Yes, probably, but only to the extent that consent is given, that understanding of
the stakes is clear, and that methods are invented dialogically rather than imposed. A rad
ical music theory is an exploratory space, a play-space, a transformation of paideia into
Page 15 of 22

paidia.50 Dewey’s three-part inquiry structure—observation, recollection, judgment—is a

useful program, in the particular way it shapes a notion of freedom that empowers the in
dividual to transcend their own limitations: a “power to frame purposes, to judge wisely,
to evaluate by the consequences which will result from acting upon them.”51 In other
words, to tend a kind of freedom that empowers one to visualize the task to be accom
plished and to imagine the steps needed to accomplish it, and to select and enact the spe
cific sub-tasks (in order, in learning and teaching situations, to develop the necessary
skills) to move toward that task, to always keep alive the possibility that the goal will
change as new information is acquired and new situations are passed through (or enact
ed). This amounts to a practicable form of inquiry into, for example, new music-cultural
contexts. Throw yourself into the middle of the situation; listen, watch, observe (including
observing how others do so). Note similarities and dissimilarities with other experiences.
Here the teacher can inform, advise, and warn by asking leading questions, providing
prompts for further observational perspectives, helping chain questions together to en
rich and intensify the field of experience. And analyze by synthesizing observed data with
accreted past knowledges, all in pursuit of understand what that which one is experienc
ing signifies. What does it mean, in its contexts? What else can it mean?
These are music-theory questions. And this returns me to my original question about
what music theory is in the first place. What kind of a theory it is, what its objects are,
what kinds of problems it ought to be in the business of posing, what kinds of tentacular
connections it can be making with diverse communities of practice. How it can refuse the
decoupling of theory and practice, the classroom and “real life”; how it can make itself in
commensurable with the colonizing/civilizing/domesticating desiderata that animate tra
ditional centerings of repertoires and impositions of methods and assumptions of valua
tion criteria.52 How it can insist that empty acts of “diversifying” actually harm the criti
cal pedagogical project if they do not trouble the discipline’s epistemological foundations;
as Robin Attas warns of tokenistic gestures like “adding a Clara Schumann example to a
chromatic harmony course without questioning why there’s a chromatic history course in
the first place.”53
And most of all, to be vigilant about keeping the question open. By resisting the telos of
solution-based thinking, by refusing the theory–practice bifurcation, by facilitating dia
logue within and across communities, music theory becomes radically, necessarily public;
radically, necessarily activist. Dewey believes that this kind of project points the way to
“the measures and policies by means of which a better social order can be brought into
existence.”54 This comes full circle, back to the production of new forms of sociality, now
emerging through project-based, participatory, experiential, situated teaching and learn
ing. Might this lead to the fulfillment of Attali’s prophetic mandate for musicking forma
tions?
The public music theory I am starting to outline here demands numerous transformations
of conventional formulations, some subtle changes of orientation, some quite substantive.
It means enacting the move from teachers and students to teacher-students and student-
teachers. From solution-based to problem-based teaching and learning. From a concep
Page 16 of 22

tion of “theory to practice” to praxis, as action and reflection folded irreducibly into one
another. From knowledge, as something pre-defined and circumscribable to knowledges,
as essentially partial, perspectival, situated, and always just a little out of grasp. From the
comfort of disciplinary and pedagogical enclosure to a fugitivity that continuously opens
onto new potentials. From the artificial detachment of the classroom and “real life” to
rich embeddedness in and across multiple communities. From staying with the known
and living within the comfort of expertise to “staying with the trouble” and refusing to
ever let the question close.55
To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the
way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind
of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will sim
ply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to
perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to exam
ine society and try to change it and to fight it—at no matter what risk. This is the
only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.”56
Acknolwedgements
pp. 120–121 from Tales of Nevèrÿon © 1993 by Samuel Delany. Published by Wesleyan
University Press. Used by permission.
Further Reading
Allsup, Randall E. Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Educa
tion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016.
Aruzza, Cinzia, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser. Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto.
New York: Bloomsbury, 2019.
Bottici, Chiara. Anarchafeminism: An Introduction and Guide. New York: Bloomsbury,

2021.
The Combahee River Collective. “The Combahee River Collective: A Black Feminist State
ment.” In Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, edited by Zillah R.
Eisenstein, 362–72. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1979 [1977].
Dewey, John. The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action.
New York: Putnam, 1929.
Freire, Paulo. Education for Critical Consciousness. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos, Louise
Bigwood, and Margaret Marshall. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Garrison, Jim, Stefan Neubert, and Kersten Reich. John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education:
An Introduction and Recontextualization for Our Times. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2012.
Page 17 of 22

Hess, Juliet. “Decolonizing Music Education: Moving Beyond Tokenism.” International

