Redrawing Analytical Lines^*

Introduction: Lines and Cuts

[0.1] As a professional music theorist, I have become very adept at drawing lines. There are the staff lines, the stems, and the slurs that I draw while teaching or analyzing a piece of music. These lines, as I tell my students, give shape to our experience of sound and how we can communicate about it. And then there are the disciplinary lines, the ones that form the terrain of music theory and our relationships with other fields. Through my training, I have become aware of these lines drawn before my time—the split between music theory and musicology in the 1960s and ’70s, the debates about musical text versus context through the ’80s and ’90s, etc.⁽¹⁾ For better and worse, I, along with other fellow theorists, contend with our inheritance of these disciplinary delineations. “Such lines,” Sara Ahmed writes, “mark out the edges of disciplinary homes, which also mark out those who are ‘out of line’” (2006, 22).⁽²⁾ And as a theorist invested in articulating the value of our discipline with perspectives that examine the field’s “straight lines,” I am especially concerned with how our habitual line-drawing informs who and what counts in music theory (Boyd et al. 2019; Hisama 2021).

[0.2] I share these concerns with scholars involved in past and ongoing conversations about the effects of music theory as a practice and as a discipline. Recently, there has been a proliferation of responses from graduate student-led organizations, such as Project Spectrum and the Engaged Music Theory Working Group, and the Society for Music Theory itself, with its recently published Statement of Ethical Affirmations, a document that acknowledges the effects of the Society’s historically exclusionary practices and offers action points to address these issues (Society for Music Theory 2021). To contribute to these and many other efforts, this article theorizes music-theoretical line-drawing, examines the effects of these lines, and offers ways of drawing otherwise.

[0.3] The lines that we use to shape sound into knowledge and that conjure disciplines into being may be conceived through philosopher Karen Barad’s concept of agential cuts (2007). Building on a new-materialist understanding of the world as dynamic and entangled matter, Barad defines agential cuts as the ongoing division of matter into different bodies—such as subjects/objects or selves/others. These lines have profound effects on how power and agency are distributed across these bodies. Barad describes the agential and ethical effects of these cuts as follows:

We are responsible for the cuts that we help enact not because we do the choosing . . . but because we are an agential part of the material becoming of the universe. Cuts are agentially enacted not by willful individuals but by the larger material arrangement of which “we” are a “part” . . . Indeed, ethics cannot be about responding to the other as if the other is the radical outside to the self. Ethics is not a geometrical calculation; “others” are never very far from “us”; “they” and “we” are co-constituted and entangled through the very cuts “we” help to enact. Cuts cut “things” together and apart. Cuts are not enacted from the outside, nor are they ever enacted once and for all. (2007, 178–79)

This contingent interconnectedness between the agential cuts of knowing, being, and relating is described by Barad as an “ethico-onto-epistem-ology,” a term that itself performs the agential cutting together of ethics with ontology and epistemology (Barad 2007, 9 and 409n10). Moreover, for me, the connection of line-drawing with the evocative imagery associated with “cuts” and the act of “cutting” emphasize the potentially harmful consequences that can arise when we segment bodies and experiences into knowledge.

[0.4] By construing the line-drawing enacted in our practices of music analysis as agential cuts, I insist, with Barad, that analysis is not only a form of knowledge-making, but also an enactment of certain modes of relating in the world—in other words, an ethics. Here, I build on the work of feminist and queer music scholars such as Suzanne Cusick (1994a and 1994b), Marion A. Guck (1994), and Fred Everett Maus (1993), who demonstrate the illusory nature of the cut between “objectivity” and “subjectivity” that restricted traditional music research. Indeed, their interventions demonstrated how professional music scholarship is always, unavoidably shaped by our intimate, loving relationships with music (Guck 1996). And more recently, elaborating on this scholarship, I have argued that this notion of music loving itself often cuts the loving relationship between a scholar and a piece of music out of the networks of analysts, music, theoretical apparatuses, and physical spaces that inform and animate music-analytical practice (Luong 2017). However, following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I contend that “we always make love to worlds” (1983, 294; quoted in Luong 2017, [1.10]). That is, love is not just a dyadic relationship between two lovers (or in the case of music analysis, analyst and piece); rather, love composes “relations . . . among and within dynamic multiplicities or assemblages—networked, vibrant landscapes [paysages] comprised of many people, things, and forces” (Luong 2017, [1.10]). In other words, insofar as music loving is an analyst’s relationship to the piece, music analysis might be understood as building or composing a world. And in this way, music analysis is also about ontology.

