The end of 2020 presents a crucial time to reflect on the challenges that lie ahead for decolonizing and disrupting musicology. While many have flocked to what I call here the “presumed innocence of musical truth” during the time of Covid-19, any move to disaggregate music from political realities—both the contexts within which it was first created, and those that have upheld the musical traditions that are now in place—carries the risk of perpetuating the destructive possibility that loving the canon can also be our alibi for (or, as I propose here, our “claim to innocence” about) why the discipline of musicology has been so slow to engage with antiracist and decolonial debates in a sustained way. Thinking critically about systemic racism at the end of a particularly challenging year, the time is ripe for interrogating how the institutional structures that uphold western art music are still tied to values about aesthetic truths that have yet to be decolonized. In this article I respond to critical race and Indigenous studies theorists Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in their renowned 2012 article “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” by outlining three “moves to innocence” that are prevalent in music academia, followed by a proposed “move to disruption” about musical value that contributes to an actively “decolonizing” musicology. Focusing on the themes of truth and value, I argue that the next decade holds an opportunity to engage with the ideas that might productively disrupt our discipline the most.

In sonata form, the transition module has specific primary functions and labels any other uncommon ones as deformations or, rather, idiosyncrasies. Considering the difference in compositional styles and techniques used between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the latter undergoes a trend explored by some nineteenth-century composers: a development in its transition module, which ostensibly confining it to an idiosyncratic feature or a lower-level default of the transition (Hepokoski and Darcy, 2011). I argue that composers utilized this technique in transitions to foreshadow themes in subsequent modules, yielding an additional function of the transition. This paper examines nineteenth-century sonatas, providing an analytic overview of my findings and introducing a concept I call the “Anticipatory Transition,” offering an additional function to the transition–—distinct from other concepts by previous scholarship. Building off the work of Schenker's concept of “linkage technique” and its contribution to the development of new themes in subsequent thematic modules (Smith, 2007), as well as Schmalfeldt's adoption of Dahlhaus’s’ “processual” ideas (Schmalfeldt, 2011; Carro, 2020), the anticipatory transition is employed through two avenues: first, a literal “copy-and-paste,” and second, a “spun-out” transition. I analyze four case studies that utilize anticipatory transitions in nineteenth-century sonatas. It is important to examine the function of transitions more deeply and explore other possible outcomes because the material within can inform other thematic modules and contribute to the cohesiveness of the work. My analyses demonstrate that anticipatory transitions—profound than mere deformations and limitations—offer a deeper sense of unity and a broader perspective within sonata form.

In 1948, Elliott Carter penned an analysis of his Piano Sonata for Edgard Varèse. His analysis of the first movement, in particular, makes one ask why Carter did not subsume its recurrent two-tempo structure under “first group” of its sonata form. Given Carter’s sophistication, was he experiencing a moment of music historical “agnosia,” since two-tempo expositions inform familiar Beethoven works such as Piano Sonata, op.31, no.2 and String Quartet in Bb, op.130. This paper explores Carter’s “agnosia” by way of internal and external evidence. Internally, it revisits the thematic chart he attached to the 1948 analysis and goes on to posit the idea that the work’s quintal neo-tonality so saturates its thematic network themes as to distort the composer’s analysis of the form, historical precedents irrespective. Externally, the paper compares three works by Beethoven to Carter’s Sonata as regards its two-tempo structure, using concepts borrowed from Hepokoski and Darcy’s Elements of Sonata Theory (1999). Finally, the author revisits writings of Carter and his circle that may explain why his analysis downplayed historical precedents to the Piano Sonata.

The assertions, refutations, and counter-refutations concerning two core pieces of Richard Taruskin’s studies on Russian music—Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5—provide a starting point for discussion about the possibilities, limits, and obligations of musicological interpretation. Moreover, an important aspect of the discussion is the phenomenon of “alternative facts,” both in publication and in pedagogy, and possibly in music itself.
 Taruskin argues against the logical fallacies of overly specific or overly simplistic interpretations, but hesitates to fully interpret certain music himself, thereby participating in the web of alternative facts. Taruskin refutes popular myths about biographical meanings in Tchaikovsky’s symphony, but in so doing, also seems to reject a tragic reading of any kind. He explains away various musical structures and extroversive references, but fails to explore why those elements are in fact present.
 As for Shostakovich’s symphony, Taruskin notes its saturation with musical topics, but ignores their allusive specificity, downplaying their significance altogether for what he calls their transferability. Yet Taruskin himself identifies an allusion to a specific Orthodox hymn, and therefrom draws specific conclusions. His evidence for calling the passage a “literal imitation” is actually flawed, but a truly literal quotation of this very hymn may be present throughout the entire symphony, and may act as a sort of species of alternative fact itself. In any case, something that specific, and its placement in the symphonic structure, deserve notice and demand specificity of interpretation.

