Colonial Galant 

My fourth book project concerns the teaching of music theory in eighteenth-century Jesuit missions among the Chiquitano Indigenous people.  Located in what was then the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru––now eastern Bolivia––rural Jesuit missions fostered vibrant communities of choral and orchestral performance.  Unlike the heavy Spanish counterpoint practiced in the cathedrals of colonial cities such as Lima or La Paz, mission music was characterized by a lighter, galant sound.  This transparent and elegant style constituted a mixture of Italian, German, and French musical influences.  Perhaps most significant is the ample evidence of Indigenous musical leadership in the missions.  Local systems of apprenticeship trained Indigenous musicians in instrument building, singing, solfège, conducting, and composition.  Their works, persevered in the Archivo Musical de Chiquitos in Concepción, include several large-scale operas and liturgical compositions written entirely in the Chiquitano language and attributed to teams of Indigenous composers.

In “Colonial Galant: Three Analytical Perspectives from the Chiquitano Missions,” (Journal of the American Musicological Society 75/1 (Spring 2022): 129–162) I suggest how the tools of music analysis can help us better to understand the textures of New World colonial encounter.  In this article I am specifically interested in the pedagogy of the galant style, asking how its streamlined simplicity, characteristic homophony, and simple melodic imitations contributed to an effective system of aesthetic imperialism.  Here I am inspired by Kofi Agawu, who has demonstrated how tonality itself was a tool of colonialism in Africa.[1]  The article shows how music analysis can aid in examining various forms of social behavior in the missions, such as the structure of music pedagogy and the group dynamics of public spectacle.  In this, I aim to explain how the galant style helped to produce colonial subjects among the Indigenous population, and also to seduce them into a system of its own reproduction.  Ultimately, the article provides a historiographical re-framing of the European galant style.

Solfège, or training in musical literacy, was another foundational element of music theory pedagogy in the Chiquitano missions.  In “Teaching Music Theory in Colonial Chiquitania,” (in The Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory, ed. Daniel Jenkins), I take a close look at the evidence for a truly unique system of solfège that circulated through these eighteenth-century missions.  I also draw this colonial adaptation of solfège into comparison with what we today call “public music theory”; both are attempts to reappropriate music theory’s systems and methods in order to create a literate musical public.  Sounding a warning to the recent ebullient discourse which seeks to grow music theory’s audience, I argue that it was public music theory that erased Indigenous musicality in colonial Chiquitania.

These two essays represent the beginnings of a larger book project on music making in colonial Chiquitania.  In the broader scope of the book, I’m interested not so much in how the context of colonialism shaped music theory, but in how music theory animated and gave form to colonial power.  The book makes interventions, therefore, into both the history of music theory and in postcolonial theory, asking what these two fields might yet have to teach each other. 

Peculiar Attunements 

Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement in European music theory of the eighteenth century. During that time the affects—or passions, as they were also called—formed a vital component of a mimetic model of the arts. Eighteenth-century critics held that artworks imitated or copied the natural world in order to produce copies of the affects in their beholders. But music caused a problem for such theories, since it wasn’t apparent that musical tones could imitate anything with any dependability, beyond the rare thunderclap or birdcall.

Struggling to articulate how it was that music managed to move its auditors without imitation, certain theorists developed a new affect theory crafted especially for music, postulating that music’s physical materiality as sound vibrated the nerves of listeners and attuned them to the affects through sympathetic resonance. This was a theory of affective attunement that bypassed the entire structure of representation, offering a non-discursive, corporeal alternative. It is a pendant to contemporary theories of affect, and one from which they have much to learn. Inflecting our current intellectual moment through eighteenth-century music theory and aesthetics, this book offers a reassessment of affect theory’s common systems and processes. It offers a new way of thinking through affect dialectically, drawing attention to patterns and problems in affect theory that we have been given to repeating. Finally, taking a cue from eighteenth-century theory, it gives renewed attention to the objects that generate affects in subjects.

Beating Time

Beating Time & Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era chronicles the shifting relationships between ideas about time in music and science from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Centered on theories of musical meter, the book investigates the interdependence between theories of meter and conceptualizations of time from the age of Zarlino to the invention of the metronome. These formulations have evolved throughout the history of Western music, reflecting fundamental reevaluations not only of music but also of time itself. Drawing on paradigms from the history of science and technology and the history of philosophy, author Roger Mathew Grant illustrates ways in which theories of meter and time, informed by one another, have manifested themselves in the field of music.

During the long eighteenth century, treatises on subjects such as aesthetics, music theory, mathematics, and natural philosophy began to reflect an understanding of time as an absolute quantity, independent of events. This gradual but conclusive change had a profound impact on the network of ideas connecting time, meter, character, and tempo. Investigating the impacts of this change, Grant explores the timekeeping techniques - musical and otherwise - that implemented this conceptual shift, both technologically and materially.

Bringing together diverse strands of thought in a broader intellectual history of temporality, Grant's study fills an unexpected yet conspicuous gap in the history of music theory, and is essential reading for music theorists and composers as well as historical musicologists and practitioners of historically informed performance.

I am a theorist and historian of music and culture with particular interests in affect theory, the history of music theory, and eighteenth-century music.  My journal articles have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, Music Theory Spectrum, Eighteenth-Century Music, and the Journal of Music Theory.  My first book, Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era, won the 2016 Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory.  In addition to teaching at Wesleyan, I have also been Visiting Professor in the music departments at both Harvard and Yale. My most recent book, Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical, was published with Fordham University Press (2020).  I am currently serving as the Dean of Arts and Humanities at Wesleyan University. You can find my CV here.