Inspired by Naomi André’s vision of an “engaged musicology” (2018), the members of the Engaged Music Theory Working Group collectively assembled the following bibliography to encourage music scholars to engage directly with issues of cultural politics—race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, intersectionality, decolonization, and disability—in their research and teaching. We especially highlight scholarly work that confronts the centralized, historically Eurocentric and heteropatriarchal framing of North American music theory. Thus we include scholarship that has explicitly and significantly intervened in our field’s established practices at the time of publication, especially in terms of subject position, topic, methodology, and repertoire. While this list is not meant to be exhaustive, we hope it offers a starting point for engaged music theoretical research. It focuses primarily on music theoretical work as well as directly relevant scholarship from musicology and ethnomusicology.
The bibliography purposefully omits work by scholars who do not self-identify as music theorists or musicologists, but whose work is indispensable to the aims of our group. A list of these authors would include Sara Ahmed, Daphne Brooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Saidiya Hartman, Lisa Lowe, Fred Moten, José Esteban Muñoz, Christina Sharpe, Eve Tuck, and Alexander G. Weheliye, among many others. We strongly encourage anyone who is interested in the goals of our group to read and cite this body of scholarship.
Please contact the administrators of this group at engagedmusictheory@gmail.com if you require assistance accessing any of the items on this list.
New Item Suggestions
Please use this form to suggest new items for this bibliography. You will need to provide a full citation using Chicago footnote style, 17th edition, as well as suggested keywords.
Important Notes on the Search Function
The search bar will filter the bibliography so that it only includes items that contain your word(s). This search includes both the complete bibliographic entry (“black” will include any item from Black Music Research Journal or with “Black” in the title or author name, for example) and a set of invisible keywords that we have entered for each item. All keywords are constructed as one word.
Suggested keywords include: blackmusic, colonialism, disability, embodiment, feminism, gender, hiphop, historyoftheory, improvisation, indigenousmusic, interculturality, intersectionality, jazz, metatheory, methodology, nonwesternmusic, pedagogy, philosophy, popularmusic, posttonal, publicmusictheory, queertheory, race, rhythmandmeter, schenker, sexuality, timbre, tonality, 16thcentury, 17thcentury, 18thcentury, 19thcentury, 20thcentury, and 21stcentury.
Enter the keyword “primer” for a list of texts the group considers foundational to Engaged Music Theory.
Entering numbers such as 198 will produce a list of anything published in the 1980s (useful), but will also include anything with a page range that includes these numbers (less useful).
Search items are additive: entering “queer 198” will include items that include “queer” anywhere in their bibliographic entry or keywords, published in the 1980s, and any page ranges that include “198.”
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