Grove Music Online: Theory

Grove Music Online
Theory
David Carson Berry and Sherman Van Solkema
https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.A2258426
Published in print: 26 November 2013
Published online: 31 January 2014
An area of study that tends to focus on musical materials per se, in

order to explain (and/or offer generalizations about) their various
principles and processes. It investigates how these materials
function (or, in a more speculative vein, how they might function), so
that musical “structure” can be better understood. More broadly, in
the United States, music theory refers to an academic discipline with
a dual focus on research and pedagogy. Regarding the latter,
especially at the undergraduate level (and earlier), theory is often
coterminous with a program for teaching a variety of skills, from the
rudiments of melody and rhythm, to harmony, counterpoint, and
form (along with their attendant “ear training” or aural perception).
Related to but standing apart from these fundamentals of praxis are
the various research areas of modern theory, as described under §5
below. It should be noted that music analysis plays a major role in
this agenda. Although conceptually separate from theory, in that
analysis often focuses on the particulars of a given composition
whereas theory considers the broader systems that underlie many
such works, in practice the two have a reciprocal relationship.
1. Introduction.
Although music theory has deep roots, traceable to antiquity’s seven

liberal arts and the work of Aristoxenus in the 4th century bce (and
the Pythagoreans before him), as a professional discipline in the
United States it began to develop only around 1960, making it
younger than the kindred fields of musicology and ethnomusicology.
Prior to the 20th century, American theory was typically pedagogical
in purpose, as evidenced by its often rudimentary coverage in
tunebooks of the 18th century (see §2), and by treatises and
textbooks of the 19th century, which were often of German, British,
or French origin (see §3). In the first half of the 20th century,
conditions became propitious for a wider array of music-theoretic
explorations (see §4(i)), and during the second half of the century,
theory assumed prominence in American academic institutions as an
autonomous field with its own professional societies, journals, and
conferences (see §5(i)). A notable result of the field’s continued
growth has been its expanding range of methodologies, as applied to
an increasing number of repertories. At the beginning of the 1980s,
it could be claimed that the main areas of American theory involved,
on the one hand, Schenkerian studies of tonal music and, on the
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other hand, the investigation of 20th-century music through 12-tone
and set theories—a dual emphasis sometimes summarized with the
alliteration “Schenker and Sets.” Certainly these areas are still
robust; but as music theory has further developed, a diverse array of
approaches and subjects for exploration have arisen, as
demonstrated under §5.
2. The 18th century: theoretical

introductions.
The earliest attempts to provide a theoretical background for music-

making in America are brief essays on rudiments, published in the
18th century as introductions to tunebooks intended for use in the
singing-schools of New England. The first two “theoretical
introductions,” both of which appeared in 1721, are found in Thomas
Walter’s The Grounds and Rules of Musick Explained and John
Tufts’s A Very Plain and Easy Introduction to the Singing of Psalm
Tunes. Like Walter’s, Tufts’s aim is the purely practical one of
teaching people to sing psalm tunes in three parts from a printed
score. He sketches his own version of a four-letter notation, based
on solmization syllables, in which rhythm is shown by patterns of
dots and slurs. A few lessons in the singing of scales and intervals,
and observance of the “few foregoing Rules” enable one “to sing all
the Tunes in this Book in any of their parts with Ease and Pleasure.”
Later tunebook introductions borrow freely from each other and
from similar English manuals, such as those by Thomas Morley and
John Playford, and, especially, William Tans’ur’s The Royal Melody
Compleat (1754–5), printed in the colonies in revised form as The
American Harmony (1771).
Of the several hundred tunebooks published in the century after the

first editions of Tufts and Walter (see Britton, 1950), only a few
attempt a more comprehensive treatment of theory. Among those
that do are The Continental Harmony (1794/R1961) by William
Billings, and The Massachusetts Compiler (1795). The sparkle of
Billings’s 23-page dialogue on the rudiments of theory sets his
writing apart, though he was merely filtering the commonly
accepted ideas of his time. A more professional turn was taken by
the editors of The Massachusetts Compiler, the introduction to
which is assumed to be largely the work of Hans Gram, though the
book as a whole was produced in collaboration with Oliver Holden
and Samuel Holyoke. This work is important for two reasons: its
theoretical explanations are the first to go considerably beyond the
immediate needs of a singing-school student, and its materials
derive not only from English but from European sources. The editors
state that “a compilation was judged more eligible than the
translating or republishing of any particular treatise.” Seven sources
were drawn upon: Johann Joseph Fux’s “Treatise on
Counterpoint” (i.e., Gradus ad Parnassum, 1725; partial Eng. trans.,
c1768), Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Elémens de musique théorique et
pratique (1752), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique
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(1768/R1969; Eng. trans., 1771), Johann Georg Sulzer’s Allgemeine
Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–4), William Jones’s A Treatise on
the Art of Music (1784), Charles Avison’s An Essay on Musical
Expression (1752, rev. 2/1753/R1967, 3/1775), and Edward Miller’s
Elements of Thorough Bass and Composition (1787). In 29 pages,
the compiled “observations” cover notes, intervals, consonance and
dissonance, diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic intervals,
fundamental and “continued” (continuo) bass, chords and
thoroughbass, counterpoint, cadences, time, accent and syncopation,
and singing. As in most treatises of the time, harmony is the central
issue; rhythm and form are peripheral concerns, and the few pages
devoted to counterpoint scarcely justify the citation of Fux as one of
the sources. Incomplete and problematic as the extracts and
explanations are, the materials offered greatly exceed practical
needs, and in this sense The Massachusetts Compiler may be cited
as the first “advanced” treatise published in the United States.
3. The 19th century: translations and

textbooks.
For most of the 19th century, American theory was a satellite of

European theory. Interesting experiments in unorthodox notations,
all aimed at more effective sight-reading, poured forth in a
continuing stream of tunebooks up to the Civil War and beyond (see
Perrin, 1968), but their introductions remained rudimentary.
Billings’s independent spirit was lost in a series of didactic manuals
by minor theorists, whose goal was to provide translations of “the
most practical” European treatises and to produce theoretical
writings based on them (usually in simplified form). Among the
English instruction books in circulation were John Callcott’s A
Musical Grammar (1806; first published in the United States in a
new edition, 1833) and Thomas Busby’s A Grammar of Music (1818/
R1976). As for French theory, d’Alembert’s Elémens appeared in
Thomas Dobson’s Encyclopedia (1798), translated by Thomas
Blacklock; and Charles-Simon Catel’s Traité d’harmonie (1802)—the
adoption of which at the Paris Conservatoire had effectively marked
the end of the Rameauian tradition in France—was brought forth by
Lowell Mason as A Treatise on Harmony (1832).
In 1842 James Warner published his translation of Gottfried Weber’s

