Music Theory’s Therapeutic Imperative and the Tyranny of the Normal

Abstract

Traditional music theory rationalizes abnormal musical elements (like dissonant or chromatic tones or formal anomalies) with respect to normal ones. It is thus allied with a medical model of disability, understood as a deficit or defect located within an individual body, and requiring remediation or cure. A newer sociocultural model of disability understands it as a culturally stigmatized deviance from normative standards for bodily appearance and functioning, analogous to (and intersectional with) race, gender, and sexuality as a source of affirmative political and cultural identity. The sociocultural model of disability suggests the possibility of a disablist music theory, one that subverts the traditional therapeutic imperative and resists the tyranny of the normal. Disablist music theory is music theory without norms, and without a commitment to wholeness, unity, coherence, and completeness—those fantasies of a normal, healthy body. Instead, disablist theory brings the seemingly anomalous event to the center of the discussion and revels in the commotion and discombobulation that result: it makes the normal strange. In the process, it opens up our sense of what music theory is and might be.