Certain kinds of common sense might assume classical music to be categorically separate from matters of land, ecology, and territory. Yet close attention to this field’s material realities, from infrastructures to funding to discursive mechanisms, reveals a radically different picture.¹ In this post, I track the latter, by reading a watershed music theory text’s figurative language through environmental and decolonial studies analytics. This reading will show how the text’s articulation of Tuning and Harmony structurally relies on the figure of the Wolf as a problem, a figure implicated in the extermination of wolves in Europe and beyond, and in European colonizers’ attacks on Indigenous sovereignty in lands known colonially as the Americas.²

This post presents for the first time an artistic research project on the politics of Tuning and Harmony in classical music. Part of a book-in-progress of decolonial reckonings with concert music through interwoven scholarly prose and artistic projects,³ this post proceeds from a scholarly reading of a watershed music theory text, and then dramatizes this reading through artistic projects that draw on and refigure techniques historically developed in Fluxus event scores,⁴ (more power-sensitive approaches to) appropriation art,⁵ and institutional critique.⁶ These artistic projects press indexes of the environmental politics that undergird early modern tuning texts into archives (in a broad sense) of normative concert music Tuning-Harmony discourses and protocols.

In what follows, I offer a close reading of a historically influential music theory text, alongside artistic projects which offer parallel readings of these texts; the latter take the form of musical scores notated with text, and interpretations of these scores in a variety of audiovisual media. For music readers, this project is meant as a proposal for a musical practice that proceeds otherwise to concert music’s mythology of transcending the Earthly—a mythology that has occluded and even enabled the field’s deep complicities with environmental degradation—through the close reading of canonical music theory texts through environmental and decolonial studies analytics. For environmental history readers, this project is offered as a proposal for analyzing and mapping how environmental and colonial politics can be reproduced in unexpected ways and places, through relations that often exceed historically white binaries such as aesthetic/political, culture/nature, urban/rural, and metropole/colony. As a settler artist who is read as white, I aim to proceed in a power-sensitive way by deliberately limiting the discussion to a critique of European and colonizer positionality.⁷

This project approaches early modern Tuning as a key historical precondition for the later self-determined, seated, silent spectator of 19th century concert music. While the 17th century music theory texts discussed here negotiate the complex crossroads of intellectual history called Man1 by decolonial scholar Sylvia Wynter, I read these texts with a view to how they came to undergird the later secular self-determined concert music spectator, which I understand as an instance of what Wynter calls Man2.⁸ Thus, while decolonial music theorist Andrew Chung’s field-changing excavation of a “natural philosophy of empire” embedded and (re)produced in early modern tuning writings thematizes these texts’ agreements and disagreements with earlier Scholastic frameworks, I instead read similar tuning theory texts as the beginnings of an individuated spectatorial subject who is constituted within a necro-biopolitics of sensory (in)capacity.⁹ That is, while Chung’s endeavor is intellectual history, my project is the excavation of sedimented knowledge, a theoretical rather than historical endeavor, located in performance and practice studies.¹⁰ Approaching music theory and listening as bodies of technical knowledge, I ask how their organizing principle of Consonance-as-interiority are founded on political principles of extermination and colonization.

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I inventory this emergent subject through a close reading of a foundational text of early modern tuning theory, Syntagma musicum vol. II by Michael Praetorius (1619). In the Syntagma, I argue that the music theorist is able to abstract the vibration of music practice into the interiority of Tuning and Consonance by undertaking four operations: the citation of the inscription Wolf-as-problem, the displacement of the problem of vibration’s exteriority onto the inscription Wolf, and the division of intervals in terms of Consonance and Dissonance. Each operation is concurrently figured in an artistic piece that thematizes the music theorist as an embodied, emplaced position; these four pieces are excerpted from a longer series of textual scores entitled tuning theory, on earth.

The figure of the Wolf emerged through a specific historical shift in the function and orientation of music theory. Chung notes that “where a central purpose of medieval Scholastic understandings of tuning and consonance was to discern the harmonic logics that held dominion over the sensible world, new discourses on tuning and keyboard temperament shifted focus toward managing and imposing harmony on the world of things.”¹¹ Here the music theorist’s task is to establish that he—and by implication music’s beholder—has sensory access to the materiality of musical practice, but without being determined by its exteriority.¹² While early modern music theory does not posit a concrete, specific beholder in the way that much late modern music theory more or less assumes a concert music listener, a quite specific set of assumptions about listening are nonetheless implicit in Syntagma’s articulation of Tuning and Harmony, assumptions coterminous with those of later concert music listening. My goal here is not to write a history of listening but to read Syntagma as an index of how a violent civilizationist politics is baked into the founding of key techniques of concert music.

