This article studies the values animating the profession of music theory in the North American academy. Focusing on the creation and development of the field’s institutional home, the Society for Music Theory, Inc., I argue that professional music theory’s homemaking project was first built—and continues to operate—on exclusionary and assimilationist world-building practices. To conclude, I ask how we might pursue homemaking and world-building otherwise in coalition with contemporary abolitionist scholarship.
In this rejoinder, I elaborate on the uncomfortable and foundational call of “Making a Home of the Society for Music Theory, Inc.”: the necessity of abolition as at once the destruction of our colonial/capitalist worlding and the building of a life-affirming world otherwise. Bringing to the fore a couple of backgrounds to my writing—early career transience and building community with unhoused residents of Norman, Oklahoma—I clarify that my call is not for inclusion (and enclosure) within this colonial/capitalist worlding, but our collective liberation from it. Ultimately, I hope this response might inspire readers to build life-affirming, abolitionist worlds wherever they find themselves.
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