Dr. Marc Hannaford, assistant professor of music theory, received the Society for Music Theory’s Emerging Scholar Award for his article, “Fugitive music theory and George Russell’s theory of tonal gravity” at the joint meeting of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory in Denver, CO in November 2023.
Hannaford’s article theorizes a network of “fugitive music theory” and examines George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization (1953) as a case study. The article, published in the journal Theory and Practice in 2021, is available here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27251596
The publisher’s abstract elaborates:
Fugitive music theory represents a genealogy of texts, concepts, and people that suggests we fundamentally rethink who and what counts as music theory, and Russell provides a profound theory of tonality that intervenes in our field’s current approaches to this topic and repertoire. After outlining some of Russell’s core concepts, several analyses demonstrate the utility of his theory using excerpts from various tonal compositions, including those by William Grant Still, Marion Bauer, Howard Swanson, Margaret Bonds, Richard Strauss, and Charles Ives. This article seeks to unearth and redress anti-Black racism in music theory, even as it also discusses the challenges of doing this work.