While tuning theory gets technical very quickly, in the present non-specialist setting, I offer a less specialized account.¹³ The quarter-comma mean tone tuning (or temperament), the most widely discussed tuning of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is organized around the interval known in music theory as the perfect fifth, a frequency ratio of 3:2 (example 1 below).¹⁴ That is, its project is to create a gamut of pitches with a maximum number of acoustically “pure” intervals and a minimal number of “impure” sonorities. “Pure” sonorities are characterized by simpler whole number frequency ratios, which in physical terms means minimal acoustic interference, which manifests as tactile vibration and even as periodic pulsations often called “beating.”¹⁵ Beating was a source of acute anxiety for early modern music theorists, who often liken these vibrations to the howling of a wolf.¹⁶ In addition to pure fifths, quarter-comma mean tone also sought to optimize the purity of the interval of the third, due to its increasingly important role in music of the time, not least in the then-novel musical project of Harmony.¹⁷ The major third was derived by stacking four 3:2 fifths; yet the problem with this derivation of the third is that it creates the “impure” interval 81:16. Due to the principle of octave equivalence (that treats a frequency relation of 2:1 as equivalent), and musicians’ preference for intervals of less than one octave (i.e. a 2:1 frequency ratio), the second number here is usually multiplied by 4, resulting in the ratio 81:64 (example 2). Quarter-comma mean-tone responds by slightly narrowing each fifth by 80:81, thereby changing the third from 81:64 to 80:64, which reduces to the much “purer” interval 5:4 (example 3). This enables a gamut of 12 pitches that contains 11 relatively pure fifths (3:2 x 80:81, barely distinguishable from example 1), and one impure fifth that is called the Wolf (example 4) in many early modern music theory texts.¹⁸ In these ways, the figure of the Wolf emerges out of and names an impasse inherent in tuning theory’s attempt to “tame” Dissonance.

In what follows, I trace how the Wolf figure underwrites the interiority of musical consonance in Praetorius’s Syntagma musicum. The author situates this text as a “musical encyclopedia” that is “not only useful and necessary for organists, instrumentalists, organbuilders, instrument makers, and all who are well‑disposed toward the muses, but also to be read with pleasure by philosophers, philologists, and historians.”¹⁹ Historically, this text has been widely read, and indeed, in the 17th century, the text was so influential that this temperament was often attributed to Praetorius and even called the “Praetorius temperament.”²⁰ The text invokes the Wolf in a passage that elaborates practical tuning strategies for optimizing consonance, or “purity,” through the minimizing of “beating.” Praetorius labels the interval F/G-sharp the Wolf, “since these notes together produce a completely out-of-tune minor third,” and later describes this feature as a “fault.” The theorist concludes by summarizing the proposals of “our forebears” “to transfer the wolf” and “to put the wolf” in other locations, to which he responds by writing “‘Each to his own;’ best that the wolf with his unpleasant howling stay in the forest, and not bother our harmonic consonances.”²¹

In what follows, I trace how this passage secures the interiority of “our harmonic consonances,” and by implication, the interiority of their beholder-possessor, through operations of citation, inscription, displacement, and division. First, citation. Praetorius directly cites “our forebears” who “labelled the interval f/g-sharp ‘the wolf,’” and this music theoretical tradition is itself founded on a citation, in a broad sense, of the early modern European writing about wolves. While the exact textual influences on Praetorius and forebears are unclear, Chung has argued that the very legibility of the Wolf as a metaphor for tuning problems depended on the broad dissemination of a distinctly early modern “natural philosophy of empire” that viewed “earthly wildernesses and their flora and fauna… as fallen spaces notionally full of beasts that Christian man was duty bound to occupy, improve, cultivate, and manage with impunity.”²²

