Table Of Contentt
T he essays in Music Theory and
he editors are Jack Douthett, “These essays, by leading American music theorists, continue the Douthett Music Theory Mathematics: Chords, Collections,
a mathematician and music development of some of the most important research of the last twenty Hyde and Transformations define the
theorist who collaborated years into mathematical models of basic musical structures. These Smith state of mathematically oriented music
extensively with Clough; Martha M. Hyde, and Mathematics theory at the beginning of the twenty-
models are elegant in the abstract, but they are also shown to have
a distinguished scholar of twentieth- first century. This book is dedicated to
many practical applications in explaining a wide range of art music.
century music; and Charles J. Smith, a John Clough (1928–2003), the long-time
recognized expert in tonal theory. The Several of the contributions are bound to be classics in this literature.” holder of the Slee Chair of Music Theory
contributors are all prominent scholars, M Chords, Collections, and Transformations at the State University of New York at
teaching at institutions such as Harvard, —John Roeder, professor of music theory, u Buffalo, whose groundbreaking work
Yale, Indiana University, and the University of British Columbia s has inspired all the contributors. The
University at Buffalo (SUNY). Six of them i volume includes essays in diatonic set
(Clampitt, Clough, Cohn, Douthett, Hook, c edited by theory, transformation theory, and neo-
and Smith) have received the Society for “Music Theory and Mathematics is a fitting memorial to John Clough, T Riemannian theory—the newest and most
one of music theory’s great pioneers. Clough was among the first
Music Theory’s prestigious Publication h Jack Douthett | Martha M. Hyde | Charles J. Smith exciting fields in music theory today.
Award, and one (Hyde) has received the scholars to introduce non-trivial mathematics into what has emerged The essays constitute a close-knit
e
ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. The collection as diatonic set theory or scale theory. This volume consists of essays body of work—a family in the sense
o
includes the last paper written by Clough by important theorists on a variety of topics ranging from scale and of tracing their descent from a few key
r
before his death, as well as the last paper Riemannian theory to analysis of works by Bartók and Schoenberg. y breakthroughs by John Clough, David
written by David Lewin, an important Building on Clough’s research, Music Theory and Mathematics poses Lewin, and Richard Cohn in the 1980s and
music theorist also recently deceased. a 1990s. More important, they are integrated
new questions and approaches to what are perhaps the most exciting
n by the ongoing dialogue they conduct with
directions in music theory today.” d one another. For example, both Clough
Contributors: David Clampitt, John and Julian Hook exploit mathematical
Clough, Richard Cohn, Jack Douthett, —Robert Morris, professor of composition, M group theory, the former to investigate a
Nora Engebretsen, Julian Hook, Martha Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester) a particular relationship among Riemannian
M. Hyde, Timothy A. Johnson, Jonathan t transformations, the latter to reconsider
Kochavi, David Lewin, Charles J. Smith, h important elements of tonal theory. Some
and Stephen Soderberg. e parts of Jack Douthett’s modeling of scales
m and chords with dynamical systems are
related to Hook’s essay, others to Clough’s.
a In addition, Hook’s essay has important
t connections with Timothy Johnson’s
i
c pedagogical approach to diatonic set
s theory. The geometric devices used by
Johnson can be related to the dynamical
University of Rochester Press approach taken by Douthett. And so
forth, through the entire volume. An
668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731 introduction by the editors places the
Jacket Image and Design: Geri McCormick P.O. Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK essays in historical context, and supplies
www.urpress.com essential bibliographical background.
Music Theory and Mathematics
Eastman Studies in Music
Ralph P. Locke, Senior Editor
Eastman School of Music
Additional Titles in Music Theory and in Music since 1900
Analyzing Wagner’s Operas: Alfred Lorenz Pentatonicism from the Eighteenth
and German Nationalist Ideology Century to Debussy
Stephen McClatchie Jeremy Day-O’Connell
Aspects of Unity in J. S. Bach’s The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening,
Partitas and Suites: An Analytical Study Meaning, Intention, Ideology
David W. Beach Edited by Arved Ashby
CageTalk: Dialogues with and about Representing Non-Western Music in
John Cage Nineteenth-Century Britain
Edited by Peter Dickinson Bennett Zon
Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz since 1945: Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Worlds:
Essays and Analytical Studies Innovation and Tradition in
Edited by Elizabeth West Marvin Twentieth-Century American Music
and Richard Hermann Edited by Ray Allen and Ellie M.
Hisama
Elliott Carter: Collected Essays
and Lectures, 1937–1995 Schumann’s Piano Cycles and the Novels of
Edited by Jonathan W. Bernard Jean Paul
Erika Reiman
Explaining Tonality:
Schenkerian Theory and Beyond The Sea on Fire: Jean Barraqué
Matthew Brown Paul Griffiths
The Music of Luigi Dallapiccola The Substance of Things Heard: Writings
Raymond Fearn about Music
Paul Griffiths
Opera and Ideology in Prague:
Polemics and Practice at the National Theories of Fugue from the Age of Josquin to
Theater, 1900–1938 the Age of Bach
Brian S. Locke Paul Mark Walker
A complete list of titles in the Eastman Studies in Music Series,
in order of publication, may be found at the end of this book.
