A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice (Oxford Studies in Music Theory)

469 Pages·2011·7.42 MB·English

by  Dmitri Tymoczko

A Geometry of Music
OXFORD STUDIES IN MUSIC THEORY
Series Editor Richard Cohn
Studies in Music with Text, David Lewin
Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music, Kofi Agawu
Playing with Meter: Metric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart’s Chamber Music for
Strings, Danuta Mirka
Songs in Motion: Rhythm and Meter in the German Lied, Yonatan Malin
Tonality and Transformation, Steven Rings
A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice,
Dmitri Tymoczko
A Geometry of Music
Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended
Common Practice
DMITRI TYMOCZKO
1
2011
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tymoczko, Dmitri, 1969–
A geometry of music : harmony and counterpoint
in the extended common practice / Dmitri Tymoczko.
p. cm. — (Oxford studies in music theory)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-533667-2
1. Harmony. 2. Counterpoint. 3. Musical analysis. I. Title.
MT50.T98 2010
781.2—dc22 2009046428
Oxford Web Music
Visit the companion website at:
www.oup.com/us/ageometryofmusic
For more information on Oxford Web Music, visit www.oxfordwebmusic.com
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To the memory of my father, who predicted I’d someday
get tired of rock and want to understand other
musical styles as well.
This page intentionally left blank
acknowledgments
In college, I met four people who had a profound impact on my life. Milton Babbitt
gave me permission to be a composer, showing me that a serious artist could also be
a rigorous thinker. Stanley Cavell opened my ears to philosophy, demonstrating that
rigorous thinking could begin with scrupulous honesty. Hilary Putnam, who seemed
to know everything, reawakened my interest in science and math. And Noam Elkies
taught me what true intellectual and musical excellence looked like, setting standards
that I am happy to try to uphold, even though I might never actually meet them.
As a graduate student, I learned how to be a professional musician from Edmund
Campion, Steve Coleman, Bevan Manson, David Milnes, and David Wessel. Later,
my colleagues at Princeton University provided me with a supportive home, encour-
aging my nonconformist and cross-disciplinary tendencies. (Paul Lansky and Steve
Mackey in particular taught me not to worry about the slings and arrows of outraged
forefathers.) Rick Cohn, Dan Harrison, Fred Lerdahl, and Joe Straus all nurtured my
fl edgling theoretical career. Rick’s theoretical work was also quite infl uential, as it
pioneered the use of geometry to model chromatic voice leading. Conversations with
Clifton Callender, Ian Quinn, and Rachel Hall were crucial to developing a num-
ber of the ideas in this book, as can be seen from our various co-authored papers. I
still cherish the memory of fall 2004, when Cliff, Ian, and I—and occasionally Noam
Elkies—exchanged excited emails about the links between music and geometry.
Rick Cohn, John Halle, Dan Harrison, Christopher Segall, Bill Sethares, and Jason
Yust all read very large portions of the manuscript, providing countless substantive
and organizational suggestions. Jason’s highly professional copyediting, performed
on short notice, caught a number of embarrassing errors. Students in Princeton’s
Music 309, a mixed undergraduate/graduate theory course, read a fi rst draft of the
entire manuscript and offered many useful comments. One of these students, Andrew
Jones, produced the audio examples on the book’s companion website. Another, Jeff
Levenberg, proofread the book and produced the index. Still more comments were
provided by Kofi Agawu, Fernando Benadon, Poundie Bernstein, Elisabeth Camp,
Mark Dancigers, Robert Gjerdingen, Philip Johnson-Laird, Jon Kochavi, Yuhwon Lee,
Steve Rings, Dean Rosenthal, Lauren Spencer, and Dan Trueman. Students in Music
306 (a later iteration of 309) caught an infi nite number of typos while the book was
in page proofs.
Suzanne Ryan at Oxford University Press was a fi rm and relentless advocate;
her calm presence helped guide this unusual book past some formidable obstacles.
As series editor, Rick Cohn was a benevolent overseer from fi rst to last. Important
viii Acknowledgments
fi nancial support was provided by Princeton University, the Radcliffe Institute for
Advanced Study, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Finally, conversations with my wife, Elisabeth Camp, have provided more than a
decade of intellectual stimulation, emotional support, and just plain fun. Since 2008,
conversations with our son Lukas have been equally rewarding, though somewhat
less relevant to the concerns of this book.
contents
About the Companion Website xv
Introduction xvii
PART I THEORY
chapter 1 Five Components of Tonality 3
1.1 The fi ve features 5
1.2 Perception and the fi ve features 8
1.3 Four claims 11
1.3.1 Harmony and counterpoint constrain one another 12
1.3.2 Scale, macroharmony, and centricity are
independent 15
1.3.3 Modulation involves voice leading 17
1.3.4 Music can be understood geometrically 19
1.4 Music, magic, and language 22
1.5 Outline of the book, and a suggestion for impatient
readers 26
chapter 2 Harmony and Voice Leading 28
2.1 Linear pitch space 28
2.2 Circular pitch-class space 30
2.3 Transposition and inversion as distance-preserving
functions 33
2.4 Musical objects 35
2.5 Voice leadings and chord progressions 41
2.6 Comparing voice leadings 45
2.6.1 Individual and uniform transposition 45
2.6.2 Individual and uniform inversion 45
2.7 Voice-leading size 49
2.8 Near identity 51
2.9 Harmony and counterpoint revisited 52
2.9.1 Transposition 53
2.9.2 Inversion 56
2.9.3 Permutation 58
2.10 Acoustic consonance and near evenness 61