In 1998 I was asked by the editors of the music theory journal Intégral to consider writing an essay on the state of music theory at the turn of the twenty-first century. I had been similarly asked in 1996 to write on the major trends in music theory for a special plenary session celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Society for Music Theory at its national convention held in Phoenix, Arizona in the fall of 1997. Rather than read a text, I selected thirty-five quotations, one per author, from music theory texts from 1987–97 to be read over a specially designed musical fabric of slowly evolving harmony. The result was Panorama of Music Theory, 1987–97, a musical composition, rather than a paper, lasting fifteen minutes.

While I was interesting in writing a text for Intégral, just as in Arizona, I wanted to avoid making pompous pronouncements and value judgments about past work or “the direction of the field.” I therefore decided to elaborate a text I had written for students to read in my course in the theory and analysis of twentieth- century music. So I addressed the question of what music theory might be and for what. This project also helped me come to terms with my new role as full-time chair of the composition department in 1999, which meant I would not be teaching music theory any longer. In any case, I hope the formality of an “autocommentary” obviates some of the potential ostentation that my text’s topic may entail.

The form of this writing is text and commentary, a common means of transmission in classical Asian literature. In India, for example, shastras—manuals and other technical discourse—were written in Sanskrit in succinct and abbreviated lines of poetry. As time went on, commentaries on earlier shastras were composed as interpolating lines of explanation in the original text. Then commentaries on the commentaries were written, and so forth. Writing a commentary permits me to express my current ideas in footnotes where cross relations and elaborative reference flourish, cutting across the hierarchy of the main text. Here I will comment on a text I wrote in 1994 and subsequently revised every year until 1998.