Introducing Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory

Abstract

Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory, edited by Thomas Christensen, Lester Zhuqing Hu, and Carmel Raz seeks to capture the range and variety of human music theorizing with two fundamental interventions. First, it aims to expand the range of available sources over time and place by moving beyond the canon of European theoretical treatises on which the history of music theory, as practiced in the Anglophone and Germanophone academy at least, has traditionally focused. Thinking Music will therefore include a greater number of music-theoretical texts and inscriptions drawn from musical cultures around the world from antiquity to ca. 1914. Excerpts from these sources will be presented in English translation (many for the first time) along with scholarly annotations, commentary, and relevant bibliography. Second, we seek to move beyond textual sources as the sole repository of music-theoretical knowledge by considering more ephemeral sources, material artifacts, and non-discursive evidence. Rather than imposing a fixed definition of music theory in advance, we instead wish to encourage a broader conception of what it means to “theorize” in music. In the ca. 300 diverse entries in our volume, we seek to show the manifold ways in which the notion of “music theory” might serve as a productive and creative heuristic for musicians and scholars alike. In other words, we hope to expand the field’s purview so as to recognize and appreciate music-theorizing wherever and however it has occurred, to look for new sources of music theory and theorizing, and to learn to listen in other ways.

Biography

Carmel Raz is an assistant professor of Music at Cornell University, where she studies the interrelations of music, mind, and body during the emergence of modern European musical cultures. She holds degrees from the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, the University of Chicago, and Yale University. Her recent book, Hearing with the Mind: Proto-Cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2025) sheds new light on the history of music perception by focusing on music theory in the Scottish Enlightenment. Other ongoing projects include The Attentive Ear: Sound, Cognition, and Subjectivity, co-edited with Francesca Brittan and forthcoming with the University of Pennsylvania Press, as well as Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory, a digital anthology co-edited with Thomas Christensen and Lester Hu, which will be published by the University of Chicago's OPS as a digitally native, open-access book in 2026.