Who Does the Society for Music Theory Gather?

Abstract

An important question in Stephen Lett’s provocative article is K’eguro Macharia’s, “Who is gathered by your invitation?” (2021). Lett outlines how the founders of the Society for Music Theory staked out territory for the discipline to establish theorists as separate from composers, musicologists, and pedagogues, and how they assessed who was to be invited by determining what theory as a discipline was and what it was to be. He then discusses how others have been (and still are) invited or excluded based on principles present since the founding of the society and offers suggestions for how to make SMT as an institution more welcoming by using the ideas of homemaking and world-building. My response addresses two topics: first, that the narrow view of the discipline of music theory present at its inception created an anti-pedagogy bias that exists to this day; and second, that this narrow view is perpetuated by graduate programs, which can and should be changed in order to achieve the goal of diversification of the discipline and its members.