This dissertation situates historically a group of philosophical problematics informing a thread of post-World War II American music theory, begun at Princeton University under Milton Babbitt (1916-2011) and his students. I historicize and demonstrate the logics behind, without attempting to explain away, problematic notions from experimentalism to experience, solipsism to ethics. Initially a formalist project, Princeton Theory in the early 1970's underwent an under-discussed Turn toward experimentalism, seemingly rejecting its earlier high-modernist orientation. The dissertation situates this Turn as an auto-critique and provides a variety of hermeneutics for the Turn. I discuss how Princeton Theory before the Turn problematically situated itself as both a logical positivist or empiricist discourse, wherein musical experience plays a foundational role, and a formalist, conceptual, discourse, complicating the claim that Princeton Theorists were unconcerned with music hearing as such. Because musical experience seems to be personal, not sharable, I historicize Princeton Theory's uneven appeals to the notion of solipsism--that only the listening or theorizing "I" exists--and question this position's implications for ethics, arguing that Babbitt and his students have been more concerned with ethics and morality than their formalist commitments may imply. This dissertation offers a sustained discussion and critique of mid-century high-modernist formalism, raising the stakes of our understanding of this foundational discourse for modern music theory by showing its historical situatedness, contentious status even for the practitioners involved, and what claims it may still make on our own musical imaginations.

This dissertation traces the development of the concept of the cadence in the history of music theory. It proposes a division of the history of cadential theorizing into three periods, and elucidates these periods with four studies of particularly significant doctrines of musical closure. The first of these periods is the pre-history of the cadence, which lasted from the dawn of medieval music theory through the fifteenth century. During this time theorists such as John of Affligem (ca. 1100), whose writings are the subject of the first study, developed an analogy between music and the classical doctrine of punctuation to begin to describe how pieces and their constituent parts can conclude. The second period begins at the turn of the sixteenth century, with the innovative theory expounded by the authors of the Cologne school, which forms the subject of the second study. These authors identified the phenomenon of musical closure as an independent concept worthy of theoretical investigation, and established the first robustly polyphonic cadential doctrine to account for it. For the following three centuries theorists frequently made new contributions to the theorizing of the cadence in their writings, as exemplified by the remarkable taxonomy of cadences in the work of Johann Wolfgang Caspar Printz (1641-1717), the subject of the third study. By the early nineteenth century, however, cadential theorizing had largely ossified. Instead, authors such as A. B. Marx (1795-1866), on whose writings the fourth study focuses, only drew upon the concept of the cadence as was necessary in their treatments of newly emerging theoretical concerns, especially musical form. In order to elucidate and corroborate this historical framework, the dissertation’s chapters undertake close readings of the doctrines of musical closure put forth by John of Affligem, the Cologne school, Printz, and Marx. The theoretical contributions contained in these sources are interpreted and contextualized in light of the non-musical discourses upon which they draw, and through interrogation of the relationship between the cadential ideas they espouse and contemporaneous musical practice. In doing so, the dissertation reveals discontinuities in the concepts and functions of cadential doctrines in historical music theories, and provides new possibilities for understanding and experiencing musical structure.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität zu Köln. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 251-271) and index.

Project (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Instructional Psychology and Technology, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 95-96).

Thesis--University of Otago. / Includes index. Photocopy of typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [269]-274).

Issued in part as inaugural dissertation, Halle. / "Literatur": p. [136]-138.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität zu Köln. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 251-271) and index.

Issued in part as inaugural dissertation, Halle. / "Literatur": p. [136]-138.

Thesis (M.M)--University of Michigan, 1944.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2008. / "Graduate Program in Music." Includes bibliographical references (p. 426-447).