1 How Music eory Went Online Miriam Piilonen is article combines archival research, digital-media histories, close readings of various kinds of internet content, and interviews to map out a history of music theory on the internet. By unpack- ing and historicizing online music theory, we can better understand how music theory became a digital-media object. Music theory was originally brought online by theorists at universities, yield- ing a false dichotomy between insiders (i.e., academic music theorists) and outsiders (i.e., everyone else). Public music theory is useful when it helps us to break down this insider–outsider fallacy. Keywords: online music theory, digital-media history, history of music theory, public music theory, internet memes. M usic theory’s arrival online and its transformation into a digital-media object can be traced back to the earliest computer networks in the 1960s. Music the- ory’s online presence originated within the academy, only later broadening into a more inclusive arena. A range of actors— engineers, music theorists, teachers, students, diplomats, and entrepreneurs—cultivated a complex social life for music the- ory enthusiasts through digital media. ese efforts aligned with the founding of the Society for Music eory in 1977 and the creation of the first music theory email lists and electronic journals in the 1990s. By the 2000s, online influencers were building brands and shaping massive international communi- ties around music theory content. e memes of today sit atop a long history of online music theory—one that involved many hands and many theories, and that is crucially about power and internet access. In 2025, most people’s conception of music theory is not academic music theory. Instead, it is everyday experiences; interactions in person and on social media; “think pieces” about popular songs, artists, and trends; and video essays by online creators. Academic music theorists have much to learn by acknowledging that the history of music theory is being written partly by people who work outside the academic realm. At the same time, a false dichotomy between music theory’s insiders (i.e., professional theorists at universities) and its outsiders (i.e., everyone else) risks blurring the lines between music theory as a discipline and music theory as a discourse. Both are represented online and in historicizations of digital music theory, although people commonly conflate them and draw artificial distinctions between them. By beginning to construct a media archaeology for online music theory, we can depixelate our image of how music- theoretical knowledge is and was constructed and disseminated. e digital history of music theory is fundamentally about access to the internet, which has come to determine a great deal of power to define music theory in the digital age. To consider the history of online music theory is thus to conduct a power analysis, which I initiate in this essay. Any history of online music theory will be fraught with anachronisms, missing pieces, and a sense of the uncanny. 1 Consider the relatively small problem of analyzing the comic meme in Example 1 just a few years after it was posted: 2 e meme first appeared on Twitter in February 2022. In April of that year, tech entrepreneur and plutocrat Elon Musk ini- tiated the purchase of Twitter, leading to a rebranding of the site to X. e meanings of the meme have shifted in the wake of Musk’s demolition project. Its author, @mountbel- lyache, has since deleted their account. Historicizing the internet is challenging. Beyond the fragility of the software and the communities themselves, some aspects (such as “the vibe” on Twitter pre-Musk) are hard to quantify. e connections that people make on social-media platforms are real, but also delicate because they depend on the stability of impermanent structures: people, management teams, software, and communities. Some of what I discuss here will soon seem out of date. Nevertheless, I offer a partial account that illus- trates important features of digital music theory. MUSIC THEORY GOES ONLINE At present, music theory takes a range of forms online. One of them is internet memes, which are casual expressions of ordi- nary creativity and, at the same time, indicators of trends in online discourse. An example of a music theory internet meme 1 Michel de Certeau (1988, 36) described the “rupture” between past and present that troubles the writing of history: “us founded on the rup- ture between a past that is its object, and a present that is the place of its practice, history endlessly finds the present in its object and the past in its practice. Inhabited by the uncanniness that it seeks, history imposes its law upon the faraway places it conquers when it fosters the illusion that it is bringing them back to life.” 2 e music theory boxer meme is a play on a recently popular meme form. e earliest iteration of the boxer meme was posted by Twitter user @boyofyouth on 6 October 2020 (Schimkowitz 2020). It went viral several times over the following months, leading to the spread of variations on Twitter and other sites such as Tumblr and Instagram. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mts/advance-article/doi/10.1093/mts/mtaf002/8069840 by SMT Member Access user on 12 March 2025