Allgemeine Musiklehre (1822, 3/1831) under the title General Music
Teacher, Adapted to Self-instruction both for Teachers and Learners.
The contents of this volume are nearly identical to those of the first
quarter of Weber’s important treatise Versuch einer geordneten
Theorie der Tonsetzkunst (1817–21), all four volumes of which soon
appeared in Warner’s 818-page translation (Theory of Musical
Composition, 1846, 2/1851). Weber’s treatise was famous for its
rejection of the “philosophico-scientific” approach of Justin Knecht
and others, in place of which Weber offered a “naturally arranged”
theory emphasizing pedagogical concerns.
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In 1864, the first English translation of the Lehrbuch der Harmonie
(1853), by Ernst Richter of the Leipzig Conservatory, was published
in London. Three years later, John Morgan issued a translation in the
United States as Manual of Harmony (1867). A competing American
translation was put out by James Parker in 1873, and two additional
versions followed by 1912. Parker, who had studied with Richter in
Leipzig, had two decades earlier published his own Manual of
Harmony (1855), which made “free use” of Richter’s work. Parker is
undoubtedly the “Mr. J. P.” who wrote to Lowell Mason concerning
the courses of theoretical instruction at Leipzig. In Dwight’s Journal
of Music for 24 April 1852, Mason introduced the letter from
Leipzig, stating that
It has not been generally known in our country, that there is enough
in music to occupy years of close application. The older singing
books, published some fifty or eighty years ago, contained a few
pages of “Rules,” giving some directions as to finding the “mi,” and
describing the different kinds of time; and a man who could so
explain these that no one could possibly understand him, was
thought to be musically learned.
A decade later the first American conservatories were opened, and

this gave further impetus to publication and translation. Richter’s
pragmatic emphasis and his defense of the empirical tradition
appealed strongly to Americans. These qualities were sustained well
into the 20th century, not just through the work of Richter himself—
i.e., through editions of his harmony book as well as translations of
his work on counterpoint, and canon and fugue—but through texts
on these same subjects by his former student Salomon Jadassohn
(also at the Leipzig Conservatory).
A more systematic approach became available with Herrman

Saroni’s translation of the first two volumes of the third edition of
A.B. Marx’s Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition,
praktisch-theoretisch (1837, 3/1846–7) as Theory and Practice of
Musical Composition (1852). For the American market Saroni made
changes: his 34-page essay on tones and the relationships between
them replaces Marx’s more philosophical introduction; and for the
fifth and subsequent American editions a 166-page appendix was
provided by Emilius Girac, whose aim was to “condense and abridge
matters which, in the author are too prolix, and mingled with
secondary considerations.” For more advanced students, the first
volume of Simon Sechter’s Die Grundsätze der musikalischen
Komposition (1853) was translated by C.C. Müller as The Correct
Order of Fundamental Harmonies (1871); and John Fillmore’s New
Lessons in Harmony (1887) introduced the polarity principle of
another important European theorist, Hugo Riemann. As an
appendix to his book, Fillmore provided a 30-page translation of
Riemann’s Die Natur der Harmonik (1882).
Finally, toward the end of the century, an American theorist, Percy

Goetschius, began to publish his own corpus of theoretical writings.
On the basis of the widespread recognition of his work and the use
of his books over several decades, Goetschius has been called “the
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father of American theory” (Thompson, 1980); however, his work
was somewhat atypical of the developing American tradition of
empiricism and openness to new ideas. Goetschius studied in
Stuttgart with Immanuel Faisst, whose theory he taught to the
English-speaking classes at the Stuttgart Conservatory from 1876
until his return to the United States in 1889. In the first American
edition of The Material used in Composition (1889), he expounded
what was to become the most influential of his theoretical notions:
the theory of “tone-relations” based on a series of natural fifths.
Independently of European theorists of his day, including Faisst,
Goetschius set up a “Pythagorean” series of natural fifths (F–C–G–D–
A–E–B in the key of C), which he saw as the basis of both melody and
harmony (rather than seeing one as being derived from the other)
and of harmonic progression as well. The idea of harmonic motion
toward a tonic through successive descending fifths has been called
the most durable aspect of Goetschius’s theory. In The Theory and
Practice of Tone-Relations (1892), which is a condensed version of
The Material, he emphasized the impossibility of separating the
study of harmony and melody. He considered it “a waste of time” and
“pedagogic error” to make a separate phase of study of “Strict
Counterpoint” (7/1903). Problematic to present thinking is
Goetschius’s stultifying attitude to chromaticism, which he
considered “the domain of harmonic lawlessness” (The Material, 8/
1907). Goetschius was far more ambitious than Richter with respect
to the establishment of basic principles and the systematic
presentation of rules and classifications, but a fussy and somewhat
archaic pedanticism pervades his theoretical writings, as compared
with the streamlined texts of Richter.
Just before the turn of the century, Homer Norris’s Practical

Harmony on a French Basis (1894–5) signaled a quickened interest
in things French. Norris offered an up-to-date view of chromaticism
to demonstrate “that Wagner, Brahms, Leoncavallo, and Bruneau are
as truly in key as is Mozart.” Other American texts in use at the time
included George Gow’s The Structure of Music (1895), George
Chadwick’s Harmony (1897), and Arthur Foote’s and Walter
Spalding’s Modern Harmony in its Theory and Practice (1905), the
latter of which introduced concepts from the English theorists
George Macfarren and Ebenezer Prout. As the new century
unfolded, an ever greater number of American pedagogical texts
rose to prominence, as addressed under §4(ii).
4. 1900 to 1950.
(i) Changing conditions.

In the first half of the 20th century, the environment in the United
States became much more nurturing for music-theoretic endeavors
of an expanding scope. Several intersecting factors were
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responsible. First, theory in its pedagogical forms experienced
increased relevance, as courses in harmony and related subjects
continued to join the curricula of colleges and universities, where
they had just begun to be welcomed in the late 19th century. Second,
the status of musicology grew, as demonstrated by new
organizations: the US branch of the Internationale Musikgesellschaft
was formed in 1907, the American Council of Learned Societies
established a committee on musicology in 1929, the New York
Musicological Society was formed in 1931, and from it the American
Musicological Society was created in 1934. Third, a growing number
of composers were impelled to write about contemporary
compositional techniques, and some did so in a way that engaged
theory and analysis. And fourth, periodicals arose that were
receptive to theory-oriented articles. The proceedings of the Music
Teachers’ National Association, which resumed in 1906 after a
hiatus, frequently included such material, as did Musical Quarterly
(founded 1915), Modern Music (1924–46), and the Journal of the
American Musicological Society (founded 1948). As a result of these
conditions, several principal lines of investigation coalesced, as
surveyed below.
(ii) Tonal-music pedagogy.