[0.5] If “we always make love to worlds,” then how might we, as analysts, attend to the worlds that we make through our music loving by including them into our writing? Building on my previous work, in this article I propose the practice of autoethnographic writing as a way to redraw our disciplinary lines in order to open our work up to the worldly effects of music-analytical practices. The next two parts of my article set up and then offer an autoethnographic writing experiment centered on a Schenkerian analysis. I will then present a set of five autoethnographic vignettes before concluding with the broader contributions of this project with regards to the ethics and possible futures of our field.

1. Defining Autoethnography

[1.1] If analysis is a practice that forms worlds, how might we write about it? I offer one tentative answer to this question with the help of autoethnography, a self-reflexive method of writing about experience. I will focus on one definition of the method from anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s work, which brings out the messy relations between being, relating, and knowing emphasized in this piece.

[1.2] Stewart’s version of autoethnography is writing that homes in on the formation of temporary affective worlds.⁽³⁾ As she defines it:

An autoethnography is . . . one way of reimagining the subject-object in scenes of the composition of some kind of world, whether that world is a lived identity, a prismatic structure of feeling or thought, a historical present, or the force of potentiality animating something. The objects of autoethnography are tellingly diffuse yet precise—a tone of voice, a form of labor, a sleepless night, unsignified intensities. An attachment circulates across bodies of all kinds—human bodies, bodies of thought, plant and animal bodies, bodies of pain and pleasure—assemblages of histories and politics, forms of caring and abuse solidified into models. (2013, 661)

This kind of autoethnographic writing taps into the affects, histories, and possibilities during moments of world-making—or “worldings,” as Stewart calls them—so that we can rethink our assumptions about how things are in order to reimagine how things could be.⁽⁴⁾ From this inquiry, we can continue to labor toward understanding all relations as dynamic and contingent so that we can envision and build other, more equitable worlds. This approach to autoethnography resonates with how I seek to understand the kinds of relations that form when we produce an analysis.

[1.3] In The Hundreds (2019), Stewart, writing with Lauren Berlant, approaches everyday, ordinary scenes in which love and other affects circulate—to get a sense of the intensities of formed habits and unformed potential in everything that we do. Video Example 1 shows an earlier 2015 performance of “The Sound of a Wording” Berlant and Stewart 2015, which subsequently appears in The Hundreds. This excerpt illustrates how autoethnography can reflect the dynamic movement of experience and thought. In her narrative, Stewart swerves quickly between scenes of theorizing and memories of piano lessons, showing how all these levels of inhabiting the world can intertwine, meld, and/or bounce off each other when we try to create knowledge.

[1.4] For me, as a reader and listener of their work, Berlant and Stewart’s writing is a performance of theory. That is, their writing does not simply describe their theoretical concepts, but rather, their writing enacts theory through its form and rhetoric. This performative writing invites readers to take on, embody, and digest their words. This process helps me grasp difficult concepts related to their work—the sensations of potential hitting you, the agency of things pulling you this way and then that, and the constant threat of old habits taking over. Their writing performs and then elicits in me a new sensitivity to the many other bodies and forces that affect us.