The then-novel technology of print was an active and crucial participant in this dissemination; as a reader and writer of Latin, Praetorius would have been able to read a wide range of relevant materials printed across Europe in this period. In the decades prior to Syntagma, two massive, widely-reprinted publications articulated a specifically early modern understanding of animals and specifically wolves: Historiae animalium (4 vols., 1551-1567) by Conrad Gessner, from which much material was translated and summarized in History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents (1607) by Edward Topsell. Topsell positions wolves as the superlative embodiment of beastly cruelty through sensational allegations that are presented without even a pretext of contextualization.²³ The text also goes on at length and in graphic detail about “devises for the destroying of Wolfs.”²⁴ Then, for Topsell and Gessner, the wolf is a problem for civilization, a rhetoric that was concurrently being deployed to justify state-led extermination campaigns against wolves across Europe.²⁵ In this context, then, the inscription Wolf-as-problem functions as nothing less than a symbolic weapon that marks wolves as innately cruel and thus ungrievable and thereby enables the deployment of actual weapons.

crucial inspiration for the theory of Consonance

1. A large amount of printed matter which might have influenced watershed tuning theory writings on the figure of the Wolf is placed on a small writing table, specifically contemporaneous writing that demonizes beings known as wolves, e.g. Historiae animalium by Conrad Gessner, History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents by Edward Topsell.
2. A music theorist sits at the table and reads any of this printed matter.

In the early 17th century, the symbolic weapon of the Wolf-as-problem was being deployed not only in Europe but also against sovereign Indigenous nations across “the Americas.”²⁶ Indigenous studies scholar Kim TallBear (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate), argues that “Indigenous peoples came into being as Peoples in longstanding and intricate relation with these continents and the other life forms here,” relation enacted particularly through caretaking. For TallBear, sovereign Indigenous nationhood “[includes] the lands, waters, and other-than-human beings with whom Indigenous peoples are co-constituted.” This notion of nationhood encompasses beings known in English as wolves; as such, colonizers’ attempts at wolf extermination across the Americas need to be situated as active attacks on these relations, and even as part of what TallBear calls “a genocide that is simultaneously human and other-than-human.”²⁷ For example, a group of Anishinaabe and settler environmental scientists write that the Ma’iingan (wolves) and Anishinaabe nation “would be forever connected, and whatever happens to one will happen to the other.”²⁸ These authors frame a 2021 wolf hunt enabled by the US settler state of Wisconsin as a violation of national sovereignty which “devastated the kinship between Ma’iinganga and their Physical, Plant, Animal, and Anishinaabeg relatives.”²⁹ This hunt was a continuation of nearly five centuries of French, British, US, and Canadian attacks on Anishinaabe nationhood, which were well underway by the time of Praetorius’s text. Yet for Gessner, Topsell, and others, wolves are not sovereign Indigenous relations but pests to be “dealt with;” as such, these writers’ positioning of wolves frames sovereign Indigenous ecologies as a “failure” to relate to land in a properly civilized fashion, a judgment which is also implicit in the later disparagement of sovereign Indigenous territory as a “howling wilderness.”³⁰

tuning theoretical writing

1. A wolf exterminator places an early modern European spear on a table, on top of a blank piece of paper, as if the spear is to be used as a writing implement, and leaves the stage.
2. The resulting set-up is marked by the following text:
to write with a spear.
        to theorize with a spear.
        to conceptualize with the prosthetic of a spear.
3. A music theorist picks up the spear and writes a passage from a watershed tuning theory text on the figure of the Wolf:
             - with the tip of the spear, the theorist writes musical, verbal, or       
other notations about phenomena marked as Wolf
             - with the dull end of the spear, the theorist writes musical, verbal, or other notations about phenomena marked as Tuned/Consonant
4. The notations are displayed and/or interpreted. 

left: a performer, playing a music theorist, sits at a table, pictured from the neck down. The performer holds a spear, as if about to write with it on a blank piece of letter-sized paper; top right: the following text is displayed with black letters on white: to write with a spear./to theorize with a spear./to conceptualize with the prosthetic of a spear; bottom right: a piece of paper is displayed, into which the outlines of the following has been cut with a spear: 1) “best that the wolf with his unpleasant howling stay in the forest” (Michael Praetorius) and 2) the pitches F and G-sharp, historically marked as Wolf, are written in Western staff notation on a treble clef. The piece of paper is displayed on the music stand of an organ console in a church; below the page are the registration stops of the organ. To the right of the page are windows, through which a forest can be seen through the faint light of twilight.

