Who is Allowed to Be a Music Theorist? Sarah Mary Fitton and <i>Conversations on Harmony</i> (1855)

As a field, we must work to recognize and elevate music theorists traditionally excluded from our histories of music theory.In this article, I introduce and examine one such excluded figure, Sarah Mary Fitton (ca.1792-1874).Fitton's Conversations on Harmony (1855), a series of dialogues between the fictitious young Edward and his mother, was popular with students and amateur musicians in Great Britain and France during the latter half of the nineteenth century.Study of her work (Shteir 1996; Rainbow 2009;Maust 2022) has centered almost exclusively on its pedagogical merit and not its music-theoretical content.I take Fitton's Conversations beyond its usual music-educational context: while affirming all of her work as music theory, I highlight Fitton's distinctive approach to augmented sixth chords, which encompasses generation, resolution, enharmonic reinterpretation, modulation, and chromatic-scale harmonization.Her work represents an important contribution to our historical understanding of chromatic harmony.I also consider several crucial questions about Fitton and her Conversations.How might Fitton's gendered dialogue both reinforce and subvert contemporaneous stereotypes about gender and professionalism?Why has her pedagogically oriented Conversations been largely ignored by the field of music theory?Why do Fitton and other women-such as Anne Young (Raz 2018a, 2018b), Oliveria Prescott (Lumsden 2020, 2022), Nanine Chev, Louisa Kirkman, Fannie Hughey, Clare Osborne Reed, and Amy Dommel-Diny-traditionally not count as music theorists?How can the study of these authors and those from other marginalized communities help us reframe our music-theoretical questions?How can such studies help us understand and reform our methods of discipline formation?