Modeling Musical Analysis

Music theory has recently seen burgeoning efforts to make the field more inclusive and diverse. One prominent response involves a concerted effort to collect musical examples by historically marginalized composers for use in the classroom. Less has been done, however, on behalf of the scholars whose work is taught in our classrooms. This collection addresses this concern: scholarship taught in the music theory classroom is often dominated by one particular cultural reality, and this collection is a step toward changing that paradigm by bringing together short essays written by marginalized scholars who model analytical writing for students using a variety of music theories and genres from diverse regions of the world, including for example China, India, Japan, North and South America, and Turkey.

The essays represent current music analytical trends in a substantial breadth of genres, including ballet, chamber music, film music, jazz, musical theater, opera, oratorio, orchestral music, popular music, video game music, and vocal music. Modeling Musical Analysis marks an important step in making the field of music theory, the classroom, and the study of music in general more inclusive by amplifying the representation of, and substantive contributions made by, scholars of color.

Kimberly Goddard Loeffert is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Virginia Tech.
John Peterson is Associate Professor of Music Theory at James Madison University.