ABSTRACT
This chapter evolved from a Graduate Seminar directed by Margaret Bent at Princeton University during the Fall of 1988, thus owing something to both her scholarship and her provocative insights into the thorny subject being covered. It is presented here with only minor cuts, corrections and clarifications, retaining essentially the same contents, form, and faults, of the 1989 version; a minimal bibliographical update is given at the end. It is a typically youthful work: doctrinal, judgmental, rebellious, unbalanced, hurriedly argued, too intricate and disjunct to follow easily, and yet ambitious, far-reaching and proudly innovative. Musicologists face still another problem: even if a certain corpus of music theory has been shown to be relevant to the repertory analysed, it can not be assumed that this corpus includes all those concepts involved in the process of communication that are needed to make sense of the music.
