When Michael Rogan invited me to speak here today, the only stipulation regarding the talk was that it should engage and highlight some element or aspect of the Ritter collection. Now given the richness of the collection, this did not narrow things down very much. As I have

There are books on virtually every subject of music, scores of every genre, and a cornucopia of rare and valuable autograph manuscripts. This eclecticism is well reflected, in fact, in Ritter's own sizeable list of publications. It is perhaps a telling change of the times to observe that when Ritter became a Professor of Music at Vassar College in 1867, he published in addition to musical dictation and harmony primers, no less than three histories of music, a pioneering history of music in America, a history of Western music in general, a collection of hymns for Women's chorus as well as an intellectual study of philosophy and Romanticism. Just think about that. Can you imagine today such a list appearing in any musicologist's academic CV? Quite obviously, the boundaries between theory and history, between scholarship and practice, were ones that were not clearly drawn in nineteenth-century American academia as they are today in our own musical and academic culture of hyper- specialization.

Now I'm not going to join those conservative pundits who look nostalgically back to Ritter's Victorian age when knowledge was less specialized and segmented than it is now. There are very good reasons why scholarly disciplines have become specialized, and why the call for the breakdown of academic walls so often heard called for is epistemologically naive. Despite what Foucaludian critics might say, walls are useful and necessary components of academic interiors-as they are in our own homes. With that said, however, there is also a sense that many of our disciplinary boundaries are more artificial than we may realize. And this is particularly true in the case of music.

For a number of years, I have personally been interested in understanding the history and epistemological configurations of my own discipline of music theory. My engagement with the historical side of music theory culminated last year in the publication of the , which I was privileged to edit. In the process of working on this massive tome, with its motley collection of 31 differing chapters, I was again and again struck forcefully by the historical evidence of music theory's elusive and malleable nature.

Now many of you in this room today may have a somewhat bipolar view of music theory. On the one hand, you may think of theory as a pedagogical discipline: it comprises a series of courses in a typical undergraduate music curriculum consisting of rather dry pedagogical drills in harmony and counterpoint, ear dictation and sight singing--something along the lines of Ritter's own manuals of Practical Harmony and Dictation used by the young ladies he taught at Vassar. On the other hand, some of you might think of music theory as a highly learned, specialized pseudo-scientific discipline, whose literature is comprised of some rather intimidating and highly-technical abstractions, often involving impenetrable graphic notations and mathematical equations, or perhaps as involving metaphysical musings of cosmological harmony and mystical numerology. In either case, music theory seems to project multiple, and not always compatible, images of both the didactic and the metaphysic, of both the mundane and the sublime. And I should reassure you that this image is not entirely illusory, either. Many of us active as music theorists today feel very much a sense of tension and even outright neurosis between our duties as music pedagogues in the classroom and scholars in the library.

My own study of historical models of music theory has helped me to calm somewhat my own disciplinary anxieties by the observation that the competing demands of practice and speculation are present in virtually all writings of past music theorists. In the Middle Ages, this dichotomy was often termed that between the and : the was the singer who made music; the was the speculative philosopher who knew about music-the reasons why and wheretofore music works as it does. But as much as the traditions of and were seen philosophically as separate disciplines, in reality they were usually treated as complementary. In other words, the found that it was impossible to engage in isolated from the exigencies of , just as the found the ideas, tools and languages of the to be of value. Hence music theory-and note I am now using quite deliberately the non-Latinized name of this discipline-necessarily incorporates elements of both, although not without strong residual tensions that may be felt still reverberating today.

To elucidate these tensions, I have decided in the remainder of my lecture to look at a few chosen examples of music-theoretical writings drawn from the Ritter Collection, and see how this dichotomy of theory and practice is played out. Specifically, I will concentrate on works in the collection largely from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although given the time, I could easily extend this survey to many of the wonderful nineteenth-century books contained in the collection. But I hope the selected examples I offer suggest how ubiquitous and integral the tension of pedagogy and speculation are in music theory. Far from being a dissonance that needs resolution, we will see that the friction between the two is one of the very motive forces propelling our discipline forward.