Journal of Music Education 33, no. 3 (2015): 336–47.
hooks, bell. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. New York and London: Routledge,
2003.
hooks, bell. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. London and New York: Rout
ledge, 2010.
Lind, Vicky R. and Constance L. Mackey. Culturally Responsive Teaching in Music Educa
tion: from Understanding to Application. New York: Routledge, 2016.
Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Palmer, Thorne. “Critical Pedagogy for Music Education.” Thinking in Music (blog), Au
gust 7, 2013. https://thornepalmer.wordpress.com/tag/paulo-freire/.
Robinson, Dylan. Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. Min
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
Sarath, Edward. Music Theory Through Improvisation: A New Approach to Musicianship

Training. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Sarath, Edward W., David E. Myers, and Patricia Shehan Campbell. Redefining Music
Studies in an Age of Change. New York and London: Routledge, 2017.
Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River
Collective. Haymarket Books, 2017.
Walker, Robert. “Music Education Freed from Colonialism: A New Praxis.” International
Journal of Music Education 27 (1996): 2–15.
Semetsky, Inna and Diana Masny, eds. Deleuze and Education. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni
versity Press, 2013.
Yunkaporta, Tyson. Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. Melbourne:
The Text Publishing Company, 2019.
Notes:
(1) Samuel Delany, Tales of Nevèrÿon (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1993),
120–21.
(2) Heidi Westerlund and Lauri Väkevä, “Who Needs Theory Anyway? The Relationship
Between Theory and Practice of Music Education in a Philosophical Outlook,” British
Journal of Music Education 28, no. 1 (2019): 37–49, at 37.
Page 18 of 22

(3) For a range of positions on the vast conceptual apparatus that the term “music theo
ry” is capable of setting into motion, see Per F. Broman and Nora A. Engebretsen (eds),
What Kind of Theory is Music Theory? Epistemological Exercises in Music Theory and
Analysis (Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2007).
(4) Secondarily, my role is to help keep things on track toward the goals we collectively
set for ourselves: this is where the power dynamic (paid instructor v. paying students)
comes in, but also provides the beginning of a template for mitigating that dynamic.
Jacques Rancière makes this important point when he dislocates “intelligence” from
“will,” arguing that the hierarchical assertion of one intelligence over another can only
ever produce what he calls “stultification” (abrutir; “to render stupid, to treat like a
brute”—see Kristin Ross’s translator’s note to Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmas
ter: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1991), 7), but the relationship of one will over another can produce liberatory growth. A
student, Rancière suggests, “may need a master when [their] own will is not strong
enough to set [them] on track and keep [them] there” (13).
(5) Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary Edition, trans. Myra
Bergman Ramos (New York: Continuum, 2005), 51.
(6) Chiara Bottici, “Bodies in Plural: Towards an Anarcha-feminist Manifesto,” Thesis

Eleven 142, no. 1 (2017): 91–111, at 98. This formulation has been expressed many differ
ent ways, for example as “affective neuro-physio-phenomenology” in Giovanna Colombet
ti, The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2014); as “making as thinking” in Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture (Durham: Duke Uni
versity Press, 2016); and as “thought in action” in Barbara Gail Montero, Thought in Ac
tion: Expertise and the Conscious Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
(7) Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 80.
(8) Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 53. The internal quote is from Georg Lukács,
Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought, trans. Nicholas Jacobs (New York: Verso,
2009 [1970]), 35.
(9) John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Touchstone, 1997 [1938]), 43.
(10) Dewey, Experience and Education, 68.
(12) Linda Candy, Practice-Based Research: a Guide (Sydney: Creative and Cognition Stu
dios, 2006).
(13) Manning, Minor Gesture.
(14) Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the
Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. “Knowledges”
Page 19 of 22

in the plural (and as always contingent, partial, and situated) is a subtle but important
concept that I borrow from Haraway.
(17) Ibid.
(18) Ibid.
(20) Ibid. By “doxa” Freire means law-like prescription, whereas “logos” refers to knowl
edge produced through communicative acts, which may transcend verbal discourse.
(21) Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black
Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 28.
(22) For a critical engagement with another version of this white-savior mentality, see
Benjamin Givan, “Gunther Schuller and the Challenge of Sonny Rollins: Stylistic Context,
Intentionality, and Jazz Analysis,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67 no. 1
(2014): 167–237. Ethnomusicologist Deborah Wong puts forth another position on the
very concept of valuation, with which I find myself sympathetic: “The longer I have been
an ethnomusicologist, the less interested I have become in whether a piece of music or its
performance is ‘good’,” since “such qualitative judgments are inescapably rooted in…
Western art ideologies.” Deborah Wong, “Ethnomusicology and Critical Pedagogy as Cul
tural Work: Reflections on Teaching and Fieldwork,” College Music Symposium 38 (1998):
80–100, at 82.
(23) Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Liter
ature (Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1981), 67.
(24) Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002),
25.
(25) Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization:
Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40, at 6–7.
(26) Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization,” 5.
(27) wa Thiong’o, Decolonising, 72.
(28) See Luca Chiantore, “Undisciplining Music: Artistic Research and Historiographic
Activism,” IMPAR: Online Journal for Artistic Research 1, no. 2 (2017) and Chris Stover, “A
música como pesquisa nômade (Music as nomad research),” Atos de pesquisa em edu
cação 14, no. 3 (2019).
(29) Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 18.
Page 20 of 22