Praetorius’s citation of the figure Wolf-as-problem should thus be read as the wielding of a symbolic weapon implicated in attacks against not only wolves but also Indigenous sovereignty. By wielding this symbolic weapon, the theorist engages in a second operation, inscription that essentializes the Wolf into a position of incapacity. At stake in the inscription Wolf-as-problem is a historically emergent necro-biopolitics of sensation. For sensory studies scholar Kyla Schuller, drawing on Jasbir Puar’s decolonial revision of disability studies, this politics works by sorting bodies in terms of (in)capacities for “sensorial discipline,” which Schuller describes as a civilizationist imperative “to learn to master their sensory impulses.”³¹ Sensorial discipline is also a necro-biopolitical measure that marks bodies as self-determined and civilized, or as outer-determined and savage.

For Topsell, the wolf’s alleged cruelty is evidence of incapacity for sensorial discipline, and specifically incapacity to discipline hungry impulses: “Wolfs in the time of their hunger fall upon all creatures that come in the way, whether they be men or beasts, without partiality, to fill their bellies, and that especially in the winter time, wherein they are not afraid to come to Houses and Cities.”³² Howling is further evidence of the Wolf’s subjection to hungry impulse: “Wolfs do never howl, but when they are oppressed with famin.” And howling is a means through which this impulse spreads: “if there by many [wolves] hunting together, they equally divide the prey among them all, and sometimes it is said, that they howl and call their fellows to that feast which are absent, if their prey be plentiful.”³³ As such, howling is a threat to the civilizationist project of sensorial discipline. So the wolf is a problem for civilization because of an essential(ized) incapacity for sensorial discipline, as is “proven” by howling. Then, by positioning wolves as always already incapacitated, these writings create impunity for the total political incapacitation of wolves through extermination.

It is through this politics of sensory (in)capacity that the figure of the Wolf becomes “useful” for tuning theory, enabling a third operation, displacement. If the early modern music theorist faces the task of establishing his and the beholder’s capacity to abstract vibration into tuned Consonance, the (howling) Wolf’s necropolitical positioning as a figure of incapacity is hardly incidental to the task. Struggling with the exteriority of beating, Praetorius displaces this exteriority onto the figure of the Wolf. This displacement depends upon the reductive inscription of the Wolf discussed above. If the ventriloquism of a person is often glossed as a gesture of “putting words in their mouth;” what happens in the theorist’s displacement of beating onto the Wolf is a ventriloquizing gesture of putting sound in the Wolf’s mouth. Because this mouth has already been reduced to the exteriority of hunger and howling, and silenced through extermination, the theorist is enabled to relate to it as a blank slate, onto which tuning’s impasses can be displaced. Praetorius’s closing rhetorical flourish monumentalizes this ventriloquizing displacement: the quarter-comma mean tone tuning’s intervallic containment of Dissonance is narrated as the (compliant) agency of a Wolf who “stay[s] in the forest” and “[does] not bother our harmonic consonances,” a move that literally dis-places Dissonance not only onto this Wolf but also onto a forest as a whole.

the tuning theorist solves the problem called Wolf

1. A grey sock puppet (with an aperture for a mouth, but otherwise with minimal features, legible as a generic animal) and two or more organ pipes of similar materials sit on a table.
2. A music theorist puts the sock puppet on one hand.
3. “I am about to stuff [insert number] organ pipes into this puppet’s mouth.”
4. Pause.
5. The theorist slowly picks up the organ pipes, as if preparing to stuff them into the puppet’s mouth.
6. The music theorist makes a gesture that actively refuses to realize the action described in #5.

variation with reference to Michael Praetorius’s statement “best that the wolf with his unpleasant howling stay in the forest, and not bother our harmonic consonances:”

A large number of organ pipes are pointed at a forest, in a similar direction.

This displacement of exteriority enables a fourth operation, a division between Consonance and Dissonance. Beginning around Praetorius’s time, writings on Tuning and Harmony attempt to enact a categorical, hierarchical distinction between the interiority of Consonance and the exteriority of Dissonance. The quarter-comma mean tone temperament—with its optimization of “pure” fifths and containment of the impure fifth marked as Wolf in a “remote” part of the pitch gamut—embodies this division, a division that curiously mirrors contemporaneous spatial logics of wolf trapping (especially as enacted through fenced enclosures depicted in the Livre de chasse) and deforestation.³⁴ Yet Praetorius’s discursive dis-placement of the Wolf into the forest suggests that the intervallic containment of Dissonance alone was insufficient to establish the interiority of “our harmonic consonances.”