Music Theory
and Mathematics
Chords, Collections, and Transformations
EDITED BY JACK DOUTHETT, MARTHA M. HYDE,
AND CHARLES J. SMITH
UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER PRESS
Copyright © 2008by the Editors and Contributors
All rights reserved.Except as permitted under current legislation,
no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted,
recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
First published 2008
University of Rochester Press
668Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA
www.urpress.com
and Boydell & Brewer Limited
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP123DF, UK
www.boydellandbrewer.com
ISBN-13: 978–1–58046–266–2
ISBN-10: 1–58046–266–9
ISSN: 1071–9989
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Music theory and mathematics : chords, collections, and transformations
/ edited by Jack Douthett, Martha M. Hyde, and Charles J. Smith.
p. cm. — (Eastman studies in music, ISSN 1071–9989; v. 50)
Memorial volume for John Clough.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-58046-266-2(hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-58046-266-9(hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Music theory—
Mathematics. I. Douthett, Jack M. (Jack Moser) II. Hyde, Martha M.
III. Smith, Charles J., 1950– IV. Clough, John (John L.)
MT6.M96204 2008
781.2—dc22
2007033160
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
This publication is printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America.
Contents
Preface vii
Charles J. Smith
Introduction 1
Norman Carey, Jack Douthett, and Martha M. Hyde
1 “Cardinality Equals Variety for Chords” in Well-Formed
Scales, with a Note on the Twin Primes Conjecture 9
David Clampitt
2 Flip-Flop Circles and Their Groups 23
John Clough
3 Pitch-Time Analogies and Transformations in Bartók’s
Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion 49
Richard Cohn
4 Filtered Point-Symmetry and Dynamical Voice-Leading 72
Jack Douthett
5 The “Over-Determined” Triad as a Source of Discord:
Nascent Groups and the Emergent Chromatic Tonality in
Nineteenth-Century German Harmonic Theory 107
Nora Engebretsen
6 Signature Transformations 137
Julian Hook
7 Some Pedagogical Implications of Diatonic and
Neo-Riemannian Theory 161
Timothy A. Johnson
8 A Parsimony Metric for Diatonic Sequences 174
Jonathan Kochavi
vi ❧ contents
9 Transformational Considerations in Schoenberg’s
Opus 23, Number 3 197
David Lewin
10 Transformational Etudes: Basic Principles and
Applications of Interval String Theory 222
Stephen Soderberg
Works Cited 245
List of Contributors 253
Index 257
Preface
In the fall of 2001, John Clough announced his intention to retire from his fac-
ulty position at the University at Buffalo. As a celebration of John’s central role
in the field of music theory, a collection of essays by scholars who had worked
and studied with him seemed timely and appropriate. Martha Hyde and I
(John’s music theory colleagues at UB) first discussed this idea at the Society for
Music Theory annual meeting that fall in Philadelphia, and then began to put
together a roster of possible contributors and to issue invitations.
Sadly, John’s severe health problems appeared at the beginning of the next
semester, in January 2002. What had been planned as an orderly transformation
of the UB theory program became a mad scramble to cover John’s teaching,
advising, and departmental duties. After his January surgery, he seemed well
enough; nonetheless, a slow, inexorable process of diminishment had begun.
The dissertation defenses of Nora Engebretsen and Jonathan Kochavi, both in
the spring of 2002, were the last he participated in, and virtually his last public
appearances in the department. By the summer, the decline had become impos-
sible to ignore. John’s children had to manage the difficult task of looking after
him in Buffalo, which they did with courage and determination. His UB col-
leagues continued to visit, but every time we saw him, there seemed to be less
and less of him. Finally, John was moved to be nearer his family, and died in the
late summer of 2003—less than two years after making those retirement plans.
What was originally conceived as a collection honoring one of the great lights
in the field of music theory, on the occasion of his retirement, was first recon-
ceived as a get-well offering, and now is appearing as a post-mortem tribute. In
this context, it seemed more appropriate to Martha Hyde and me that we pres-
ent a collection of papers in the areas of John’s specialization, rather than a
more general offering from friends and colleagues. Since neither of us has
much expertise in mathematical music theory, we decided to withdraw our own
planned contributions, and invited Jack Douthett, a professional mathematician
and one of John’s best friends, as well as his frequent co-author, to share the edi-
torial duties. Jack has done most of the work getting John’s own piece, his last
music theoretical paper, ready for publication. He did the same for David
Lewin’s paper, since, by tragic coincidence this great scholar has also left us,
shortly after submitting his piece for this collection.
viii ❧ preface
Martha compiled the master bibliography for the entire collection, negotiated
with publishers, and co-wrote the introduction along with Jack and Norman
Carey. I made most of the initial contacts with contributors, and formatted the
manuscripts according to the publisher’s specifications. It has also fallen to me
to preface the collection—perhaps because I had known John Clough since
1972, the longest of any of the co-editors.
