Music Theory as Polyphony: Interrogating the Long Tradition of Dialogical Theorizing

While the concept of polyphony arose to describe musical texture, the attention it draws to the interaction of distinct voices has proved to be fruitful more broadly. Building upon Bakhtin’s characterization of Dostoevsky’s novelistic discourse as “polyphonic,” this presentation analyses how interlocutors interact to convey knowledge in music-theoretical texts presented in dialogue form. It begins by investigating different approaches to voice and character in dialogues from antiquity to the early modern era. I propose a continuum anchored on one end by the abstract, “erotomatic” style of many early-modern textbooks (in which unnamed voices alternate questions and answers) and on the other by a baroque-era hybrid of the novelistic theory treatise. This continuum provides a basis for characterizing other significant music-theoretical dialogues, ranging from catechistic works to Platonic dialogues and their Renaissance imitators. I then examine the problematic position of the musical example within dialogues: since they resemble transcriptions of oral conversation, to acknowledgeing thea need for visual aids would threaten to undermine the genre’s integrity. Some authors respond to this issue by adhering doggedly to dialogic conventions, eschewing all non-verbal examples, while others portray notated music simply as further transcription of orally delivered content. Intriguingly, authors occasionally thematize the examples within the fictional frame, with interlocutors yearning for a visual example, or with a character calling attention to the notations on his writing tablet. The presentation concludes by examining an award-winning book on music theory from the 1990s, Harald Krebs’s Fantasy Pieces, large sections of which are composed as novelistic dialogues. I show that these exemplify my presentation’s two main themes, analysing how Krebs’s use of voices and characters resembles the literary output of Robert Schumann (whose compositions are Krebs’s primary focus), and situating his creative use of musical diagrams within the long tradition of dialogue-based theorizing.

Oct 2, 2026