Whether due to the presence of one remaining “problem” fifth (whose dissonance was sometimes knowingly engaged by composers), or due more broadly to the vibrational exteriority of musical practice, Praetorius’s anxiety about the Wolf indexes how the organization of Tuning around interiority will inevitably be haunted by materiality. That is, in tuning theory’s project, founded as it is on the beholder’s abstraction of vibrational impulse into the interiority of scale degrees, intervals, counterpoint, modes, and, most broadly, pitches, the materiality of musical practice will inevitably register as a problem. As such, this project will inevitably need to displace this problem, and to do so through inscriptions that reduce living beings and sovereign Indigenous relations to problems, and in turn as figures onto which these problems can be displaced. In this project, then, the beholder’s mythologized capacities for abstracting vibration into the interiority of Consonance are inseparable from the epistemic violence that reduces the Wolf to a figure of incapacity.³⁵

In these ways, the seemingly technical, quantitative matter of dividing vibrations into Consonance and Dissonance is ultimately an intensely embodied and emplaced issue: these “musical” divisions are meaningful only for and through a beholder, who coheres only within taxonomizing categorical divisions between organisms and lands, which Chung summarizes as a “stark opposition between dissonant, wolf­ infested wildernesses on the one hand, and the cultivated, civilized, harmonious space of concord on the other hand.”³⁶ If the Consonance/Dissonance binary is a key semiotic basis for later Baroque aesthetics of Affektenlehre and Romantic aesthetics of Feeling, this analysis of the violent, even ecocidal, foundations of this binary severely complicates liberal notions that concert music cultivates empathy.

tuning theory delineates between Consonance and Dissonance

1. A Western art music chart in which certain intervals are marked as Wolf and others are unmarked, is projected onto a floor, or printed in large format and laid on a floor; the chart is scaled so that each of the chart’s compartments (or other embodiments of pitch intervals) is at least as large as a live wolf’s body.

2. One or more music theorists emphasize the boundary between areas marked Wolf and those unmarked by wielding (visibly fake) toy versions of lethal weapons utilized in the early modern European extermination of wolves—spears, crossbows, firearms, etc. The theorists freeze in tense postures, occasionally changing posture in a rapid and disciplined fashion.

Since the publication of Syntagma, the Consonance/Dissonance opposition has emerged as the central organizing principle of Western art music syntax, polyphony, form, and narrative, particularly as this music was institutionalized in the concert hall in the late 18th and early 19th century, and later became an important lexicon for movie, TV, and video game soundtracks. Since then, the civilizationist and colonialist dynamics of Consonance and Dissonance have, if anything, become more explicit.³⁷ Chung has traced how Georg Andreas Sorge’s watershed 18th century music theory writings on equal temperament—the tuning system that has become the norm for many Western(ized) musical infrastructures—are founded on aversion not only to the Wolf but also to Idleness, an inscription that continues to legitimize the colonization, clearing, and terraforming of Indigenous lands.³⁸ And musicologist Ellen Lockhart has traced how, even as nineteenth-century Western music theory spoke less about the Wolf in matters of tuning, this figure has persisted as a metaphor for the nuisance sounds of violins and other bowed string instruments.³⁹ And these musical frameworks, with their orientation around the abstraction of Pitch, have both backgrounded and been materially enabled by destructive infrastructures such as musical instruments made through the harvesting to near-extinction of “tropical hardwood” trees and the near-extermination of elephants, media technologies made of “conflict” minerals, and funding derived from ecocidal infrastructures such as sugar plantations, heavy industry, and oil companies.⁴⁰ In this context, it should be no surprise that white modernist art music’s breaks with earlier regimes of Consonance and “pure” sounds have not only failed to mark the civilizationist politics of these regimes, but have in many cases actually updated their underlying form by displacing the exteriority of vibration and noise onto racially-marked and even animalizing figures such as the Primitive. This is true of watershed modernist Arnold Schoenberg as well as his ideological rival Igor Stravinsky, and even of later (post)modernist experimental musicians who made dramatic physical exits from the concert hall.⁴¹