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This colloquy, by graduate-student-led collective Project Spectrum, attempts to map out existing discussions around inclusion and equity in music academia, with a specific focus on identifying and analyzing the structures in academia that work against minoritized and historically excluded scholars. 
 Margaret Thomas takes us into the undergraduate music theory classroom, addressing one of the entry points into the music academia pipeline. Thomas proposes two educational theories to make our classrooms more inclusive: universal design for learning (UDL) and equity pedagogy. More importantly, she calls for music pedagogues to be proactive and to address the structural inequities that shape a student’s engagement in and out of the classroom.

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There is very little scholarship that considers questions of queerness in relation to film music, and the scholarship that does (Paulin, 1997; Haworth et. al., 2012; Buhler, 2014; Dubowsky, 2016) tends to approach the subject from a representational standpoint, identifying instances in which the soundtrack participates in the representation of queerness in film. The role that the soundtrack plays in fostering queer engagement with film has been left relatively underexplored. In this essay, I assert that the theories of counteridentification and disidentification as articulated by Jose Esteban Munoz in his groundbreaking queer of color critique text Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Munoz; 1999) have much to offer scholars of film music interested in exploring questions of identification and auditory and/or emotional spectatorship. I will begin by laying out Munoz’s formulation of these theories and then briefly sketch counteridentification’s long history within film music criticism, an academic orientation that sets up Hollywood’s musical norms as the product of an oppressive “culture industry” and the disruption of those norms through modernist European musical practices as liberatory counteridentification (Adorno/Eisler; 1947). With these understandings in place, I will move to a discussion of two U.S. films from the 1970s whose soundtracks present Black audiences with audiovisual experiences that invite counteridentification and disidentification respectively: Blacula (William Crain; 1972) and Ganja and Hess (Bill Gunn; 1973).

This paper considers the representational role of music in theatre, and how music can help to communicate complex elements of ‘lived time’. I extract case studies from Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play (2019), a recent Broadway production which explores the impact in contemporary America of inherited trauma from slavery, by interrogating the sexual power imbalances within three interracial couples. Both characters exhibit musical hallucinations associated with their obsessive-compulsive disorder. I theorize how the musical examples emerge as an indirect emotional and temporal byproduct of the struggles facing two of the characters. I argue that their hallucinations ‘suspend’ lived time, and are an attempt to overcome “restriction, uncertainty, and blockage,” with regard to their intimate relationships (Sara Ahmed 2006, p.139). I consider much of the music in Slave Play to perform a metadiegetic function. The secondary narration, constructed by ‘queer time’, is represented through the two popular musical examples, Rihanna’s “Work” (2016) and Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s “Multi-Love.” Both songs are ridden with intertextual significance, and are integrated meaningfully into the temporality of the play through Harris’ autofictional approach to writing. Slave Play stands at the forefront of a budding genre of theatre, one which largely does away with traditional theatrical convention by blending the distinction between musical and traditional theatre. This requires a novel academic approach—drawing from both musical and traditional theatre scholarship, queer theory, and philosophies of time and music.

This literature review focuses on the history of the Orff-Schulwerk (translated literally as “Orff-Schoolwork”), conceived by German composer Carl Orff as an improvisatory, natural approach to music and movement education. The history of the Orff-Schulwerk and its journey to the United States can be divided into three distinct phases: first, its origins in 1920s Munich; second, a return in the late 1940s via the Bavarian state radio as an approach for children; and its current iteration as an institutionalized methodology in the United States. Broadly stated, the purpose of this literature review is to synthesize primary and secondary sources in such a way that one can become familiarized with the gains and losses the Orff-Schulwerk experienced during each phase of its life, as well as an understanding of key issues surrounding its guiding philosophy and practice, and how these shift over time.