O Give Me a Home

Abstract

This essay examines Stephen Lett’s (2023) critique of North American music theory in general, and of the Society for Music Theory in particular, from the point of view of the binary inclusion/exclusion. Drawing on my own experience, I acknowledge that in many respects his critique of the Society for Music Theory (SMT), from its very inception, as creating an exclusionary, “stratified” space, is on target. Yet I contest his reading of the history and current functioning of the Society and of the broader discipline as a wholesale enterprise of coloniality. Although he insists that this metaphor, as applied to the SMT, is not to be read as involving the type of violence inflicted by colonial powers on native peoples, his consistent, governing language of displacement, pushing out, building fences, and defending territory, belies this denial, and produces a narrative that often suggests a level of hostility incompatible with both history and current experience.