To satisfy the increasing demands of educational institutions, a great
many new textbooks on tonal harmony were issued in the first half of
the 20th century. According to the lists or surveys of Heacox (1922),
Hill (1941), and Jones (1964), the authors who would have been most
familiar to students of this time included Richter, Jadassohn, and
Prout (German and British authors of an older generation), but also
the Americans Percy Goetschius, George Chadwick, Francis York,
Arthur Foote and Walter Spalding, Arthur Heacox (including with
Friedrich Lehmann), Carolyn Alchin, Arthur Olaf Andersen, George
Wedge, Melville Smith and Max Krone, and Walter Piston. As for
particular books, Wedge’s Applied Harmony (1930–31) seems to
have been especially popular in its time, whereas Piston’s Harmony
(1941) was favored by the next generation.
In canvassing these and other contemporary texts, to track changing

conceptions of the tonal system, the treatment of secondary or
applied dominants (as we would call them today) emerges as notably
irregular. Often, such chords were described as “transient
modulations,” and in analyses the momentary “keys” would each be
indicated. However, there was also a steady stream of authors who
interpreted these chords like secondary dominants, albeit with great
variance in terminology. For example, just before the present period,
Frank Shepard (1889 and 1896) wrote of “Attendant chords,” which
included all the usual chords with secondary leading tones: variants
of V, vii°, and also augmented-sixth chords. He symbolized these
with an “[A],” and his analyses would include labels such as “[A] of
IV,” etc. Some authors imported similar ideas from Europe: Daniel
Gregory Mason (1908) wrote about the “parenthesis
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chords” [Klammer-accorde] of Carl Piutti; and Dirk Haagmans
(1916) appropriated Riemann’s Zwischendominante, which he called
an “Intra Dominant Chord.” Other American authors developed their
own terminology: e.g. for Andersen (1923), such chords were “the
dominant formations” of whatever the diatonic chord happened to
be; for Heacox and Lehmann (1931), they were “Apparent” chords;
and for Wedge (1930–31), they were “dominant embellishments” (or
“half-diminished seventh embellishments,” etc.) of the following
chord. Piston’s 1941 discussion of “secondary dominants” was just
one more link in this chain of development. However, given the
popularity of his text, it might have helped turn the tide away from
the other school of thought; the secondary dominant—both in
concept and in that specific term—became increasingly common
after mid-century.
(iii) Analysis of modern harmony.

Broadly speaking, approaches to contemporary harmony either
cataloged existing practice or speculated about possibilities. René
Lenormand offered a book of the first type with his Study of Modern
Harmony (1913; Eng. trans., 1915). His approach was conservative:
he tended to describe chords as conventional entities with sundry
alterations or additions. A. Eaglefield Hull was more accommodating
in Modern Harmony (1914). He too discussed chords with altered
and added notes, but he also considered chords built from
superimposed fourths, fifths, and even seconds, and chords of
“mixed structures.” Certain “horizontal methods” were also
explored, including polytonality and “reflection” (i.e., symmetrical
inversion). Horace Miller’s New Harmonic Devices (1930) likewise
offered a multifaceted view of practice. (Schoenberg’s
Harmonielehre will not be considered, as it was not fully translated
until 1978.)
Somewhat more probative was Bernhard Ziehn. In his Manual of

Harmony (1907), he employed various kinds of chromatic triads and
seventh chords, each notated in stacked thirds but including a
diminished third and perhaps other less common intervals. In
labeling them, he used “ordinal numbers, written in Roman
characters.” Thus he could refer to chords “IV and IX with their
major resolution,” etc. Whereas Ziehn’s chromatic harmonies were
constrained by tertian spelling and tonal orientation, Ernst Bacon
wished to systematically identify all possible chord types. In “Our
Musical Idiom” (1917), chords were first placed in a closely packed
“fundamental position,” and then they were labeled by their adjacent
intervals, measured in semitones. Thus there was a four-note “1–2–
1” harmony, a five-note “1–3–2–4” harmony, etc. Bacon accurately
tabulated all 350 transpositionally equivalent chord types, ranging
from two to 12 members.
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As a greater variety of chord types was accepted, a means for
regulating their progression became a concern. Ernst Krenek
addressed this topic in Studies in Counterpoint (1940). In the section
on three-part writing, he classified intervals broadly, as consonances,
mild dissonances, or sharp dissonances; an assortment of three-note
chords was then divided into the same categories. He offered
general guidelines for succession; for example, more sharply
dissonant chords should “introduce and stress culmination-points,”
whereas milder chords suggest “decreasing intensity of the musical
flow.” A similar but more extensive system was introduced by Paul
Hindemith. In The Craft of Musical Composition (1937; Eng. trans.,
1942), chords of three to six members were divided into six main
groups, and several more subgroups, based on interval content and
the corresponding degree of consonance or dissonance. One could
then evaluate a succession of sonorities in terms of its “harmonic
fluctuation,” or unfolding degrees of tension. Hindemith provided a
graphic representation of this fluctuation beneath the staff, in the
form of an expanding and contracting wedge.
(iv) New scalar resources.

Complementary to a new harmonic vocabulary was the exploration
of new scalar resources. This took one of two approaches: either the
traditional set of intervals was apportioned into forms other than
major and minor scales, or microtonal divisions of the octave were
proposed. Several of the harmony tracts cited above (see §4(iii))
addressed scalar usage. For example, Lenormand and Hull wrote
about new uses of the modes, pentatonic, and whole-tone scales, so-
called Oriental scales, and other devices. More speculative
possibilities were suggested by Bacon, who considered the
systematic construction of various scales, including
“equipartite” (i.e., symmetrical) types that Olivier Messiaen would
later call “modes of limited transposition.” On the other hand, Joseph
Schillinger’s Kaleidophone (1940) was written with a practical
intent: to help composers “instantaneous[ly]” find the scales that
“correspond to [a] given chord.” He illustrated 137 chords of two to
five members each, and correlated them to a much larger number of
scales that included the stable chord tones plus various tendency
tones. Nicolas Slonimsky’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns
(1947) also came to have practical application, as jazz musicians
such as John Coltrane turned to it. One of the many procedures
Slonimsky employed was to begin with a basic scale consisting of
equal divisions of the octave, and then to create new patterns by
systematically inserting between its members an increasing number
of notes (of various intervallic distances). The result was over 1300
numbered scales or patterns, with more derivatives still to follow.
Proposals involving microtones were likewise varied. Ferruccio

Busoni suggested the “tripartite tone (third of a tone)” in his Sketch
of a New Esthetic of Music (1907; Eng. trans., 1911); and Charles
Ives issued a 1925 commentary on quarter-tones. A much more
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entailed philosophy gave rise to Harry Partch’s 43-note division of
the octave, in just intonation. In Genesis of a Music (1949), he
provided an explication of the broader “monophonic” theory on
which his intonation scheme was based. Joseph Yasser’s A Theory of
Evolving Tonality (1932) was notable for its teleological bent. Yasser
argued that our diatonic system, with its seven principal notes and
five auxiliary notes, evolved from a pentatonic system with five
principal notes and two auxiliary notes. Likewise, the diatonic
system was predicted to evolve into a “supra-diatonic” system of 12
principal and seven auxiliary notes—that is, a 19-note, equal-
tempered scale that would serve as a future basis for music.
(v) Analysis of 12-tone music.

