ABSTRACT
Music theory seemed to have suffered a double loss by the end of the seventeenth century. "Music theory" continued to be cultivated by a few scholars throughout the Enlightenment in the model of traditional classical canonics. By the eighteenth century, music theory had become only a shell of its former glory. If one recalls that the traditional Latin translation of "theory"—speculum—also means "mirror," he can begin to understand how historical music theories act as a mirror of past musical intellectual cultures, ones in which the theorist too is reflected as an observer. Johann Forkel's program constitutes an extraordinary change in the meaning of music theory by radically expanding its domain in relation to practical pedagogy and criticism. At the opening of the twenty-first century, there seems little doubt that music theory has once again firmly found its place in the scholarly study of music.
