It surprises a lot of people to think about research as having a particular type of lens, particularly in the arts. It shouldn’t, but it does. I think part of this is that science conditioned people to believe that science is objective. The scientific process is great, and the process helps a lot, but we are living in a time where it is hard to debate that science is objective. Science is funded by research bodies with particular motives; study variables can be affected by researcher bias, and nowadays there is so much research that it is hard to keep up with it all. In research, we have hierarchies of research so that we know when something has been properly looked at – called ‘peer review’. This means that the research has been assessed by other people in the discipline and they’ve decided it is rigorous enough to be published. Of course, this isn’t perfect. Anyone can find research that is not peer reviewed, and this can be published in something that sounds reputable even when it isn’t, and most people probably have no idea how to determine when this is the case. Furthermore, there’s no saying that the peers are actually experts, or that they read the entire thing, or that they weren’t half-asleep when reading it, and so on. None of this is to say that research shouldn’t be trusted, but I think people should be wary of trusting anything with the word research in it. 

This objectivity seeps into the perception of research across academia. It is somehow surprising, initially, to consider how music can be analysed with a queer lens, or a feminist lens, or a postcolonial lens, as if music is somehow immune from these perspectives. After all, it’s music. It’s entertainment! And entertainment doesn’t have politics in it (despite this being exactly what artists are trying to communicate, most of the time). Of course, some things get siloed. Of course, studying female musicians could fall under a feminist lens. But how would you study music theory with a feminist lens? Well, we might think about how music theory is a system that has been propped up and supported by powerful people through history, predominately white men. Most of the famous classical works — called the ‘canon’ — are written by white men. When you think of this music, most people would think of Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, maybe Schoenberg if you’re trendy, Wagner, and so on. These are the works that are taught, performed, and listened to around the world. What do they all have in common? So, it’s not unreasonable to look at music theory in a feminist lens, and ask — how do these power structures influence music theory? And like all research, there will be some interesting and valuable responses to this question and some less so. Likewise with similar questions of race and queerness. So that takes us from a first reaction of “how can music theory be sexist?” to “actually, you might have a point there”. 

For me, it is these perspectives, these lenses, which are actually the most valuable part of the research, for they go beyond the basic results. My Honours research looked at how immersion in culture impacted compositional voice and ability. The results of that research were that, if you immersed yourself in a culture through learning a new instrument and language, the way you conceptualised music could change and result in hybrid music. This is an interesting result, and I’m oversimplifying a bit, for there were numerous other smaller results throughout, but that was the overarching result. But when we consider this from an embodied theory lens, we see that learning an instrument — something we mainly do with our hands — actually impacts the way we think and create. Or using a hybridity theory lens, we see how hybrid works are created, and some ways we might be able to analyse these. Suddenly, we’ve gone from a very fixed result of learning Balinese music and writing music to a more general, abstracted result which could apply elsewhere — for example, to the science fiction works of Arthur C. Clarke when he was living in Sri Lanka. We’ve gone cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural. 

So next time you listen to music or read research, think about the deeper meaning and engage with the text on that deeper level. What you find may surprise you.

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