Essays on 12-tone music began to appear within a few years of
Schoenberg’s initial developments, with the journal Modern Music
serving as an important early source. In 1925, Paul Stefan made
passing comments about Schoenberg’s “theory of the twelve tones
and the ‘fundamental form,’” although these were somewhat vague
and not entirely accurate. Paul Pisk followed in 1926 with a general
summary of the 12-tone principles of both Schoenberg and Hauer;
and Adolph Weiss discussed Schoenberg’s ideas on a variety of
compositional parameters (including row use) in 1932. Analyses of a
variety of recent works by Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and Krenek
were contributed by David Josef Bach, Willi Reich, and Erwin Stein.
Of articles that appeared elsewhere, the most influential was

Richard S. Hill’s essay on “Schoenberg’s Tone-Rows and the Tonal
System of the Future” (Musical Quarterly, 1936). Hill traced the
development of the 12-tone technique, addressed various aspects of
works composed between 1923 and 1930 (opp.23–35), and
commented on different types of row structures. Some of Hill’s ideas
were subsequently adapted by Krenek to his own compositions, as
the latter noted in his essay, “New Developments of the Twelve-Tone
Technique” (1943).
Krenek warrants further mention as a composer-author whose

writings engaged analysis and theory. In addition to the cited article,
his book Music Here and Now (1939) addressed various aspects of
12-tone music (see the chapter titled “Music under Construction”).
For example, in explaining how the row—“a single germ cell”—gives
rise to “all the elements in a musical composition,” he observed that
it was relevant to more than just the “melodic surface”: the
“characteristic intervals” of the row also influence polyphonic
interactions and harmony. In 1940, Krenek published the first
manual in English on 12-tone composition, Studies in Counterpoint.
It not only addressed melodic usage of the row, but also suggested
an approach to harmony based on intervallic tension (see §4(iii)).
Page 9 of 27
(vi) Broader compositional approaches.
Some authors engaged in more comprehensive forms of
compositional prescription, completing books that outlined some
type of system (in one sense of the word or another). For example,
the stated goal of Hindemith’s Craft, cited above (see §4(iii)), was to
provide a “new and firm foundation” for compositional technique,
and thus he included extensive commentary on intervals, chords,
progressions and modulations, and melodic structure.
In 1921 Henry Cowell (with Robert L. Duffus) wrote an article on

“Harmonic Development in Music,” which canvased the expansion of
harmonic materials across the centuries. He speculated that future
progress might include the use of “tone clusters” or “polyharmony,”
but it might also necessitate the use of “new overtones” above the
sixteenth partial (i.e., intervals smaller than a semitone). Cowell’s
ideas appeared in fuller form a decade later, in New Musical
Resources (1930). The overtone series was proposed as the basis of
a variety of musical relationships: from its intervals and ratios one
could derive tone clusters and other types of chords, as well as
rhythm, meter, and tempo. Accordingly, Cowell observed that his
ideas might well be called “a theory of musical relativity.” Some of
the concepts in his book would later prove influential on composers
such as Nancarrow and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
In 1930 Charles Seeger published a brief essay “On Dissonant

Counterpoint.” It was, in essence, an overview of select topics from
an unpublished treatise that had been in development for many
years. Its point of departure was that the treatment of consonance—
not dissonance—was the real problem for contemporary
composition. Thus, Seeger devised a kind of reverse-species
approach for modern-music pedagogy, in which dissonances formed
the norm and consonances were treated restrictively. Although the
complete “Manual of Dissonant Counterpoint” was not published
until 1994, his approach influenced his pupils Cowell and Ruth
Crawford, as well as Ruggles.
Joseph Schillinger, in contrast, tended to teach composers involved

with popular or commercial forms of music. As these individuals
were often traveling, he compiled his methods into a multivolume
correspondence course. After his death in 1943, two of his disciples
(Arnold Shaw and Lyle Dowling) brought these and related materials
to publication in the form of the encyclopedic, 1640-page Schillinger
System of Musical Composition (1946). His was a computational
approach to elements such as rhythm, melody, harmony, and
counterpoint, all couched in algebraic and geometric terms. Despite
its idiosyncrasies, the method attracted many famous pupils during
Schillinger’s life—most notably George Gershwin, but also Tommy
Dorsey, Vernon Duke (Vladimir Dukelsky), Benny Goodman, and
Glenn Miller.
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5. 1950 to present.
(i) Changing conditions.

The second half of the 20th century witnessed the emergence of
music theory as an autonomous discipline in the United States,
distinct from the areas of musicology and composition. Several
factors abetted this development. First, specialized publication
venues began to appear, such as the Journal of Music Theory (1957),
Perspectives of New Music (1962), and The Music Forum (1967).
Such sources multiplied in the 1970s and afterwards, as products of
regional societies, specific graduate programs, and the new national
society. Second, music theory was accepted within the university as
a specialized subject of graduate study leading to a PhD. Princeton
made inroads in 1962, when its PhD in composition (with strong
underpinnings in theory) was initiated; in 1965, Yale inaugurated a
PhD in theory. Third, dedicated professional societies and
conferences began to arise. The Music Theory Society of New York
State held its initial meeting in 1971, and the first Michigan
Conference on Music Theory was convened in 1975. Two National
Conferences on Music Theory were held in 1976 and 1977, and the
inaugural meeting of the newly formed Society for music theory was
held in 1978. Fourth and more broadly, in the wake of the preceding
developments, more universities and colleges began to offer
graduate programs in theory, and to employ “professional
theorists” (instead of composers, etc.) to coordinate their curricula.
Coinciding with this progress, a wide array of methodologies and
topics for exploration began to evolve; some are summarized below.
(ii) Schenkerian approaches.