In the following pieces, I trace how the concert hall engraves these civilizationist politics of sensation onto spectators.⁴² Against white modernism’s infatuation with the New, I instead adopt a historicizing gaze aligned with decolonial methods, in order to excavate and disrupt civilizationist politics sedimented into concert music frameworks. In the piece every Concord is an agreement to exterminate (Consonance is a trap), I filter audio samples of concert music samples that epitomize the re-establishment of Consonance, or Concord, through audio samples of closing metal traps, a widely-used infrastructure of wolf extermination since early modernity. Here, Consonance is sonically contingent upon wolf trapping, a form which attempts to render audible Consonance’s socio-ecological contingency upon the same; in so doing, I attempt to align artistic Form not with imperial abstraction but with decolonial environmentalist knowledge. The piece’s title redirects focus from the Dissonance-Wolf problem to its situated beholder, and specifically to the possessive first person plural subject hailed by Praetorius, who is constituted through an implicit agreement that the Wolf is a problem.

Note: the listening experience will be best with headphones.

audio description: audio samples of a metal trap closing are played, with 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, or 14 seconds of silence in between. Occasionally, at the louder points of the trap audio, samples of classical music moments of “resolution” into Consonance are faded in briefly, exactly following the loudness contours of the trap audio

In every cadence stokes violent desires for Finality (Harmony is a trap), I mark and refuse the device of the harmonic cadence, in which dissonance is “resolved” into consonance, through audio samples of closing traps, and through a visual marking of musical notations of these passages. As a “resolution” of dissonance, the cadence is at very least haunted by desires for ecocide and for the obliteration of Indigenous sovereignty, even while this device hails listeners to experience satisfaction in its simulated (i.e. sanitized) enactment of these desires.⁴³

audio description: an audio sample of Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony no. 5, the very end of the third movement, also known as the transition into the fourth movement is played; in place of the beginning of the fourth movement, an audio sample of a metal trap closing is played.

In before the Audience can be Harmonious, I mark the position of Harmony’s Audience by projecting onto the audience seats of a concert hall. This community of subjects is constituted through common sensory capacity to discipline the “high” auditory sense, a capacity secured through the displacement of the “low” sense of hunger onto the figure of the Wolf.

left: an excerpt from Michael Praetorius, Syntagma Musicum II is projected, in white letters, on the black plastic audience chairs of a concert hall, arranged in two rows. On the seats, the following text is legible. Line breaks indicate breaks between chairs, and empty lines indicate linebreaks between rows of text; right: a grid of six metal wolf traps, rendered as light grey on a black background, is projected on the black plastic audience chairs of a concert hall, arranged in two rows, with each trap scaled to be projected onto 2-3 adjacent chairs.

Then, as a way to end this publication in a way otherwise to (a certain kind of) closure, the piece closure is a ruse offers more open-ended prompts to find trajectories otherwise to Harmony’s taxonomic, essentializing binary oppositions.

closure is a ruse

1. Listen to a cadence, embodying its “resolution” of dissonance by relaxing muscle tension.

2. Listen to the same cadence, with the sound of a wolf trap closing played in place of the music’s resolution of dissonance.

3. Remember your listening to these cadences, until you locate an impulse that resists Harmony’s normalizing of extermination. Make space for this impulse, even/especially if the impulse exceeds Western modern notions of Tuning, Harmony, and Closure.

4. Find a collective formation that can nourish and politically implement this impulse. Find a position- and power-sensitive way to relate to this formation.

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Primary Sources Cited:

Gessner, Conrad. Historia animalium libiri I-IV. Zurich: C. Froschauer, 1551-1567.

Praetorius, Michael. Syntagma Musicum vol. II: De Organographia Parts III–V, edited and translated by Quentin Faulkner. (1619) 2014. Lincoln, NE: Zea E-­Books. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook/24/

Topsell, Edward. The historie of foure-footed beastes: Describing the true and liuely figure of euery beast, with a discourse of their seuerall names, conditions, kindes, vertues (both naturall and medicinall) countries of their breed, their loue and hate to mankinde, and the wonderfull worke of God in their creation, preseruation, and destruction. London: Printed by William Iaggard, 1607.

