Projects
"Music, Mind, and Body, 1650-1900"
This project traces the role of music in theories of the mind and body, as well as the ways in which understandings of the mind and body have been historically applied to explain the effects of music during the period bookended by Descartes and Charcot.
Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory
This anthology aims to capture the range and variety of human music theorizing by offering excerpts (with commentary) of more than three hundred documents selected from across the world’s musical traditions.
"The Hammers and the Bow: Western Polyphony, the Metaphysics of Unity, and the Concept of Harmony"
Heraclitus, invoking the tensed string of a bow, conceived harmony as the stasis and equilibrium of conflicting forces held in continuing tension. Plato in the Symposium rejects this view in favor of a concept of harmony in which all conflict must already have been resolved.
"Hearing with the Mind: Proto-Cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment"
This book synthesizes two of the most exciting current approaches to music: cognitive psychology and social history, by focusing on the remarkable work of John Holden (1729-1772).
Database of Sources in the History of Music Theory
This open-access database features digitized original-language versions of all of the music-theoretical sources included in the Global Anthology of Sources in the History of Music Theory, and will then gradually expand to include sources beyond the reader.
Afterlives of Pythagoreanism: Musica theorica and Its Legacy
This book examines the dissolution, and at the same time some especially noteworthy ramifications, of speculative music theory in the Pythagorean style, the central component of what the Middle Ages and Renaissance called musica theorica.