The theory of tonal music developed by Heinrich Schenker had
already begun to spread from Vienna to the United States before mid
century. Schenker’s student Hans Weisse began teaching at New
York’s David Mannes Music School (now Mannes College of Music)
in 1931 and also at Columbia University the following year. After his
death in 1940, his and Schenker’s student Felix Salzer began a long
career at Mannes (and later at Queens College). Schenker’s pupil
Oswald Jonas, and his student Ernst Oster, emigrated in the late
1930s and were active, as were Weisse’s American students Adele
Katz and William Mitchell. During this time Schenker’s ideas were
also communicated through articles, such as by Weisse, Katz, and
Arthur Waldeck and Nathan Broder; and through Katz’s book
Challenge to Musical Tradition (1945).
In the ensuing decades, the influence of Schenkerian ideas on

American music theory escalated tremendously. Its teaching spread
from New York to the rest of the country; and increasing numbers of
Page 11 of 27
articles, dissertations, and books were issued. By 1991, Milton
Babbitt could observe that he had witnessed Schenker’s method
“change its status from the heretic to the nearly hieratic, from the
revolutionary to the received.” However, the extent to which these
“received” methods were Schenker’s own could vary. This was in
part because of the compromises required for the theory to be
accepted within the American academy—a process William Rothstein
(1990) has termed the “Americanization” of Schenker. But it was also
in part because Schenker’s writings were slow to be translated. A
version of Harmonielehre (1906) appeared in 1954, but it was
abridged and at any rate predated the analytic graphing technique
for which Schenker was best known. It was not until 1979 that his
magnum opus, Der freie Satz (1935), was published as Free
Composition. Other significant writings trailed at roughly decade-
long intervals: Kontrapunkt (1910 and 1922) in 1987, Das
Meisterwerk in der Musik (1925–30) in 1994–7, and Der Tonwille
(1921–4) in 2004–5. As a result, the sense of what constituted
“Schenker’s method” was initially communicated by those other than
Schenker, some of whom had different musical agendas. Notable in
this respect was Salzer, whose Structural Hearing (1952) attempted
to “mold [Schenker’s] concepts into a workable, systematic approach
for use by teachers, students and performers.” However, he
broadened and generalized many core tenets so that the
methodology would apply not just to tonal music but to a “cross-
section of musical literature from the Middle Ages to the present
day.”
Writings that incorporate Schenker’s ideas and analytic approach

have embraced a wide array of topics, including aspects of rhythm
and meter (see §5(vi)) and studies of form (see §5(vii)). (For an
extensive survey, see Berry, 2004.) In addition, many of Schenker’s
concepts have been incorporated into conventional textbooks on
harmony and related subjects. This process started with Mitchell’s
Elementary Harmony (1939), but it was in the 1960s and 70s that
the influence gradually accrued, as through textbooks by Allen
Forte, William Christ and others, Peter Westergaard, Leo Kraft, and
Edward Aldwell and Carl Schachter.
(iii) Twelve-tone theory.

Although work on 12-tone music had commenced earlier (see §4(v)),
in the second half of the century its structural principles were
investigated with unprecedented rigor. At the forefront of this
approach was Milton Babbitt. In 1946 he presented a dissertation to
Princeton that used set and group theories to model attributes of the
12-tone system. He addressed several key topics, including derived
rows, which are created through transformations of smaller serial
segments, and hexachordal combinatoriality, in which two different
transformations of a row produce all 12 tones through the
combination of their initial hexachords, and all 12 again through
their second hexachords. Also emphasized was the concept of
Page 12 of 27
invariance, which refers to properties or elements of a row that are
preserved under some transformation. Babbitt’s dissertation
languished, and was not accepted until 1992. However, in the 1950s
and 60s, he brought these and other ideas to the public through a
series of landmark articles, and his methods set the stage for the
work that followed.
George Perle also made significant contributions during this time.

His 1956 dissertation (New York University), “Serial Composition
and Atonality,” gave rise to a published book of the same title in
1962. In it he explored structural aspects of 12-tone music; he also
addressed serial music that utilized non-12-tone rows, and “free”
atonality. Two decades earlier, he had written about what he called a
“twelve-tone modal system” (1941), and it was also taken up in the
book. This concept, on which Perle’s own compositions were based,
had as one of its central concerns the challenge of creating coherent
harmonic organization. Its final formulation appeared separately, in
Perle’s Twelve-Tone Tonality (1977, 2/1996).
Various specific areas of 12-tone research have been cultivated. For

example, analogies between pitch and rhythmic structures have
been of interest. One such formulation relates to Babbitt’s idea of
“time-point sets,” which he addressed in a 1962 article; it was later
amplified by John Rahn, William Johnson, Andrew Mead, and others.
On another front, much has been done with partitions or mosaics,
which are divisions of the aggregate (i.e., a collection of all 12 tones)
into discrete collections; that is, they are sets of sets. Proceeding in
part from Donald Martino’s work on aggregate formations (1961),
studies have issued from Andrew Mead, Robert Morris and Brian
Alegant, Richard Kurth, and others. A related area of research has
centered on the idea of the array, which is a two-dimensional
arrangement of aggregates. Godfrey Winham and Peter Westergaard
contributed early work on the subject in the 1960s, but Babbitt’s
own music has been the focus of other theorists (see, e.g. his various
procedures as surveyed by Mead, 1994). An extensive, composer-
oriented explication of array design is found in Robert Morris’s
Composition with Pitch Classes (1987).
(iv) Pitch-class set theory.

Perle’s 1962 book (see §5(iii)) examined non-serial or “freely” atonal
music by considering the role played by an “intervallic cell” (or
“basic cell”): a “microcosmic set, of fixed intervallic content,” that
could be employed “either as a chord or as a melodic figure or as a
combination of both.” A forerunner of this idea was offered by Perle
in 1955, when he discussed two four-note “sets” that were
significant in Bartók’s Fourth Quartet. Also around this time,
Howard Hanson published a volume on the Harmonic Materials of
Modern Music (1960). His goal was to analyze relationships among
“all of the possible sonorities.” He referred to these in terms of
interval content; for example, the notes C–E–F♯–A♯ formed an
Page 13 of 27
“isometric tetrad” (i.e., inversionally symmetrical tetrachord) that
“contains two major thirds, two major seconds, and two tritones,”
2 2 2
symbolized m s t .
Shortly thereafter, a more formalized system of analysis began to be

