Early Modern Tuning, Temperament, and the Natural Philosophy of Empire

This presentation examines early modern interactions between music-theoretical writings on tuning and consonance, natural philosophy (systematic, scientificunderstanding of the natural world), and the colonization of the American tropics. Part 1 argues that early modern music theorists leveraged justificatory frameworks inherited from contemporaneous natural philosophy to conceptualize utilizing tonal spaces and subduing dissonances (like keyboard temperaments’“wolf fifths”). Early modern natural philosophy heavily emphasized ideas of “improving nature,” and maximally utilizing natural resources—key rationalities buttressing the colonial project. Part 2 examines how concepts of tuning and consonance served early modern colonizers’ descriptions of exploiting and “improving” the tropical Americas. Europeans commonly described non-Europeans’ musics in the American tropics as discordant and mistuned, supposedly demonstrating how nature and its “uncivilized” peoples needed to be maximally utilized, managed, and “improved.” But other descriptions treated Indigenous and enslaved African peoples’ musics as well tuned and consonant—metaphors for non-Europeans’ being harmoniously integrated into colonization’s project of dominating earthly nature. This study addresses the natural philosophy of empire both to better articulate the political-economic dimensions surrounding music theory’s adjacency to natural philosophy (and history of science) and to better situate music theory’s relation to the colonial past alongside early modern epistemological trends.

Andrew Chung comes to us today from the University of North Texas, outside of Dallas, where he has served as Assistant Professor of Music Theory since earning his PhD from Yale in 2019. His work addresses how histories of musical thought and practice disclose the colonial, enslavement-fueled underpinnings of ecologically destructive capitalism, and how the intrusion of planetary time into contemporary consciousness with the arrival of the Anthropocene epoch troubles how we narrate the musical past and the history of music theory. You can read his publications in Music Theory Online, Sound Studies, Resonance, Music Theory Spectrum, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and in the October 2024 issue of the Journal of Music Theory. Andrew is a co-convenor of the Music Studies in the Anthropocene Research Network, which has held annual virtual conferences since 2022. He was named one of the recipients of the Society for Music Theory's Emerging Scholar Award in November 2022.

Facilitated by ETCEI, funded by EDII