(30) Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana
Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 17.
(31) Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Robert
R. Barr (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014[1994]), 16.
(32) Gloria Ladson-Billings “Culturally Relevant Pedagogy 2.0: a.k.a. the Remix,” Harvard
Educational Review 84, no. 1 (2014): 74–84, at 76.
(33) See J. Daniel Jenkins, “Music Theory Pedagogy and Public Music Theory,” in The
Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy, ed. Leigh VanHandel (New York and
London: Routledge, 2020), 382–89, at 387, for an overview of some recent ways in which
music theorists and their classes have engaged in praxis-based community dialogue.
(34) Britt Rusert, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American
Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 18, 141.
(36) wa Thiong’o, Decolonising, 68.
(37) Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 20.
(39) James Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers,” in Collected Essays (Boone, IA: Literary Classics
of the United States, Inc., 1998), 680.
(40) See Tanya Kalmanovitch, “The Homunculus,” Practice: The Magazine of the Institute
for Creativity (2020).
(41) Bottici, “Bodies in Plural,” 98.
(42) Ibid., 99. See also Chiara Bottici, Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and
the Imaginary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
(43) Mbembe, Postcolony, 24.
(44) Sylvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation
(Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004), 135.
(45) Bottici, “Bodies in Plural,” 99.
(46) Emma Goldman, “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For,” in Anarchism and Other Es
says (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1911), 55.
(47) Goldman, “Anarchism,” 61.
(48) Ibid.
Page 21 of 22

(50) I work through the relationship between these concepts in Chris Stover, “Affect, Play,
and Becoming-Musicking,” in Deleuze and Children, ed. Markus Bohlmann and Anna
Hickey-Moody (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 145–61, extending and
transforming a formulation by Charles Keil (“Paideia con Salsa: Ancient Greek Education
for Active Citizenship and the Role of Afro-Latin Dance-Music in our Schools,” M.U.S.E.
Letter 2, 10–15).
(52) See Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization,” 35.
(53) Quoted in Chris Stover, Leslie Tilley, and Anna Yu Wang, “Rebuilding the Music Theo
ry Curriculum: Opportunities and Issues,” Engaging Students 8: Beyond Western Musical
ities (2020).
(55) Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthuluscene (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2016).
(56) Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers,” 678.
Chris Stover
Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University
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Radical Music Theory: Abstract and Keywords

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Radical Music Theory

Radical Music Theory

Subject: Music, Music Theory Online Publication Date: Feb 2022

Abstract and Keywords

Keywords: radical pedagogy, anarchafeminism, decolonization, Freire, Dewey, Mbembe

Music theory has an ideology problem.

Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 16 February 2022

tween theory and practice is often unproblematic: theory is considered to be irrelevant

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Praxis is very often misrepresented in contemporary scholarly literature, as a kind of

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as “teacher-students” and “student-teachers,” each participant fully able and encouraged

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Interlude 1: Artistic Research

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nimble, fluid, adaptive project of situated, dialogic, critical, action-oriented praxis,

Theory and Practice

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Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 16 February 2022

Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 16 February 2022

Interlude 2: Theory as Practice

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Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 16 February 2022

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Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 16 February 2022

actment any formalization-drive or taxonomical impulse, in favor of a radical envoicing of

What should be apparent is the paramount importance of resisting top-down teaching-to.

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Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 16 February 2022

Here Freire’s pedagogical intervention (and likewise Rancière’s) becomes increasingly

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paidia.50 Dewey’s three-part inquiry structure—observation, recollection, judgment—is a

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Bottici, Chiara. Anarchafeminism: An Introduction and Guide. New York: Bloomsbury,

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Hess, Juliet. “Decolonizing Music Education: Moving Beyond Tokenism.” International

Sarath, Edward. Music Theory Through Improvisation: A New Approach to Musicianship

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(6) Chiara Bottici, “Bodies in Plural: Towards an Anarcha-feminist Manifesto,” Thesis

(7) Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 80.

(10) Dewey, Experience and Education, 68.

(11) Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 50.

(13) Manning, Minor Gesture.

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(15) Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 128.

(16) Dewey, Experience and Education, 79.

(19) Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 80.

(26) Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization,” 5.

(27) wa Thiong’o, Decolonising, 72.

(29) Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 18.

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(35) Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 75.

(36) wa Thiong’o, Decolonising, 68.

(37) Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 20.

(38) Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 132.

(41) Bottici, “Bodies in Plural,” 98.

(43) Mbembe, Postcolony, 24.

(45) Bottici, “Bodies in Plural,” 99.

(47) Goldman, “Anarchism,” 61.

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(49) Dewey, Experience and Education, 73.

(51) Dewey, Experience and Education, 64.

(52) See Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization,” 35.