Har­mony in Con­ser­vatoire Edu­ca­tion. A Study in the His­tory of Music The­ory in Nor­way

Bjørnar Utne-Reitan’s dissertation aims to develop a wide-ranging historical understanding of how music-theoretical disciplines such as harmony and counterpoint have been constructed and justified as part of higher music education. It does this through a study of the situation in Norway in general, and Oslo in particular, from the late 19^th century to the early 21^st century.

The dissertation is the first extensive study in the history of music theory in Norway. The source material comprises music theory books, formal curricula from the Oslo Conservatoire and Norwegian Academy of Music and music theory debates in periodicals. Through Foucault-inspired discourse-oriented analyses of these historical documents, Utne-Reitan explores complex developments in the music theory discourse in Norway.

A central finding is that several important ruptures and transformations occurred in the period c. 1945–1975: Function symbols gradually replaced Roman numerals as the dominant system in harmonic analysis, a new name for the mandatory theory training was introduced (satslære) and what until then had almost exclusively been a craft-oriented discourse was transformed into a broader discourse where music theory is constructed as, among other things, ‘understanding music’. The idea of theory as craft – coupled with an aversion to theoretical complexity – would nonetheless remain strong.

About Bjørnar Utne-Reitan

Bjørnar Utne-Reitan (b. 1994) studied musicology at the University of Oslo and music theory at the Norwegian Academy of Music. He has made important contributions to research on Grieg and has published in the Journal of Music Theory, Music Analysis, Danish Musicology Online, Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie and Studia Musicologica Norvegica.