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Richard Cohn (born 1955) is a music theorist and Battell Professor of Music Theory at Yale. He was previously chair of the department of music at the University of Chicago.
Early in his career, he specialized in the music of Béla Bartók, but more recently has written about Neo-Riemannian theory, metric dissonance, equal divisions of the octave, and chromatic harmony. In 1994, he won the Society for Music Theory's Outstanding Publication Award for his article, "Transpositional Combination of Beat-Class Sets in Steve Reich’s Phase-Shifting Music," and he won it again in 1997 for "Maximally Smooth Cycles, Hexatonic Systems, and the Analysis of Late-Romantic Triadic Progressions." [1]
Cohn was the founding editor (2004–14) of Oxford Studies in Music Theory, and is the current editor of Journal of Music Theory . He is the author of Audacious Euphony: Chromatic Harmony and the Triad's Second Nature (Oxford, 2012). [2]
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The major scale is one of the most commonly used musical scales, especially in Western music. It is one of the diatonic scales. Like many musical scales, it is made up of seven notes: the eighth duplicates the first at double its frequency so that it is called a higher octave of the same note.
In music, harmony is the process by which individual sounds are joined or composed into whole units or compositions. Often, the term harmony refers to simultaneously occurring frequencies, pitches, or chords. However, harmony is generally understood to involve both vertical harmony (chords) and horizontal harmony (melody).
Atonality in its broadest sense is music that lacks a tonal center, or key. Atonality, in this sense, usually describes compositions written from about the early 20th-century to the present day, where a hierarchy of harmonies focusing on a single, central triad is not used, and the notes of the chromatic scale function independently of one another. More narrowly, the term atonality describes music that does not conform to the system of tonal hierarchies that characterized European classical music between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. "The repertory of atonal music is characterized by the occurrence of pitches in novel combinations, as well as by the occurrence of familiar pitch combinations in unfamiliar environments".
In music theory, a perfect fifth is the musical interval corresponding to a pair of pitches with a frequency ratio of 3:2, or very nearly so.
Tonality is the arrangement of pitches and/or chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, attractions and directionality. In this hierarchy, the single pitch or triadic chord with the greatest stability is called the tonic. The root of the tonic chord forms the name given to the key, so in the key of C major, the note C can be both the tonic of the scale and the root of the tonic chord. The tonic can be a different note in the same scale, when the work is said to be in one of the modes of the scale.
In music theory, an augmented sixth chord contains the interval of an augmented sixth, usually above its bass tone. This chord has its origins in the Renaissance, was further developed in the Baroque, and became a distinctive part of the musical style of the Classical and Romantic periods.
In music, function is a term used to denote the relationship of a chord or a scale degree to a tonal centre. Two main theories of tonal functions exist today:
Chromaticism is a compositional technique interspersing the primary diatonic pitches and chords with other pitches of the chromatic scale. In simple terms, within each octave, diatonic music uses only seven different notes, rather than the twelve available on a standard piano keyboard. Music is chromatic when it uses more than just these seven notes.
Pandiatonicism is a musical technique of using the diatonic scale without the limitations of functional tonality. Music using this technique is pandiatonic.
In Classical music theory, a Neapolitan chord is a major chord built on the lowered (flatted) second (supertonic) scale degree. In Schenkerian analysis, it is known as a Phrygian II, since in minor scales the chord is built on the notes of the corresponding Phrygian mode.
The modern Lydian mode is a seven-tone musical scale formed from a rising pattern of pitches comprising three whole tones, a semitone, two more whole tones, and a final semitone.
Allen Forte was an American music theorist and musicologist. He was Battell Professor Emeritus of the Theory of Music at Yale University and specialized in 20th-century atonal music and music analysis.
In Western music and music theory, augmentation is the lengthening of a note or the widening of an interval.
In music, a primary triad is one of the three triads, or three-note chords built from major or minor thirds, most important in tonal and diatonic music, as opposed to an auxiliary triad or secondary triad.
Transformational theory is a branch of music theory developed by David Lewin in the 1980s, and formally introduced in his 1987 work, Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations. The theory—which models musical transformations as elements of a mathematical group—can be used to analyze both tonal and atonal music.
Diatonic and chromatic are terms in music theory that are most often used to characterize scales, and are also applied to musical instruments, intervals, chords, notes, musical styles, and kinds of harmony. They are very often used as a pair, especially when applied to contrasting features of the common practice music of the period 1600–1900.
Neo-Riemannian theory is a loose collection of ideas present in the writings of music theorists such as David Lewin, Brian Hyer, Richard Cohn, and Henry Klumpenhouwer. What binds these ideas is a central commitment to relating harmonies directly to each other, without necessary reference to a tonic. Initially, those harmonies were major and minor triads; subsequently, neo-Riemannian theory was extended to standard dissonant sonorities as well. Harmonic proximity is characteristically gauged by efficiency of voice leading. Thus, C major and E minor triads are close by virtue of requiring only a single semitonal shift to move from one to the other. Motion between proximate harmonies is described by simple transformations. For example, motion between a C major and E minor triad, in either direction, is executed by an "L" transformation. Extended progressions of harmonies are characteristically displayed on a geometric plane, or map, which portrays the entire system of harmonic relations. Where consensus is lacking is on the question of what is most central to the theory: smooth voice leading, transformations, or the system of relations that is mapped by the geometries. The theory is often invoked when analyzing harmonic practices within the Late Romantic period characterized by a high degree of chromaticism, including work of Schubert, Liszt, Wagner and Bruckner.
Daniel Harrison is a music theorist, author, and former Chairman of the Department of Music at Yale University. Most interested in tonal theory, Harrison wrote his dissertation on the music of Max Reger at Yale, which eventually became Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music: A Renewed Dualist Theory and an Account of Its Precedents (1994). Also interested in pop music, particularly The Beach Boys, he appeared in the Don Was documentary Brian Wilson: I Just Wasn't Made for These Times (1995). During his tenure at Yale, he was named the Allen Forte Professor of Music Theory in 2006 and Chairman in 2007. From 2001 to 2003 he was editor-in-chief of Music Theory Spectrum.
Carl Friedrich Weitzmann was a German music theorist and musician.
Vasili Byros is a Greek-American music theorist, musicologist and pianist. He is best known for his contributions to the field of music schemata theory and partimento.