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Colorblind and Tone-Deaf

In November 2019, a controversy broke out at the annual conference of the Society for Music Theory. The plenary lecture, delivered by Hunter College professor Philip Ewell, alleged the existence of elitism, color blindness, ­Eurocentrism, racism, and xenophobia in the field of music theory in North . . . . Continue Reading »

Contrapuntal Order

Around the start of the seventeenth century, a new sense of the word “harmony” emerged. To that point, harmony in music had been produced by the pleasing opposition of two melodies according to the principles of counterpoint. In the 1600s, “harmony” began to denote the non-melodic . . . . Continue Reading »

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