Music Theory Splintered Up, Not Broken Down: The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory. Edited by Alexander Rehding and Steven Rings

Abstract

At the 2020 meeting of the Society for Music Theory, the award for Outstanding Multi-Author Collection went to The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory (hereafter, CCMT). I hope that editors Alexander Rehding and Steven Rings have gotten their chance to pour the champange and trade high fives with each other and the other authors of its 26 chapters. In reading it, I learned and I was exercised; the collection is outstanding indeed—this shall not be in dispute in the pages that follow. There are numerous reviews of the volume already, including an excellent and quite comprehensive four-author undertaking published in Music Theory Online.1 It is to that essay that I would point readers for an in-depth survey of the volume’s contents and achievements. The task that I pursue in this single-author review, however, will not be to document a journey from first recto to...