2 - The responsibilities of nineteenth-century music theory

Summary

While re-examining the charge of ‘wrongness’ against Riemann's harmonic dualism in the previous chapter, I completely omitted from consideration one aspect of music theory that is usually considered crucial, namely the relation of music theory to its musical object. The prevailing view for many contemporary music theorists and analysts is that the decisive criterion is an instrumentalist one: on the most basic level, a music theory is considered ‘right’ if it can tell us something about musical practice, or about a musical composition, that in turn enhances the listening experience. In many ways, this relationship between music theory and music appears so commonsensical – certainly after the establishment of analytical practice as a field of enquiry in the nineteenth century – that it is hard to imagine how this could ever have been substantially different. Harmonic dualism, it would seem, has little chance of ever being ‘right’ in this instrumentalist sense: as has been pointed out almost without fail, music simply does not work upside down – or, as the saying goes, we do not hear it that way.

Such concerns were of little interest to Riemann. Given the comparatively small output of musical analyses among his vast body of music-theoretical writings, it would appear that applying his principles was not a top priority. Moreover, it is striking that aspects of the kind of oppositional symmetry on which harmonic dualism builds play virtually no part in his analytical observations.