Commentary

In recent years, the discipline of music theory has devoted a lot of attention to the role of social and political issues in music-theoretical discourse.Indeed, if there remains "anyone naive enough still to think music theory and analysis . . .are insulated from any social, political, or institutional ideologies" (Christensen 2024, 100), the steady stream of scholarship in response to and/or bolstered by the U.S.'s 2020 racial reckoning (or awakening) attests to the "interconnectedness between music theory and worldview," as Daniel Goldberg ([0.3]) writes.Much of this socially, culturally, and politically informed work, including my own, has focused on how the discipline of music theory has historically aligned itself with a worldview that oppresses people marginalized by race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, and other identity markers (Conlee and Koike 2021a, 2021b; Momii 2021; Boyd 2023; Ewell 2023; Lett 2023; Yust 2024); and/or has shown the potential for music theory to challenge dominant worldviews and the oppressive hierarchies therein (Hannaford 2021;Lumsden 2022;Stover 2022;Yu Wang, 2023).As valuable and path-breaking as this work has been, the vast majority of this work only captures the state of music theory as practiced in the U.S. and Canada, or, in other words, the primary purview of the Society for Music Theory.As a result, much of the sociopolitical discourse we as a discipline have been attending to through our music-theoretical practice has been limited to the political situations we are most familiar with and invested in.Yet, as we know, these global politics extend far beyond what directly impacts us in English-speaking North America, and have influenced, and continue to influence, musical and music-theoretical practices.recovering or creating authentic musical traditions" and a desire "to canonize a musical heritage" (62).