developed by Allen Forte. He applied set-theoretic principles to the
analysis of unordered collections of pitch classes, called pitch-class
sets (pc sets). He published “A Theory of Set-Complexes for Music”
in 1964; a revised and refined presentation followed a decade later
as The Structure of Atonal Music (1973). The basic goal of Forte’s
theory was to define the various relationships that existed among the
relevant sets of a work, so that contextual coherence could be
demonstrated. Toward this end, the specific pc sets of a given size
(i.e., cardinality) were reduced to a smaller number of set classes,
based on equivalence under transposition or inversion. A set class
was referred to in one of two ways: by its “prime form,” which
expressed its content in a closely packed form, using integers; and
by its “name,” which consisted of its cardinal number and its ordinal
number (i.e., its position on Forte’s list) separated by a hyphen.
Thus, the pc set C–E–F♯–A♯ (cited above) was a member of set class
4–25, which was represented by the prime form (0268). There were
several other ways of relating sets. For example, sets of different
cardinalities might have an inclusion relation, which means that one
is the subset or superset of the other; or they might be in a
complement relation (i.e., one contains the pitch classes that the
other excludes), which means that they will also have a
proportionately similar distribution of intervals. Through such
analysis, one might determine that a kernel pair of complementary
set classes (called the nexus) is related through inclusion and
complementation to other significant sets in the work, forming a “set
complex.”
Forte’s work—amplified by theorists such as John Clough, David

Lewin, Andrew Mead, Robert Morris, John Rahn, and Forte himself—
has provided a model for much of the post-tonal analysis that has
followed. Although the methodology has had its detractors, such as
George Perle (1990) and Ethan Haimo (1996), textbooks on post-
tonal analysis now routinely teach it (to varying degrees).
(v) Transformational approaches.

To the extent that “classic” pc set theory (see §5(iv)) tended to focus
on the content of static collections, through the taxonomic
perspective of an “outside” observer, an alternative position was
advocated by David Lewin in the 1980s. (See, e.g. his 1982 article on
“Generalized Tonal Functions,” and his 1987 book, Generalized
Musical Intervals and Transformations.) The “transformational
attitude” he proposed was that “of someone inside the music,” who
would ask: “If I am at s and wish to get to t, what characteristic
gesture . . . should I perform in order to arrive there?” His model
focused on process, that is, the actions that projected elements of
Page 14 of 27
one set to their new locations within a subsequent set. Although
transformational models vary, two common ones will be considered
here: those involving Klumpenhouwer networks and neo-Riemannian
operations.
Klumpenhouwer networks (K-nets), developed by Lewin (1990) and

Henry Klumpenhouwer (1991), interpret pc sets through graphs of
nodes and arrows. The nodes, or connection points within the
network, have pitch-classes as their content; the arrows are labeled
with transposition and inversion operators (i.e., transformations).
Numerous such interpretations can be offered of a given pc set,
depending on the contextually relevant features one wishes to
emphasize. With K-nets, one can relate interpretations of pc sets
belonging to different set classes. This is especially the case when
their graphs are identical, that is, the configurations of nodes and
arrows are the same, as are the transformations; such graphs are
called “strongly isographic.” Two additional features of K-nets are
significant. First, they allow transformational voice-leading patterns
to be addressed. Second, they may be applied in a recursive manner;
that is, the relationships involved in the interpretation of a pc set
might be replicated at a higher level, as the relationships involved in
a progression of pc sets.
Neo-Riemannian theory emerged from Lewin’s work of the 1980s,

along with the work of Brian Hyer, Richard Cohn, and others. It
provided a way of analyzing chromatic music of the late 19th century
(as by Wagner, Liszt, and Franck) that was triadic without adhering
to traditional progressions. (The theory’s name refers to the fact that
some of its ideas are associated with the work of Hugo Riemann.)
The transformations that map one triad onto another often consist of
the retention of two common tones, with the remaining voice moving
by step—a minimal motion described as exhibiting “voice-leading
parsimony.” Three standard transformations are Parallel (P), in
which the notes forming the perfect fifth are maintained (e.g. a C-
minor triad becomes C major); Relative (R), in which the notes
forming the major third are maintained (e.g. C minor becomes E♭
major); and Leading-tone exchange (L), in which the notes forming
the minor third are maintained (e.g. C minor becomes A♭ major).
These transformations may be illustrated on a geometric model
called the Tonnetz, of which a common form has one horizontal and
two diagonal axes, resulting in a series of equilateral triangles. The
three axes, and thus the vertices of each triangle, represent the
three triadic intervals; accordingly, each triangle corresponds to a
major or minor triad. In tracking a succession of triads in the music,
one can conceive of a Tonnetz triangle as “flipping” about one of its
edges, to land on another triangular space. In this way, the Tonnetz
models the transformations and shows an aspect of the coherence
underlying the harmonic and voice-leading procedures.
Page 15 of 27
(vi) Theories of rhythm and meter.
In the first half of the 20th century, little work was published on
rhythm and meter, excepting compositional approaches by those
such as Cowell and Schillinger (see §4(vi)). The silence began to
break in the 1950s: Curt Sachs contributed a historical survey titled
Rhythm and Tempo (1953); and rhythm and meter was discussed in
sections of Leonard Meyer’s Emotion and Meaning in Music, and
Viktor Zuckerkandl’s Sound and Symbol (both 1956). However, it
was the 1960 publication of The Rhythmic Structure of Music, by
Meyer and Grosvenor Cooper, that inaugurated the theoretic
explorations that would continue until the present. The authors
considered their topic in terms of “architectonic levels,” showing
how units on one level nest to form higher-level units. Poetic feet
(i.e., the iamb, trochee, etc.) were adapted as patterns of accented
and unaccented notes. Subsequently, in Musical Form and Musical
Performance (1968), Edward Cone added the terms
“hypermeasures” and “hypermeter” to the lexicon, in reference to
the idea that individual measures could “behave as a single beat.”
However, he restricted hypermeter to the small scale. At larger
levels, he conceived of a kind of energetic or gestural “rhythm” that
imparted the sense of “an extended upbeat followed by its
downbeat.”
The influence of Schenker was explicit in subsequent key works. For

