The Presentism of Tonal Hearing

as a graduate student, one of my most cherished volumes—indeed, one of the first books of music theory scholarship I ever purchased—was Tonal Structures in Early Music, edited by Cristle Collins Judd (1998). With no little difficulty, the essays in this book mapped the route I hoped to follow as a scholar. The authors mined musical and music-theoretical sources for clues that might help us understand pitch and pitch relationships, from the level of the individual note to the musical work as a whole to the complex history of specific tonalities as they changed over time. As Judd deftly explains in the volume's introduction, the essays are a masterclass in methodological pluralism and they embrace modern analytical techniques even as they situate their readings in historical sources and contexts. Judd (1998) writes,