Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Allen Forte
Sandow Sinai
May 3, 2014
Introduction
Allen Forte is a professor of music at Yale University[Forte()]. He is most wellknown in the music community for his seminal text on analysis of the atonal
music of the twentieth century, The Structure of Atonal Music[Forte(1973)].
In this text, he analyzes, rigorously and mathematically, the harmonic structures used in atonal music, building off the similar work of music theorists such
as notable composer Milton Babbitt[Babbitt and Peles(2003)]. In this paper I
will show how his work relates to and uses, in different notation, principles of
abstract algebra.
Music Background
Mathematics
From an algebraic perspective, it is very easy to see how the chromatic scale is
isomorphic to Z+
12 and how the set of tone rows is isomorphic to the permutation
group of Z12 .
Definition 5. A pitch-class set (abbreviated pc set) is any subset of the chromatic scale.
The set of all pc sets is a group isomorphic to the power set of Z1 2
Definition 6.
Definition 7. A b-semitone transposition of a size-n pc set a = a1 , a2 , . . . , an ,
denoted T (a, b) is the pc set a1 + b, a2 + b, . . . , an + b.
Definition 8. An inversion of a size-n pc set a = a1 , a2 , . . . , an , denoted I(a)
is the pc set 12 a1 , 12 a2 , . . . , 12 an .
For a size-n pc set a, the normal order norm(a), is an ordering of the elements of a formed by the following process.
1. Convert a to its analogous set in Z.
2. n times, move the first element of a to the end and add 12 to it.
3. Select the permutation among these for which the difference between the
first and last elements is smallest.
4. convert this back to Z1 2. This is norm(a).
Using this definition of a normal order, Forte defines musical equivalence
between two pc sets.
Definition 9. Two pc sets are transpositionally equivalent if and only if they
are reducible to the same form by transposition or by inversion followed by transposition.
It is easy to show that transpositional equivalence is indeed an equivalence
relation.
The final concept that Forte establishes is what he calles the vector of a
pc set. The vector measures the total interval content of a setthe differences
between tones.
Definition 10. The vector of a pc set is a vector in Z6 , denoted v = v1 , v2 , v3 , v4 , v5 , v6 ,
constructed from a size-n pc set in normal order a = a1 , a2 , . . . , an by the following process:
1. Initially, set v = (0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0).
2. For each of the n2 pairs of integers (x, y) in a, increment vmin(xy,yx) by1.
Conclusion
With pc sets and vectors, Forte creates an algebraic framework for the analysis
of post-tonal music. His work is of groundbreaking influence to the study of
modernist classical music.
References
[Babbitt and Peles(2003)] M. Babbitt and S. Peles. The Collected Essays of
Milton Babbitt. Princeton University Press, 2003. ISBN 9780691089669.
URL http://books.google.com/books?id=lmv UbLz yMC.
[Forte()] Allen
Forte.
Website
of
http://www.allenforte.com/index.html.
allen
forte.
URL