[1.5] In the next section, I bring this kind of practice to music theory by sharing five vignettes on the “worldings” that took shape around a Schenkerian analysis between December 2018 and April 2019. The piece at the center of this experiment is Johann Sebastian Bach’s Prelude in B-flat Minor from the second volume of the Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC). This piece and I have a history from my past training as a pianist. I became acquainted with the Prelude from the many hours that we spent together in the practice room, in lessons, and performances during the early 2000s. In my studies, I also immersed myself in Angela Hewitt’s (2008) interpretation of this piece. A hybrid of this recording and my own past interpretations play in my mind when I analyze this piece.

[1.6] I also have a prior relationship with my chosen method of analysis, Schenkerian graphing (Example 1). I became familiar with foundational ideas from Schenkerian theory early on in my studies. Through my development as a theorist, I formed an attachment to the method by forming a specific analytical process, which I will describe as a ritual. In particular, my use of the term “ritual” is inspired by the work of Tomie Hahn on the sensorial and embodied knowledge-making in our everyday rituals such as drinking water (2007, 19–21; 2021, 27–29)—these rituals help to make sense of ourselves and our relations to the world. Bringing Hahn’s ethos of ritual to the practice of analysis, I aim to emphasize the intention and care with which we as a disciplinary community perform and write about analysis.

[1.7] I must also acknowledge that my ritual is entangled with the history of Schenkerian analysis itself. As many have noted (Schachter 2001; Cook 2007; Ewell 2020, 2023), this history includes the xenophobic and racist views of Heinrich Schenker. Given this context, I must acknowledge that the development of my ritual is entwined with the erasure of these discriminatory aspects of Schenker’s thought in mainstream Schenkerian pedagogy (Clark 2019; Luong and Myers 2021). But elaborating on the notion that, as Stephen Lett (2019) proposes following Madeline Akrich (1992), we may de-script and rescript technologies, my purpose here is to (mis)use a technology like Schenkerian analysis in an attempt to build a world contrary to Schenker’s desires and imaginings. I hope that you will get a sense of how these issues circulate in the background and animate the anxieties of trying to write about Schenkerian analysis differently.

[1.8] The autoethnographic vignettes that follow try to approach both past and emergent affects that arose from my repeated analytical encounters with Bach’s Prelude. My use of the word “approach” here is an honest admission that I cannot see, understand, and describe all that happens.⁽⁵⁾ Instead, this word connects my project to notions of situated proximity, intimacy, and care (to approach with caution). My writing comprises various attempts to approach the something—the some-world—that made itself when I started analyzing.

[1.9] Writing while trying to stay attuned in this particular way has been difficult for a number of reasons. Specifically, this experiment has pushed against my habits as an academic music theorist. The tone and form of these short pieces run counter to how I have been comfortable with expressing myself. Years of training have helped me to hone a specific authorial voice. This voice is strong with its own tones and forms. Trying to write otherwise has been a painful experience of being caught between the safety of knowing how to sound and the precarity of needing to sound otherwise.

[1.10] But there have been some helpful influences along the way. With this attempt to connect our words with our music-theoretical worldings, I join a heterogenous community of scholars who have also experimented with writing. This lineage includes scholars such as Elaine Barkin, Benjamin Boretz, and J.K. Randall and their various experimental publications in Perspectives of New Music (Barkin 1984; Boretz 1979; Randall 1975).⁽⁶⁾ Feminist and queer musical writings on our personal relationships with music serve as inspiration for my writing here as well. In addition to Cusick, Guck, and Maus, Marianne Kielian-Gilbert also experiments with the intersection between gender, sexuality, and creative modes of music-analytic writing (1994, 2010). I felt a pang of recognition while reading Mary Greitzer’s (2007) anxieties of disciplinary legibility as she tried to talk about the affective dimensions of music and sexual trauma.⁽⁷⁾ Alexandra Pierce’s (1994, 2007) and Diane Urista’s (2007) efforts to include the body in Schenkerian theory are models of infusing analysis with feeling. And outside the usual lines of our field, Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse (1978) and Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (2006) helped me to consider the relationships among love, intimacy, and care as they relate to the practice of writing.

