MUSI 011, 012, 013, 014, 115: Harmony, Counterpoint, & Form (SC)

by David Forrest, Severine Neff, John Reef. Annotated bibliographies. "Since ancient Greece, the discipline of music theory has offered explanations for the nature of musical phenomena and the fundamental principles governing their use. As early as the Middle Ages, musicians utilized such explanations to analyze specific musical compositions. However, analysis as a subdiscipline of theory burgeoned only centuries later in 19th-century Europe. At that time, conservatory musicians, most often composers, taught theory as compositional craft—counterpoint, harmony, and form. In the mid-1950s, American composer-theorists began reformulating the conceptual basis of the 19th-century European tradition by proposing new explanatory models of musical structure influenced by the developments in contemporary science, philosophy, and linguistics. Their investigations resulted in their advocacy of a music-theoretical discipline centered at universities and composed of professional theorists or composer-theorists who had mastered an essential tripartite core of knowledge: Schenkerian theory and analysis, history of theory, and the pioneering subfields addressing post-tonal music, twelve-tone theory, and set theory. From the 1980s to the present, new paradigms and approaches including the topics of challenges from the New Musicology and music criticism, musical meaning (encompassing approaches from nonanalytic philosophy and semiotic approaches), phenomenological approaches, approaches from literary theory, popular music studies, non-Western approaches, multimedia studies, timbre, cognition, and social issues such as gender, queer, and disability studies, have further expanded the nature and scope of the discipline. Together these rich and varied fields of music-theoretical inquiry offer a scholarly literature unprecedented in Western musical thought."

An extensive article with excellent bibliographies.

2008, by David Russell Williams. "Music Theory from Boethius to Zarlino is a companion volume to Music Theory from Zarlino to Schenker: A Bibliography and Guide by David Damschroder and David Russell Williams (Harmonologia, No. 4, Pendragon Press). Like the previous work, the goal of the volume is to create a logically organized introduction to the major theorists of the time and a thorough review of the scholarly work about these writers. While specialists in the history of music theory may find new materials in these pages, this work is primarily designed for the non-specialist as a practical and basic introduction to the treatises, people, and scholarship of Medieval and Renaissance theory. Winner of the Vincent H. Duckles Award from the Music Library Association."

1991, by David Damschroder. "At last a vast amount of recent scholarship, pertaining to four centuries of theoretical developments including the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods, has been organized systematically in a single volume. In the Dictionary of Theorists, the major section of the volume, individual entries devoted to approximately 250 theorists supply all of the bibliographic information most scholars are likely to require: titles and publication data for each author's treatises and principal articles, as well as titles and locations of manuscripts; lists of translations, facsimile editions, and microfilm copies of each work; a bibliography of articles, books, dissertations, and encyclopedia entries pertinent to an author and his works; and a compilation of modern reviews of the books, translations, and facsimile editions cited. Author, title, and subject indices facilitate access to materials for various research topics in the areas of speculative and practical music theory, and to a lesser yet significant extent, in the areas of acoustics, aesthetics, lexicography, music analysis, musicology, orchestration, and performance practice. A chronology is provided so that the reader may determine at a glance, which authors were active at any point within the centuries covered.