Music theory: science of music?

Abstract:
My own experience with interdisciplinary work is in the study of music theory in the 1950s and 60s, and its varying dependence on ideas from the mathematical sciences. Musicology in the United States during this time acquired a (pseudo-)scientific nature; much of which still characterizes some music theory today. The use of fetishized scientific tools for music theory and analysis represents an expression of a last attempt to apply the modernist idea that a universal theory can be developed that could explain all of music on equal terms; before this idea became inconceivable in a Postmodern atmosphere.

This paper looks at these scientific models in their musical and scientific contexts, and particularly at the use of information theory as a tool for music analysis. The mathematical theory of communication was a potent zeitgeist in the 1950s and music theorists, for a time, took it up with zest.

The subsequent demise of this technique was due partly to the resistance against music ‘as a science’, and partly due to a new musicological paradigm (inspired by Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures) being taken up by theorists.

Using the interaction of music theory and information theory as a case study, I outline some of the risks of interdisciplinary work of this kind, especially the use of scientific concepts in non-scientific disciplines; the danger of transferring jargon words from one discipline to another; and how the interaction could be, and still is to some extent today, useful.