example, in The Stratification of Musical Rhythm (1976), Maury
Yeston argued that meter arises “from the interaction of two strata,
one of which must always be a middleground level,” and that this
interaction leads to two broad structural categories: rhythmic
“consonance” and rhythmic “dissonance.” Carl Schachter issued
three influential articles on “Rhythm and Linear Analysis” between
1976 and 1987. He distinguished between two (often conflicting)
sources that produce “the patterned movement . . . of musical
rhythm”: tonal rhythm and durational rhythm. The former is based
on the relative stability of notes and chords within the tonal system,
and the latter is based not just on durations per se but also on meter,
accent, proportion, and grouping. He demonstrated an analytic
notation based on “durational reduction applied to and coordinated
with significant structural levels of voice leading.” A Generative
Theory of Tonal Music (1983), by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff,
was indebted not just to Schenker but to transformational-generative
linguistics. It offered a formalized approach to issues of rhythm and
meter (as well as of pitch). Grouping and meter were treated as
interrelated but independent: the former involved segments
organized hierarchically (indicated analytically by nested slurs), and
the latter involved beats organized hierarchically (indicated
analytically by layers of dots). “Time-span reductions” were based on
the hierarchy of metrical and grouping components; and all elements
—grouping, meter, and reductions—were subject to “well-
formedness rules” and “preference rules.” The former specified the
legitimate structures, and the latter designated which of these were
optimal for the “experienced listener.”
Page 16 of 27
More recently, several significant books have further advanced the
field. For example, William Rothstein’s Phrase Rhythm in Tonal
Music (1989) considered the interactions of phrase structure and
hypermeter, taking the work of both Schenker and Heinrich Koch as
points of departure. Christopher Hasty’s Meter as Rhythm (1997)
reevaluated the separation of meter and rhythm by introducing the
concept of “projection,” which involves “the potential for a present
event’s duration to be reproduced for a successor.” Harald Krebs
expanded the treatment of metric dissonance in Fantasy Pieces
(1999). And Justin London’s Hearing in Time (2004) incorporated
psychological studies on metric perception, taking the view “that
meter is a form of entrainment behavior” that is “subject to a
number of fundamental perceptual and cognitive constraints.”
(vii) Theories of form.

For some time after mid-century, writings on form tended to be
pedagogical in purpose; traditions from the first half of the century—
as per the textbooks of Ebenezer Prout, Percy Goetschius, Stewart
Macpherson, and R.O. Morris—were typically maintained. Thus, two
popular textbooks that debuted in the mid 1960s, by Douglass Green
(1965) and Wallace Berry (1966), remained somewhat conventional
even as new features were added. For example, Green was indebted
to Schenker (via Salzer) for his conception of form as the interaction
of tonal structure and design, but also to Goetschius for many terms.
In subsequent years, additional ideas about form began to

accumulate. For example, Edward Cone (1968) offered a dynamic
view, arguing that form was essentially “the rhythmic shape of a
piece.” This “shape” was typically “an extended upbeat followed by
its downbeat,” and thus a whole composition might “constitute a
single huge rhythmic impulse, completed at the final cadence.” A
focus on form as a “growth process” was provided by Jan LaRue
(1970) in his methodology for “style analysis” (in which “style”
referred to the various elements and procedures used to develop a
work’s movement and shape). A system of analytic symbols was
proposed to represent the functions of growth. Leonard Ratner
(1980) then redirected attention toward historical views of 18th-
century music, arguing that the forms of this period should be
“interpreted as countless options within a few working schemes.”
For sonata form, this view placed emphasis on the harmonic plan
over themes per se.
The Schenkerian view of form received growing attention in the

1980s, in dissertations and articles that focused on specific formal
sections or (less commonly) broader form types. This trend
increased in the 90s, when studies considered Schenkerian views in
juxtaposition with other conceptions of form. For example, Janet
Schmalfeldt (1991) attempted to “reconcile” Schenker’s ideas with
those of Schoenberg and his student Erwin Ratz. She argued that
“certain well-established types of formal procedure,” such as those
Page 17 of 27
defined by Schoenberg and Ratz, “tend to become associated with
specific harmonic-contrapuntal plans,” as determined through
Schenkerian analysis. Charles Smith (1996) considered Schenker’s
ideas of form alongside “traditional” forms with a different purpose.
His premise was that the latter are sometimes our most trustworthy
guides to large-scale shape, and thus if a Schenkerian background
contradicts a “traditional” form, we should be “as ready to rethink
the background as we are to reject the form.” Countering the
customary distinction between these conceptions of form, he argued
that traditional classifications might provide our “most accessible
and dependable route to the structural background.”
More recently, two theories of form have been the subject of much
attention. On the one hand, William Caplin’s theory of formal
functions (1998) extends the work of Schoenberg and Ratz. Unlike
Schenker’s deeper-level perspective, Caplin focuses more on the
local levels of themes and phrases, and considers the functional
roles they play in a work’s organization. On the other hand, the
“Sonata Theory” of James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy (2006)
focuses on how moment-to-moment compositional choices impact
the traversal of a sequence of “action-zones” or “-spaces” (which
collectively constitute a sonata movement). Their analyses are
predicated on “the recognition and interpretation of expressive/
dramatic trajectories toward generically obligatory cadences.”
(viii) Other areas of research.

These include (but are not limited to) the following: musical
semiotics (semiology), which evolved between the 1960s and the 90s
from linguistically inspired formal and taxonomic approaches, to
hermeneutic and semantic interrogations of musical meaning; music
perception and cognition, which include not only investigations
associated with the empirical sciences, but forms of music analysis
traceable to the work of Leonard Meyer in the 1950s and afterward;
performance studies, which began to develop in the 1960s through
work by Erwin Stein (1962) and Edward Cone (1968);
Schoenbergian analysis, which utilizes a variety of concepts
Schoenberg developed over the years, such as the Grundgestalt and
developing variation (see also his ideas on form, cited in §5(vii));
history of theory and the analysis of early music, which are distinct
areas often yoked due to the application of historically informed
analytic models, and were largely the purview of historical
musicologists until recent decades (see The Cambridge History of
Western Music Theory, 2002, for a broad sampling of the area’s
scope); and the analysis of popular music, which began to emerge
from self-identified music theorists in the late 1980s and 90s,
initially concentrating more on rock music of the 1960s and 70s, but
now with a broader focus. Music-theory pedagogy warrants separate
mention due to the prominent role of teaching in the profession. In
practical terms, pedagogy gained in relevance during the 1960s,
with proposed reforms in music education and the emergence of new
textbook orientations (e.g. comprehensive musicianship,
programmed instruction, and Schenker-influenced approaches). In
Page 18 of 27
disciplinary terms, the field began to coalesce in the 1980s, as
evidenced by the founding of the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy
(1987), and the publication of theory-pedagogy books by John White
(1981) and Michael Rogers (1984). Today, theorists are involved in
writing textbooks on tonal and post-tonal music, counterpoint, form,
and related topics.
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(1964), 136–83
G.T. Jones: Symbols Used in Music Analysis (Washington,

DC, 1964)
G. Winham: Composition with Arrays (diss., Princeton,

1964); repr. in Perspectives of New Music, 9/1(1970), 43–
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D.M. Green: Form in Tonal Music: an Introduction to

Analysis (New York, 1965, 2/1979)
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W. Berry: Form in Music (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1966,
2/1986)
P. Westergaard: “Toward a Twelve-Tone Polyphony,” PNM,