[1.11] To acknowledge the tenuous nature of this work, these vignettes do not obscure my internal battle with the desire to return to my well-practiced, music-theoretical voice. I attune to both the loving potential as well as the paranoid scholarly habits that strike during an analysis (Sedgwick 2003, 133–36). As you read through the vignettes below, I invite you to follow the rhythms and tones of my words, which I have strung together to conjure some sense of what happened. Tune into the specific affects, memories, and desires that these vignettes generate in you—positive, negative, or otherwise. Consider when and how my stories resonate or rub up against your own methods of analysis, your own attachments to certain practices, objects, and spaces—your habitual worlds. Contemplate the bodies in your networks, how they arrived in proximity to you and the ones that have left your orbit. Think about the bodies that often make it into your professional prose and the ones that don’t. Imagine what it would be like to write these observations. Take note of how so many things can affect our work. Perhaps, feel daunted by the ever-growing scope and composition of our professional worlds. And then, try to write about it anyway. Following this journey of inquiry is how I began my experiment here.⁽⁸⁾

2. Five Vignettes⁽⁹⁾

[2.1] First Vignette
Ritual I: Repetition

I often re-write my rhythmic reduction multiple times before graphing (Example 2). It’s my way of checking my work—sketches of half notes in four-part chorale style on a grand staff, my summary of the foundational harmonies of the piece. Slowly replaying the music in my mind as I recopy the draft. Matching each half note to the faster durations of the score itself. Asking the piece if it agrees with my interpretation.

It’s soothing to slowly acquire a sense of the music this way. Caring and being cared for by the music as reduction and imagined sound. Following and checking constantly to make sure that what I am doing is okay. Does my reduction sound like what the score wants to sound like?

But this work is tiring.

So it only happens when I’m in the mood to listen attentively and when the piece wants to cooperate. Otherwise, it can fall apart. And we are left to pick up the pieces another day.

[2.2] Second Vignette
Is This Love?

If love is patient and kind, then I don’t think that’s what we’re feeling today.

Paying attention is difficult. The graph and I aren’t seeing eye to eye. And I’m tired of listening.

But if love is the everyday labor of constructing an empire, so that these moments of uncertainty can’t entirely topple us, then I suppose there might still be love here.⁽¹⁰⁾

(Love can be a colonizing force. Love is precarious. Love has its bad days.)

[2.3] Third Vignette
Ritual II: The Pen

My preference for pens confounds some theorists (Example 3). At best, I get comments about my boldness in jest: “You must be brave.” At worst, I get raised eyebrows: “What does the pen do for you exactly?”

The pen is a commitment to paying attention. It requires me to slow down, to focus on every minute analytical decision in my graph. The pen makes me pause, check, then double-check each and every notational symbol before it goes down on paper. The pen infuses each gesture with intention.

The pen is a commitment to my already-formed reduction. A commitment to the hours that I have spent drafting, playing, and testing out my rhythmic reduction. It is an implement that signifies trust that I have done enough and can move on.

The pen is a feeling, an object that feels different from the mechanical pencil. The pen requires specific handling and movement to create precise marks on the paper. Press too hard and you get blobs of ink. And then the draft ruined. Or you might maim the felt tip and lose the day to procuring a new pen. So the pen feels like caution, like slow and thoughtful care. The pen is my commitment to attentive intimacy.

[2.4] Fourth Vignette
What About?

Sometimes doing analysis is anticipating the “what-abouts” (Example 4).

Answering these imagined “what-abouts” will apparently make my analysis stronger.⁽¹¹⁾ Forcing me to choose between certain either/or paths.⁽¹²⁾ Divide and decide.

