Analyzing Atonal Music

An engaging study -- the first ever -- of the principles used by noted scholars to unravel the masterpieces of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and other modernists. For the past forty years, pitch-class set theory has served as a frame of reference for the study of atonal music, through the efforts of Allen Forte, Milton Babbitt, and others. It has also been the subject of sometimes furious debates between music theorists and historically oriented musicologists, debates that only helped heighten its pro