Maia Joëlle Foster- Before the Theory

Maia Joëlle Foster- Before the Theory

Abstract

Before the Theory examines Black musical knowledge as an inherited and embodied cultural system transmitted through oral tradition, communal practice, and proximity across generations. Drawing on practice-based research, this project argues that what academic institutions categorize as instinctual Black musicianship is a sophisticated epistemological framework that predates and informs the theoretical structures used to describe it. The creative component, a collection of gospel-informed reimaginings of jazz standards and contemporary music, serves as both artistic expression and scholarly evidence, documenting what it costs to make Black music inside institutional spaces not designed to fully hold it. The accompanying written research grounds this experience in the scholarship of W.E.B. Du Bois, Kyra D. Gaunt, Samuel Floyd Jr., Philip Ewell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, bell hooks, and William A. Smith, among others. This project asserts that practice-based research is itself an argument about what counts as knowledge, that lived experience, embodied tradition, and cultural inheritance are not supplements to rigorous scholarship but are rigorous scholarship. Before the Theory is one document in a longer conversation about who defines musical knowledge, whose inheritance gets treated as scholarship, and what conservatories owe the traditions they were built on.

Publication Date

7-1-2026

Campus

Valencia (Spain) Campus

Keywords

Black American music; Anti-Blackness; Gospel; Appropriation; Microaggressions

Maia Joëlle Foster- Before the Theory

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