I know it doesn’t have to be this way. Ambiguity is a part of our occupational ethics after all.⁽¹³⁾

But the “what-abouts” pay service to an image of the perfect, intricately woven, immaculately unified graph. Every slur at every level connected in an organic whole. I am guilty of wanting to realize this fantasy—as if such a graph would finally grant me some semblance of safety, a home. Proof at last that I am a music theorist after all.

But there’s too much riding on this. So the “what-abouts” incapacitate. The tension between the in-the-music-ness of graphing and the all-seeing, God-like view of the fundamental structure.⁽¹⁴⁾ I can’t see all these ways at once. And when I try, it all collapses in.

[2.5] Fifth Vignette Let’s Try Talking About Love Again

I can’t help feeling worried that I have shared too much. Disciplinary habits. Inherited doubt about what counts as good writing impedes.

So let’s start again somewhere safe. A definition, perhaps.

Music loving is a flow of affects and potentials when we enter into an analytical relation with many things. Writing about scenes of music loving, then, is a practice of tuning into these flows. What are their shapes? Where do they come from? Where do they go?

Sometimes my loving is joyful and productive. It elicits new hearings and wordings. And from these wordings, might there be new worlds?

Other times, it’s a terror of resistance, a lack of time, murkiness. It slips away out of reach, or it hovers condescendingly:

The reshaping of things, the cuts that we make. There are always repercussions. So what about those?

Loving is about trying again and again, trying the new, trying otherwise,
so that maybe someday this some-world can be different.

Conclusion: Redrawing Lines

[3.1] This article began by contemplating the lines that we music theorists draw around our work—from the music-notational systems we privilege to the disciplinary divisions that distinguish us. I then alluded to the harmful effects that such lines might pose, particularly to issues of gender and sexuality in music theory. I compared these lines to agential cuts in order to bring out the effects of music theory’s habitual divisions. I then turned to affective autoethnography to suggest other ways of making agential cuts to bring out the vibrant interconnected worlds created by music analysis.

[3.2] The world has changed so much since I started this project in 2018, and I would like to conclude by reflecting on how my contribution here relates to our current context. How does calling attention to the lines that we draw and the cuts that we make matter now during an ongoing pandemic and a time of immense social upheaval? If anything, facing the effects of our work is even more imperative, if we want the things that we love—music and our capacity to study it—to survive. And I suggest that we can do so by writing for liberatory worlds—worlds in which we generatively attend to the harms of intersecting structures of violence, so that bodies of all kinds can live and thrive. To end, let me trace some disciplinary and cross-disciplinary resonances with my work on the power of writing, especially of writing otherwise.

[3.3] Since the implementation of the stay-at-home orders in March 2020, I have been ruminating on a paragraph from poet Cathy Park Hong’s book Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020), turning the text over and over in my head, sensing a resonance with my writing here, and struggling to find a way to articulate this connection. So I’m going to give it a try here, with all of the trepidation that the form of this article has embodied so far. I’ve been tracing and re-tracing a path toward crossing some internalized boundary of what counts as music theory. Let me see if I can get closer to the line this time.

[3.4] In her final essay, titled “The Indebted,” Hong meditates on the concepts of “debt” and “gratitude” that shape established narratives of the Asian-American immigrant experience. In particular, she draws on her own identity as a second-generation Korean American to illustrate the messages of debt and gratitude inherited across generations of immigrant families, which in turn fuel the enforcement of the Asian model-minority stereotype (Park 2008).

