Redrawing Analytical Lines

This article contemplates the lines that animate our work as music theorists-from the music-analytical systems that shape sound into knowledge to the disciplinary divisions that distinguish us.To begin, I theorize these lines with Karen Barad's concept of agential cuts (2007).For Barad, making agential cuts at once produces knowledge (epistemology), constitutes its objects (ontology), and fosters particular attitudes toward them (ethics)-which she expresses with the term "ethico-onto-epistem-ology."Bringing this perspective to music theory, I frame analysis as not only a form of knowing, but also of relating and world-making.The second half of my article turns to affective autoethnography in order to account for these latent aspects of music analysis.Here, I draw on the collaborative work of Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart (2015; 2019) to define affective autoethnography as self-reflexive writing on experience, feeling, and space.With their writings as models, I offer five vignettes on the worlds that formed around my Schenkerian analysis of J. S. Bach's Prelude in B-flat minor, BWV 891.These examples depict analysis as a practice shaped by agential cuts across a network of bodies.To conclude, I place my vignettes in dialogue with scholarship that attunes to and seeks to remediate the harmful effects of current institutional lives.Alongside this work, I ask us to reimagine how we can write about our acquired disciplinary habits and their effects.In doing so, I hope that we can work toward redrawing lines to construct better worlds.