Introduction

Despite the diversity of musical thought across historical and cultural spaces, much of what is nominally titled "music theory" concerns only a small sliver of this intellectual tradition, to the neglect of source documents from many of the globe's language groups and communities.And while music theorists have increasingly looked to interrogate and move beyond the field's historic Eurocentrism (Ewell 2020; Li 2022), endeavors to do so are limited by three challenges.First, publications and teaching materials on traditions beyond those of the Western European art music tradition and its adjacents are considerably more difficult to locate, scattered as they are across disparate archives, libraries, journals, private unpublished records, interviews, and oral pedagogies and histories (Cunningham et al. 2020).Second, many of the world's musical cultures record and disseminate musical knowledge primarily through oral/aural means, which have not conventionally been viewed as legitimate modes of scholarly insight within Western academia (Cusick 1994; Mahuika 2019).And third, many music-theoretical discourses live in linguistic enclaves, which limits the possibility of building relations among music theory's global communities and lends itself to the privileging of knowledge production in European languages.