I am left with an almost impossible task—to try to communicate some sense of a
remarkable person to those of you not privileged to have known him, and (much
harder!) to do justice to a central figure in the lives of almost everyone who did. It’s
relatively easy to honor John professionally—he transformed music theory, though
not single-handedly (because none of us works alone). His contributions to the the-
ory of diatonicism in all its manifestations have revolutionized the way we all think
about the basic elements of music. Expressions like “maximally even” and “cardi-
nality equals variety,” popularized by John, are now indispensable to theorists grap-
pling with tonality and post-tonality. The three Buffalo Symposia on
neo-Riemannian transformations, with their many distinguished invited partici-
pants, were John’s, both in conception and execution. They reflected his commit-
ment to and excitement about this emerging field. David Lewin and Richard Cohn
may have been the actual parents of transformation theory, but John Clough was its
midwife.
One of the central themes of John’s long music-theoretical career, from its
leading-tone beginnings (the first article in the first issue of Journal of Music
Theory!) to its neo-Riemannian cadence, was his refusal to espouse any theoretical
orthodoxies. All his life, he remained a skeptic about clubs of all sorts—especially
those whose main purpose seemed to be that of excluding the uninitiated from
their ranks. He never could stand the idea of doing something just because
everyone else did it; his advice was always to think things out on their own terms.
I well remember expressing dismay at finding myself in some theoretical
quandary (a frequent occurrence!), at which John’s response would be “Perhaps
you’re asking the wrong question,” or “Perhaps you haven’t thought through
your assumptions carefully enough.”
Also notable was his commitment to precision and rigor—not least in his life-
long fascination with the interaction between music and mathematics. John
turned to math not to avoidtalking about the details of music; rather, he saw how
certain important things about music could be said precisely and effectively only
with the help of mathematics. In the process, he created theoretical structures
of great elegance, fascination, and beauty—objects that are deserving of aes-
thetic appreciation and study in their own right.
My primary duty here, however, is to honor John Clough personally, because it’s
the person we miss more than the theorist. I had known John since my days in the
graduate program at the University of Michigan, where he was teacher, supervisor,
and mentor for so many of us. John became the Slee Chair of Music Theory at the
State University of New York at Buffalo (as it was then called), and I was later priv-
preface ❧ ix
ileged to join him on that faculty, where I was a Clough colleague for over fifteen
years. John pulled his professional and collegial weight; he was, in fact, one of the
most respected senior faculty figures in Buffalo’s history. The academic landscape
is littered with his theoretical progeny—Buffalo and Michigan students he
advised, others he helped, and colleagues he encouraged and inspired.
As a music theorist, John’s work was primarily motivated by his ready love of
music—music of all flavors, from every place and group. He had a sophisticated
but firm taste in jazz, and played the old established standards on the piano with
resolute and solid enthusiasm. Another important backdrop for his life was
recreational mathematics and puzzles of all kinds (not to mention his love for
blackjack, a game in which he could adjust the odds by his considerable skill at
card-counting)—passions that would help him to congeal many of the most
important friendships of his life.1
Finally, though, John Clough’s real importance to those who knew him well was
his all-encompassing integrity. I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone with as fine and
deep a natural sense of fair play. If I had to pick a literary character to capture John’s
essence, my choice would be Atticus Finch, in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird—
especially in Gregory Peck’s screen realization of that character.2John never played
favorites, and never advocated his own interests above those of the department or
whatever community he was working within. He was unfailingly generous with his
time and his encouragement, but had no tolerance for empty rhetoric. If he had
something critical or unpleasant to say to you, he simply said it to your face, without
rancor. In short, who he was in public was exactly the same as who he was in private;
there was no role-playing, no hypocrisy, no attempt to escape from the standards he
had set for himself. John never sought to impress anyone; I don’t think he ever felt
the need to do so. I can’t think of a single serious scholar in the world of music the-
ory who has a bad word to say about him. His UB students knew this better than any
of us, and loved him for it; to them, he was simply “Papa Clough.”
I knew John as my colleague for many years, and as my teacher for many years
before that. I’m sure that I’ll never know another like him: father figure, the
most civilized of colleagues, dear friend. This, then, is the dedication of this
book: to Papa Clough.
Charles J. Smith
Coordinator of Music Theory and Chair of the Music Department
The University at Buffalo
Notes
1. One of many world-puzzles I showed John over the years particularly
delighted him as a diatonic set theorist. As a tribute to his sense of play and for those
who care about such things, I have embedded that puzzle within this paragraph....
