Towards a Diachronic Music Theory

This proposal argues for a quantum shift in the way we theorize about music. In the past three decades, music theory has been dominated by synchronic theories based upon typologies.

The value of these theories notwithstanding, there are three significant “blindspots” that arise from a purely synchronic perspective.

First, synchronic approaches are incapable of explaining trends – they at best capture “snapshots” along a timeline, but cannot explain processes: how one snapshot progressed to another.

Second, music written between two snapshots is evaluated in synchronic approaches either according to a defunct model, or according to one that had not yet come into existence, as often occurs with the music of the generation between Bach and Mozart. Third, such snapshots mask trends during their period of interest behind a false façade of stability.

I propose to address this problem through a diachronic methodology, designed to focus not on definitions and synchronic typologies, but rather on processes of change over time. To this end I will carry out a corpus study of unprecedented scope, covering 1700 works between 1680-1819.

In two overlapping subprojects based upon the same corpus, I will examine trends in four fields: large-scale form; phrase structure; cadences (musical units signifying closure); and schemata (stock musical phrases).

Tracing the diachronic process of change across the decades of the corpus, I will reveal the forces that propelled music from one style to another, and through this, the tensions with which composers were faced and to which they responded.

Furthermore, my novel diachronic approach will enable a more flexible mode of accounting for the fuzzy limits of theoretical definitions and histories.

Lastly, with its original conceptual premises and its corpus-based methodology, this project will serve as a model for a new approach to music theory, encouraging the embrace of a diachronic perspective in other fields of music theory too.