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Notes

1. I discuss infrastructures and funding below. See especially note 38 below. ↩︎
2. I capitalize Wolf when referring specifically to the discursive figure Wolf. ↩︎
3. Tucker forthcoming. ↩︎
4. Kotz 2010. ↩︎
5. Critical histories of this term include Welchman (2013) and Kim (2024). ↩︎
6. For a wide-ranging anthology of early sources around this term, see Alberro (2011). I invoke these highly imperfect terms here mainly as shorthands; in the forthcoming book, I offer a more extended assessment of which aspects of these histories are and are not compatible with decolonial principles. ↩︎
7. I have written in more depth about issues of positionality elsewhere (Tucker 2024). ↩︎
8. Wynter 2003. ↩︎
9. Chung 2024. ↩︎
10. My theorization of implicit knowledge draws on the writings of performance/practice studies scholar Ben Spatz (2015) and (2019). ↩︎
11. Chung 2024, 319-320 ↩︎
12. Here, I draw on Denise Ferreira da Silva’s relational account of modern subjectivity (2007). It is worth noting that, as Zakiyyah Iman Jackson argues (2020), in this time period, Animalization and Racialization become increasingly entangled; in the case of the Wolf, this can be observed in the fluid movement of descriptors between the positions of the Wolf and Savage, e.g. cruel, fierce, and even words like savage and howling. In other words, the early modern Wolf is never wholly separate from matters of racialization. Chung’s analysis (2024) of the later writings of Georg Andreas Sorge’s writings on tuning, with their concurrent disparagement of the intersecting figures of the Wolf and Idleness, with the latter implying the racializing figure of the Savage, further suggests that the figure of the Wolf in tuning is not easily separable from matters of racialization. ↩︎
13. A technically precise but politically grounded account of the technical details is available in Chung 2024. ↩︎
14. In scientific contexts, this ratio is often written 3/2. ↩︎
15. For an intellectual history of the concept of beating in relation to the figure of the Wolf, see Lockhart 2020. ↩︎
16. Western epistemologies since at least Aristotle have framed touch as a “low” sense opposed to the “high” senses of seeing and hearing. As I trace in the book, Western Aesthetic writings have frequently positioned touch as a threat to interiority and displaced its exteriority onto racially-marked and animalizing figures, particularly the Savage; at the same time, music philosophy and practice have often displaced vibrations known as low frequencies onto racially-marked figures. Noteworthy examples of the former include the writing of philosopher-poet Friedrich Schiller and music critic-philosopher Eduard Hanslick; examples of the latter include philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s taxonomy of musical pitch registers that inscribes high pitches as organic and low pitches as inorganic, with the latter are displaced onto the figure of the Slave, and Western art composers’ widespread use of low registers as signs of racial markedness, often of an Animalizing and/or Cthonic sort, notoriously in John Williams’s figuring of the shark in the soundtrack to Jaws through a near-quotation from Sergei Prokofiev’s Primitivist Scythian Suite. ↩︎
17. To generalize broadly, earlier approaches to Western art music had organized pitch in terms of the linear/sequential endeavor of counterpoint; approaches to pitch organization in terms of harmonies or chords (combinations of simultaneous pitches) were emerging around Praetorius’s time. ↩︎
18. Chung notes that the first printing of the term in Arnolt Schlick’s 1511 Spiegel der Orgelmacher und Organisten, and argues that this writing “likely reflects… language already in some degree of use at the time among practitioners” (2024, 321). ↩︎
19. Praetorius [1619], front matter ↩︎
20. Chung 2024, 323 ↩︎
21. Praetorius [1619], 155 ↩︎
22. Chung 2024, 325 ↩︎
23. Topsell 1607, “Of the Wolf.” These writers’ allegations about wolves’ cruelty might positioned within a long history of Western modern atrocity propaganda that seeks to underwrite Western atrocity through the repetition through print of sensational allegations about the enemy’s cruelty; indeed, these writings are exactly contemporaneous with the justification of European colonial projects through the printing of salacious allegations of colonized peoples’ cannibalism and “savage customs.” On the role of print in early modern colonial atrocity propaganda see Ghosh (2021, 45). While most analyses of atrocity propaganda focus on intra-human politics, there is no reason to exclude the position of the Animal from this analytic. Indeed, the fact that much atrocity propaganda works through Animalizing the enemy, such as the paradigmatic case of colonizer allegations of Indigenous cannibalism, suggests that the categories of Human and Animal may be productive analytic frames for reckoning with atrocity propaganda. In my book in progress, I argue that early modern atrocity propaganda is a crucial source for (concert music) aesthetics and foil for the aesthetic’s sensorial discipline, through comparison of music theory’s citation of the Wolf with Immanuel Kant’s citation of Spanish conquistadors’ allegations of Indigenous cannibalism in the Critique of Judgment. ↩︎