4/2 (1966), 90–112
E.T. Cone: Musical Form and Musical Performance (New

York, 1968)
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Tunebooks from 1801 to 1860 (diss., Southwestern Baptist
Theological Seminary, 1968)
J. LaRue: Guidelines for Style Analysis (New York, 1970,

enlarged, 2/2011)
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1973)
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Music Theory and Musical Thought in the United States
(diss., U. of Iowa, 1974)
C. Schachter: “Rhythm and Linear Analysis: a Preliminary

Study,” Music Forum, 4 (1976), 281–334; repr. in
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M. Yeston: The Stratification of Musical Rhythm (New

Haven, 1976)
G. Perle: Twelve-Tone Tonality (Berkeley, 1977, 2/1996)
R. Browne, ed.: “Index of Music Theory in the United

States, 1955–1970,” In Theory Only, 3/7–11 (1977–8), 1–
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D. Epstein: Beyond Orpheus: Studies in Musical Structure

(Cambridge, MA, 1979)
L. Ratner: Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style

(New York, 1980)
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Reduction,” Music Forum, 5 (1980), 197–232; repr. in
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Analysis, ed. J. Straus (New York, 1999), 54–78
Page 24 of 27
D. Thompson: A History of Harmonic Theory in the United
States (Kent, OH, 1980)
J.D. White: Guidelines for College Teaching of Music

Theory (Metuchen, NJ, 1981, 2/2002)
D. Lewin: “Transformational Techniques in Atonal and

Other Music Theories,” PNM, 21/1–2 (1982–3), 312–71
R. Crawford: “Musical Learning in Nineteenth-Century

America,” American Music, 1/1 (1983), 1–11
F. Lerdahl and R. Jackendoff: A Generative Theory of Tonal

Music (Cambridge, MA, 1983)
R. Crawford: The American Musicological Society, 1934–

1984: an Anniversary Essay (Philadelphia, 1984)
W. Frisch: Brahms and the Principle of Developing

Variation (Berkeley, 1984)
M. Rogers: Teaching Approaches in Music Theory: an

Overview of Pedagogical Philosophies (Carbondale, IL,
1984, 2/2004)
D. Lewin: Generalized Musical Intervals and

Transformations (New Haven, 1987/R)
R. Morris: Composition with Pitch-Classes: a Theory of

Compositional Design (New Haven, 1987)
C. Schachter: “Rhythm and Linear Analysis: Aspects of

Meter,” Music Forum, 6 (1987), 1–59; repr. in Schachter,
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ed. J. Straus (New York, 1999), 79–117
B. Hyer: Tonal Intuitions in “Tristan and Isolde” (diss.,

Yale U., 1989)
W. Rothstein: Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music (New York,

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D. Damschroder and D.R. Williams: Music Theory from

Zarlino to Schenker: a Bibliography and Guide
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D. Lewin: “Klumpenhouwer Networks and Some
Isographies That Involve Them,” Music Theory Spectrum,
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G. Perle: “Pitch-Class Set Analysis: an Evaluation,” JM, 8/2

(1990), 151–72
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Schenker Studies, ed. H. Siegel (New York, 1990), 193–
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Classic Music (Princeton, NJ, 1991)
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for Atonal Music (diss., Harvard U., 1991)
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for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and
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Peles and others (Princeton, NJ, 2003)
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Page 27 of 27

Grove Music Online: Theory

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An area of study that tends to focus on musical materials per se, in

Although music theory has deep roots, traceable to antiquity’s seven

2. The 18th century: theoretical

The earliest attempts to provide a theoretical background for music-

Of the several hundred tunebooks published in the century after the

3. The 19th century: translations and

For most of the 19th century, American theory was a satellite of

In 1842 James Warner published his translation of Gottfried Weber’s

A decade later the first American conservatories were opened, and

A more systematic approach became available with Herrman

Finally, toward the end of the century, an American theorist, Percy

Just before the turn of the century, Homer Norris’s Practical

(i) Changing conditions.

(ii) Tonal-music pedagogy.

In canvassing these and other contemporary texts, to track changing

(iii) Analysis of modern harmony.

Somewhat more probative was Bernhard Ziehn. In his Manual of

(iv) New scalar resources.

Proposals involving microtones were likewise varied. Ferruccio

(v) Analysis of 12-tone music.

Of articles that appeared elsewhere, the most influential was

Krenek warrants further mention as a composer-author whose

In 1921 Henry Cowell (with Robert L. Duffus) wrote an article on

In 1930 Charles Seeger published a brief essay “On Dissonant

Joseph Schillinger, in contrast, tended to teach composers involved

(i) Changing conditions.

(ii) Schenkerian approaches.

In the ensuing decades, the influence of Schenkerian ideas on

Writings that incorporate Schenker’s ideas and analytic approach

(iii) Twelve-tone theory.

George Perle also made significant contributions during this time.

Various specific areas of 12-tone research have been cultivated. For

(iv) Pitch-class set theory.

Shortly thereafter, a more formalized system of analysis began to be

Forte’s work—amplified by theorists such as John Clough, David

(v) Transformational approaches.

Klumpenhouwer networks (K-nets), developed by Lewin (1990) and

Neo-Riemannian theory emerged from Lewin’s work of the 1980s,

The influence of Schenker was explicit in subsequent key works. For

(vii) Theories of form.

In subsequent years, additional ideas about form began to

The Schenkerian view of form received growing attention in the

(viii) Other areas of research.

J.C. Fillmore: “The Practical Value of Certain Modern

W.S.B. Mathews, ed.: A Hundred Years of Music in

F. Shepard: How to Modulate (New York, 1889)

H. Norris: Practical Harmony on a French Basis (Boston,

G. Gow: The Structure of Music (New York, 1895)

G. Chadwick: Harmony (Boston, 1897)

F. Shepard: Harmony Simplified (New York, 1896)

P. Goetschius: The Material used in Composition (New

A. Foote and W. Spalding: Modern Harmony in its Theory

H. Schenker: Harmonielehre (Stuttgart, 1906, 2/1950, ed.

F. Busoni: Entwurfeiner neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst

D. Mason: “A Neglected Contribution to Harmonic Theory:

H. Schenker: Kontrapunkt, 1 (Stuttgart, 1910), 2 (Vienna,

A. Schoenberg: Harmonielehre (Vienna, 1911, 3/1922);

R. Lenormand: Étude sur l’Harmonie Moderne (Paris,

A.E. Hull: Modern Harmony: Its Explication and

D. Haagmans: Scales, Intervals, Harmony, 1 (New York,

E. Bacon: “Our Musical Idiom,” with intro by G. D. Gunn,

H. Cowell and R.L. Duffus: “Harmonic Development in