[3.5] The paragraph I have fixated on is a moment of unmediated intensity—an eruption into a fast-paced mapping of the many arbitrarily drawn and interconnected lines that determined how exactly Hong arrived in the United States:

I am here because you vivisected my ancestral country in two. In 1943, two fumbling mid-ranking American officers who knew nothing about the country used a National Geographic map as reference to arbitrarily cut a border to make North and South Korea, a division that eventually separated millions of families, including my own grandmother from her family. Later, under the flag of liberation, the United States dropped more bombs and napalm in our tiny country than during the entire Pacific campaign against Japan during World War II. A fascinating little-known fact about the Korean War is that an American surgeon, David Ralph Millard, stationed there to treat burn victims, invented the double-eyelid surgical procedure to make Asian eyes look Western, which he ended up testing on Korean sex workers so they could be more attractive to GIs. Now, it’s the most popular surgical procedure for women in South Korea. My ancestral country is just one small example of the millions of lives and resources you have sucked from the Philippines, Cambodia, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, El Salvador, and many, many other nations through your forever wars and transnational capitalism that have mostly enriched shareholders in the States. Don’t talk to me about gratitude. (2020, 195)

This quote is representative of the entirety of Hong’s book and its many allusions to the violence of cutting—the vivisection of nations, families, bodies. Through internalizing the norms of American society, Hong also alludes to the emotional toil of these cuts on her sense of self. She feels “flayed”—cut open and skinned—from the constant labor of proving herself into existence, in a black-and-white racial imaginary that just doesn’t quite know what to do with Asian-American identity (2020, 5). I find this passage compelling because it gets at the entanglement of lines and their harmful consequences from the micro to the macro, bringing us face-to-face with both the spectacular and mundane effects of our colonial worlding. Hong’s Minor Feelings also uses new forms of writing, such as the lyric essay—a relatively new hybrid of essay, poetry, and memoir—in order to help her reader get a sense of the world from her positionality (D’Agata and Weiss 2014; Hong 2020, 103). And from this understanding, these authors hope that coalition and solidarity can take shape so that we can imagine and build more liberatory worlds together.

[3.6] Writing to conjure other worlds is a strategy that I share with scholars across many disciplines. In music theory, music-analytical writing has already offered a space for experimentation with regard to eliciting new kinds of musical experiences. Maus’s “Music as Drama” (1988) and “Love Stories” (1995) rework typical forms of writing to rethink the parameters of analysis and theory for feminist and queer ends. Indigenous art and music scholar Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (2020) has also called for experimentation with performative writing that approaches the interconnected relations of listener, music, and space as a decolonial praxis, building in part on work in feminist and queer music theory (see also Attas 2020). Outside of music studies, my investment in the world-building potential of writing aligns with historian Saidiya Hartman’s speculative narratives of black, queer, and femme resistance in her book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2020). Hartman’s “critical fabulation” functions to reanimate the agencies and bodies the colonial archive erased. It is in conversation and solidarity with these writers—in addition to Berlant, Stewart, and Hong—that I am here trying to rework what we count as analytical writing in my vignettes.

[3.7] Returning to my title, “Redrawing Analytical Lines,” I have framed analysis and music theory around the concept of line-drawing to amplify other minoritized scholars who have been trying to get us to acknowledge and reckon with the colonizing, racist, and sexist attitudes that our work can engender. As decades of research have shown, structural barriers contribute to the attrition of marginalized scholars and scholarship. These obstacles include micro- and macro-aggressions in everyday professional settings, lack of institutional and professional mentoring, and a policing of what counts as music theory (Hisama 2021; Luong 2022; Maus 2020; Sofer 2020).

[3.8] Following Barad, the problem here is not simply that cuts are made and lines are drawn, for this is an unavoidable condition of being and relating in our world. My concern, then, is not to prevent cuts and lines entirely; instead, I ask us to consider how we enact them and attend to their effects by recognizing and remediating harm. The ethos I seek to perform and afford through the vignettes above, then, is to contemplate the affective and institutional backgrounds that support our music-analytical work that we often elide in our writing. As Stephen Lett (2023) argues, these backgrounds are premised on a violent, colonial mode of being and dwelling in this world. And as I sought to draw into my writing, even though we might foreground love as animating our work, such paranoid, harmful, and self-harming lines of experience are also our disciplinary inheritance.

