Sonia McCall-Labelle

Around 1932, the Soviet music theory discipline underwent a process of significant institutional restructuring and centralisation, emerging with a distinct focus on music as a sociological phenomenon. These changes are often understood as the product of an external imposition of a Soviet Marxist framework onto the pluralistic research landscape of the 1920s. However, closer investigation of the music-theoretical discourse reveals distinct continuities between attempts to render the discipline more ‘scientific’ that began around the turn of the century and the narrowing of the discipline in the late 20s and early 30s. This project investigates what it meant to do music theory as science before and after the October revolution, and how this ‘scientific’ approach affected the discipline’s object, its relation to other disciplines, and its institutional structures, with particular attention to the wide-reaching science-philosophical debates of the 1920s.