History of Music Theory

History of Music Theory

Fall semester, 2014

I. The figured-bass tradition; figured-bass notation as system and classification; knowledge of triadic harmony and the evidence for it.

Francesco Gasparini. L’armonico pratico al cimbalo (Venice, 1708), tr. F. Stillings (New Haven, 1963).

Monsieur de Saint Lambert. A New Treatise on accompaniment, tr. John S. Powell (Indiana University Press, 1991).

George J. Buelow. Thorough-bass accompaniment according to Johann David Heinichen, revised edition (Ann Arbor, 1986).

Allan Keiler. “The problem of the retrieval of musical knowledge: the thoroughass tradition and its relationship to Rameau.” Journal of Music Theory 77/2 (2013).

William J. Mitchell. “Chord and context in 18th-century theory,” JAMS 16 (1963).

Joel Lester. Compositional Theory in the Eighteenth Century (Harvard University Press, 1992), Chapter 3: “Thoroughbass Methods.”

II. Rameau; problems of interpretation in the structure and content of the Traité; the historical relationship of Rameau to Kirnberger, structure and organization of Kirnberger’s Kunst.

Jean-Philippe Rameau. Traité de l’harmonie (1722), in Erwin Jacobi ed. The theoretical writings of Rameau, 6 vols. (American Institute of Musicology, 1967-1972), vol. 1; tr. Philip Gossett, Treatise on harmony (New York, 1971).

Johann Philipp Kirnberger. Die wahren Grundsätze zum Gebrauch der Harmonie (Berlin and Königsberg, 1773); tr. David Beach and Jurgen Thym “The true principles for the practice of harmony,” JMT 23 (1979).

Johann Philipp Kirnberger. Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik (Berlin, 1771-79); tr. David Beach and Jürgen Thym The Art of Strict Musical Composition (New Haven, 1982).

David Beach. The harmonic theories of Johann Philipp Kirnberger (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1974).

Joan Ferris. “The evolution of Rameau’s harmonic theories,” JMT 3 (1959).

Cecil Powell Grant. “The real relationship between Kirnberger and Rameau’s concept of the fundamental bass,” JMT 21 (1977).

Allan Keiler. “Music as metalanguage: Rameau’s fundamental bass,” in Richmond Browne ed. Music Theory: Special Topics (Academic Press, 1981).

Joyce McKeel. “The harmonic theories of Kirnberger and Marpurg,” JMT 4 (1960)

Matthew Shirlaw. The Theory of Harmony (London, 1917).

Joel Lester. Compositional Theory in the Eighteenth Century (Harvard, 1992).

Thomas Christensen. Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1993)

Alfred R. Oliver. The Encylopedists as Critics of Music (New York, 1947).

Albert Cohen. Music in the French Royal Academy of Music (Princeton, 1981).

III. Adolph Bernhard Marx’s conception of musical form; criticism and analysis, and differing modes of analysis; organicism as an issue in the history of music theory.

Adolph Berhnard Marx. Ludwig van Beethoven: Leben und Schaffen 2. vls., 2nd edition (Berlin 1863).

Adolph Berhard Marx. “Die Form in der Musik,” in J. A Romberg ed. Die Wissenschaften in neunzehnten Jahrhundert 2 (1856). Translated in Burnham (1997).

Adolph Bernhard Marx. Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, praktisch-theoretisch 4. vols., 2nd edition (Leipzig, 1841).

Scott Burnham. Aesthetics, Theory and History in the Works of A. B. Marx (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1988).

Scott Burnham. Beethoven Hero (Princeton, 1995).

Scott Burnham, tr. Musical form in the age of Beethoven. Selected writings on theory and method (Cambridge, 1997).

Carl Dahlhaus. “Some models of unity in musical form,” JMT 19 (1975).

Lotte Thaler. Organische Form in der Musiktheorie des 19. und beginnenden 20 Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1984).

Birgitte Moyer. Concepts of musical form in the nineteenth century with special reference to A. B. Marx and sonata form (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1969).

Agnes Arber. Goethe’s Botany, in Chronica Botanica 10:1 (1946).

IV. The early periods of Schenker’s work; origins and development of Schenker’s ideas; another chapter on organicism in the history of theory; the problem of intellectual background and influence.

Heinrich Schenker. Harmony tr. Oswald Jonas (Chicago, 1954).

Heinrich Schenker. Der Tonwille 10 issues (Vienna 1921-24)

Heinrich Schenker. Erläuterungsausgaben der letzten fünf Sonaten Beethovens op. 101 in a Major (Vienna, 1920).

William Pastille. “Heinrich Schenker, anti-organicist,” 19th Century Music 8 (1984).

William Pastille. “The development of the Ursatz in Schenker’s published works,” in Trends in Schenkerian Research, ed. Allen Cadwallader (Schirmer, 1990).

William Pastille. “Music and morphology: Goethe’s influence on Schenker’s thought,” in Schenker Studies, ed. Hedi Siegel (Cambridge, 1990.

Allan Keiler: “The origins of Schenker’s thought: how man is musical,” JMT 33 (1989).

Allan Keiler: “Melody and motive in Schenker’s earliest writings,” in

Critica Musica: Essays in Honor of Paul Brainard , ed. John Knowles (Gordon and Breach, 1996).

Allan Keiler. “On some properties of Schenker’s pitch derivations,” Music and Perception 1 (1983-84).

Allan Keiler. Review of Cadwallader and Siegel, Notes of the Quarterly Journal of the MLA 49 (1993).

Jamie Croy Kassler. “Heinrich Schenker’s epistomology and philosophy of music: an essay on the relations between evolutionary theory and music theory,” in The Wider Domain of Evolutionary Thought, D. Oldroyd and I. Langham eds. (Reidel, 1983).

Ruth A. Solie. “The living organism and musical analysis,” 19th-Century Music 3 (1980).

Thomas Clifton. “An application of Goethe’s concept of Steigerung to the morphology of diminution,” JMT 14 (1970).

David Neumeyer and Richard Littlefield. “Rewriting Schenker: narrative-history-ideology,” Music Theory Spectrum 14 (1992).

Kevin Korsyn. “Schenker and Kantian epistomology,” Theoria 3 (1988).

Leslie David Blasius, Schenker’s Argument and the Claim of Music Theory (Cambridge,

1996)

Robert Snarrenberg, Schenker’s Interpretive Practices (Cambridge, 1997)

Nicholas Cook, The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Oxford, 2010)

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