Vol. , No.  Ethnomusicology Fall  © 2012 by the Society for Ethnomusicology houghts on an Interdiscipline: Music heory, Analysis, and Social heory in Ethnomusicology Gabriel Solis / University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana I n an analytical and hortatory article in the Yearbook for Traditional Music about theory in ethnomusicology, and on the nature of ethnomusicological theory, Timothy Rice manifests a telling contradiction regarding music theory as a part of the discipline (2010b). 1 he article is quite useful in providing sys- tematic ways of thinking about social theory and its role in ethnomusicology as well as the autochthonous modes of theorizing—about society, about culture, about the world—that we do in our discipline; but where it comes to theorizing about musical sound, Rice is unclear in a way that is at least unhelpful to his argument in the article, and potentially deleterious to our practice as a discipline as we move into the future. 2 On the one hand, he draws on a host of examples of the most signiicant work in the ield in which theorizing about and closely analyzing musical sound plays a central role, but on the other, when he discusses music theory (by which I believe he means the production of generalizations about musical structure in the abstract) he does so in a way that diminishes its currency and importance to ethnomusicology. In this essay, I take the position that we need a metatheoretical perspective on the discipline that recognizes the ongoing signiicance of close analysis of musical sound in a range of studies and the production of music theory by ethnomusicologists over the past thirty years. his work, I argue, is not separate from the “interpretive turn,” as Rice calls the growing importance of social theory in ethnomusicology since the 1980s, but, rather, interconnected with it. As Martin Stokes says in his portion of the entry on “Ethnomusicology” in the New Grove Dictionary, the opposition between “texts and contexts” can be seen as a false one (Pegg et al. n.d.). As will become clear throughout this article, my use of the term “music theory” is intentionally somewhat vague here. I take it, in the irst instance (seem-