Music Theory and Historical Awareness

After clearly defining their respective turfs about twenty-five years ago, American music theory and musicology have more recently drawn somewhat more closely together. The paper seeks to place this trend in a historical context by showing how, in much recent work, the two disciplines share both a repertory of interest to both and a number of critical methodologies. It then takes the opening measures of the first movement of Shostakovich's First String Quartet as an example of how analytical and historical approaches might interact.