[3.9] By sharing my experiment with autoethnography and laying out both the harmful and productive consequences of doing analysis in my own experience, this piece serves as an invitation to reimagine how we can write about our acquired disciplinary habits and their effects, ultimately towards the end of remediating the harms of our inherited and entrenched lines. In doing so, I hope that we can continue to enliven the possibilities of music-theoretical writing toward building liberatory, life-affirming worlds.

Vivian Luong
University of Oklahoma
Catlett Music Center
500 W. Boyd St.
Norman, OK, 73019
vivian.luong@ou.edu

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Footnotes

* In attempting to write this acknowledgement section, I realized that there are so many people who have shaped the writing here that it feels impossible to pin down an exhaustive list of each and everyone. So with that, thank you to everyone and anyone who feels like they have contributed to this piece. Thank you for the anger, grief, joy, and many other feelings that have fueled me to try to write a kinder and more liberatory world into existence. And thank you to those who have and will continue to write this world with me.
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1. Other authors have provided accounts of these historical moments in the field of North American music theory, notably Agawu 2004, Kerman 1980, Girard 2007, Gleason 2013, Lett 2023, and Korsyn 2003.
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2. Ahmed writes of the exclusionary effects of line-drawing in her home discipline of philosophy:

The lines of disciplines are certainly a form of inheritance. The line, for instance, that is drawn from philosopher to philosopher is often a paternal one: the line begins with the father and is followed by those who “can” take his place. We know, I think, that not just “any body” can receive such an inheritance or can turn what they receive into a possession. Disciplines also have lines in the sense that they have a specific “take” on the world, a way of ordering time and space through the very decisions about what counts as within the discipline. (2006, 22)

I would like to thank Edward Klorman and the students in his 2021 Schenkerian analysis class for offering this connection to Ahmed in my work on lines.
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3. As is the nature of language, meanings of words and phrases are always in flux. While “hone in” is an alternate to “homes in,” I have opted for “homes in” to depict the way that autoethnography zooms into or directs attention to the formation of temporary affective worlds. I prefer this image of coming into closer, intimate relation to our worlds rather than the image of sharpening or refinement suggested by “hone in.” This word choice also aligns with my discussion of the term “approach” in paragraph 1.8 of this article.
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4. Stewart writes, “I am suggesting that atmospheric attunements are a process of what Heidegger (1962) called worlding—an intimate, compositional process of dwelling in spaces that bears, gestures, gestates, worlds” (2011, 445).
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5. I borrow this word from Stewart, who uses it throughout her ethnographic writing. For example: “The writing here has been a continuous, often maddening effort to approach the intensities of the ordinary” (Stewart 2007, 5).
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6. I would like to thank Zachary Bernstein for reminding me of the resonance of my work with the writings of these authors. See also Gleason 2013.
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7. On trying to produce an analysis of Milton Babbitt’s Philomel, Greitzer shares that:

i fear the lack of a unifying narrative . . . i feel unsure as to what i have achieved. my expectations in this matter are shaped not only by the immediate context provided by the other analyses comprising my dissertation, but by the norms of music-analytical discourse as i’ve internalized them . . . i thrash in writing about Philomel. (2007, 106–8)

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8. A similar invitation occurs in my contribution to Modeling Musical Analysis (2025)
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9. For this section of the article, I have decided to shift to footnotes instead of embedded author-date citations to avoid disrupting the flow of the vignettes. I revert to author-date citations in the last section of my article.
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10. Povinelli 2006.
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11. Sedgwick 2003 and Stewart 2008.
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12. Schachter 1990.
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13. Agawu 2006.
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14. With this phrase, I reference the notion of an all-seeing and de-situated “objectivity” critiqued in Haraway 1988. As she writes:

I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people’s lives. I am arguing for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. (1988, 589)

What draws me to Schenkerian analysis has been the intimate, “in the weeds” process of graphing itself. Gazing down at the final product can feel a bit like a letdown, like my finalized graph is an inadequate and imprecise picture of everything that happened during an analysis.
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