Who is the implied “we” of music theory? To whom does the discipline – i.e., “you” – feel accountable? Speaking not as someone beholden to the discipline, but rather as a member of its surrounding sprawl, its “orphanage” (as one of SMT’s founders once characterized our unruly horde of disciplinary migrants from “jazz, feminism, world music, and cognition”) – and also as a music-maker who creates, studies, and teaches – I aim in this talk to sort through some of the proliferating anxieties around music studies today. Zooming out from and historicizing this relatively young discipline, we can ask, what did music theorists wish to do? Before the internet, before downloads and streaming, even before the repercussions of desegregation and non-Western immigration had thoroughly caught up with the US academy, and more or less willfully self-isolated from many of the upheavals in the humanities of the last five decades – what did music theorists presuppose about what they could do and should do? And, what could a more expansive “we,” orphans included, do together?

To this end, I employ a critical concept of musicality – a generalized, embodied (which is to say, affective and temporal) relation that is entangled with but categorically distinct from both “music” (the object) and “musicking” (the activity). The goal is to pry loose some of the assumptions of music studies and propose a larger space of collective study, practice, and action.