24. Topsell 1607, 574ff. ↩︎
25. Topsell does not use the word then-novel word animal, but his characterization of the Wolf as a problem and excess closely aligns with the rare but significant uses of this word in his English contemporary William Shakespeare’s output. On this point, see Shannon (2009) and Jackson (2020, 12-13). ↩︎
26. While there is an immense literature here, almost none of it considers wolf extermination in relation to (i.e. as an attack on) Indigenous sovereignty. At worst, this analytic move reifies the colonizing evacuation of Indigenous sovereignty and the ongoing colonial extermination of Indigenous relations. Exceptions include Beggen and York (2025), Rutherford (2022), and Wise (2016). ↩︎
27. TallBear 2019, 24, 35 ↩︎
28. O’Connell et al. 2025, 13-14. On this point, see also the writing of scientists from the inter-tribal Anishinaabe Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission (Gilbert et al. 2022) and Ojibwe scholar Jason Sanders (2013). ↩︎
29. O’Connell et al. 2025, 24 ↩︎
30. This phrase originates in Christian theology; the earliest printed uses of the phrase to describe Indigenous lands are in English-language texts by settlers in lands known colonially as New England in the 1660s, such as God’s Controversy with New England (1662). ↩︎
31. Schuller 2018, 18; Puar 2017. These texts mostly limit their analysis to intra-human politics, but there is no reason why these frameworks might not consider the position of the Animal. Indeed, an influential figure like René Descartes’s insentient Beast-Machine, which Jackson (2020) argues is inseparable from broader matters of anti-Blackness and racialization, indexes how the politics of sensory (in)capacity are deeply entwined with the position of the Animal. On the entwinement of the Animal and matters of racialization and colonization, see also footnotes 9 and 20 above. ↩︎
32. Topsell 1607, 572. See also earlier: “though they go through a flock of sheep: but in short time after, their bellies and tongue are calling for more meat” (571). ↩︎
33. Topsell 1607, 571, 572 ↩︎
34. On the drastic deforestation that characterized early modernity in Europe, see Darby (1956) and Williams (2003). ↩︎
35. “Epistemic violence” is from Spivak (1988). ↩︎
36. Chung 2024, 323. A similar argument about how musical notions of Harmony are co-constitutive with racializing and colonizing taxonomies has been made in a number of geohistorical contexts by scholars including Ewell (2023), Fretwell (2020), Hight (2003), and James (2019). ↩︎
37. The literature here is immense. The fabled public dispute between Claudio Monteverdi and Giovanni Artusi (1600-1607) is often narrated as a watershed event in this reorganization of music. A key recent cultural studies (although not decolonial) account of this shift is offered by McClary (2000 and 2012). ↩︎
38. Chung 2024. ↩︎
39. Lockhart 2020. ↩︎
40. On instruments and media, see, among other sources: Bates (2020), Brennan (2020), Gribenski et. al (2025), Murray (2009); on funding, see Evans (2015), Gikandi (2011), Gómez-Barris (2021), and Hunter (2018). ↩︎
41. Music scholars have largely failed to even ask decolonial questions of modernism, and thus very little has been written here. Schoenberg invokes the Primitive in his writings as a foil for the aesthetic subject, through rhetorics not wholly different from those excavated here in Praetorius; as is well known, Stravinsky invokes the Primitive through a well-worn lexicon of Exoticism, further underscored by programmatic content, above all in the ballet Le Sacre du Printemps. Stravinsky’s Primitive is perhaps the most explicitly Animalizing figure, as exemplified by Walt Disney’s animation of the ballet that rewrote Primitive peoples as dinosaurs; the composer Paul Hindemith reported that “Igor appears to love it” (quoted in Ross 2007, 297-8). This comment itself indexes a deeper historical entwinement between concert music signifiers of the Primitive and the Animal, one example of which is given in note 16.
    On Schoenberg, see Tucker (2026); on Stravinsky, see Tucker (2025a). On Max Neuhaus and David Tudor’s exits from the concert hall, see Tucker (2025a) and Tucker (2025b), respectively. ↩︎
42. The next few scores not included here because they are longer and more technical. At present, they are available directly from the artist: ColinLTucker AT gmail.com. ↩︎
43. For an earlier intersectional feminist analysis of the violence implicit in harmonic “resolution” focused on later musical repertoires, see McClary (1991). Even while this now-canonical text is widely discussed, artistic research has been hesitant to explicitly address these issues. ↩︎