Description
John Walter Hill (2024) defines “cognate music theory” as one which shares its fundamental basis, assumptions, and vocabulary with the theory of the period in which a given music was created and which would thus be comprehensible to the musical participants of the past, but which answers to modern requirements for degrees of thoroughness, consistency, and precision that are generally not found in the theory of the period when viewed from a modern perspective. In ethnographic terms, cognate music theory combines emic and etic, insider and outsider perspectives. More generally speaking, a cognate music theory is any outsider framework of understanding, interpretation, or recreation that arises out of sympathetic familiarity with the relevant insider framework. This contribution illustrates this approach as applied to research on eighteenth-century oratorio music in Enlightenment Rome and draws on its original academic context (the Musicology Division at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign).
