Fortenotes

Author(s): Jonathan Dunsby

Source: Music Analysis, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Jul., 1998), pp. 177-181
Published by: Wiley
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JONATHAN DUNSBY
FORTENOTES
I had been planning to give a presentation about why pc genera theory does
not seem to have seized the imagination of theorists. I would have thought this
theory a steal, and yet people have not seemed to be exceptionally interested.
My hunch is that this is a blip, just one of those things. Researchers may come
round to seeing pc genera theory for what it is, a significant step fotward in the
theory of the twelve-note universe. 1
I think my initial ruminations came to a halt, in favour of most of what fol-
lows below, because they were more political than scientific. In order to say
anything positive, I would have had to decide whether it is the case that atonal
music is losing the high ground, or on the other hand that the musical terrain
(and culture tout court) is nowadays altogether less alpine through the erosion
of the years - and thus of course easier-going for all travellers; these processes
of natural selection are hard to see clearly close up. If I imply that pc set theory
in general is a technique for the analysis of atonal music, it will be objected
that, although this may have been its original primary purpose, its remit has
widened considerably over the years - to Skryabin, Liszt and so on - and it has
also had its impact on contemporary composition. With the onset of pc set
genera theory the range of applicability may not have widened strictly speaking,
as I suspect Forte might insist theoretically, but the species names, now includ-
ing 'diatonic', are deliberately chosen to anchor pc set theory historically, in a
world where no-one is surprised at, and I hope most will welcome, modern
discussion of, for example, chromatic completion in Mozart.2
Sticking to the positive, then, making two brief points and asking some sort
of question: It seems to me that it is in a footnote - and we all know how
Forte's so-often extraordinary footnotes are their own sort of universe - that he
encapsulates what his kind of pc genera theory is about and for:
[It] organizes the universe of pitch-class sets into related 'families' on the
basis of chains of inclusion relations that begin from trichordal 'progenitors'.
The result is a collection of twelve genera, each of which has distinctive in-
tervallic properties reflected in the informal names assigned to each. For
example, Genus 12 (G12) is called the dia-tonal genus. Its trichordal pro-
genitors are 3-7 (e.g., C-D-F) and 3-1 1, the common triad. A major purpose
of the system of genera is to permit close examination of large-scale har-
monic vocabularies, particularly those of early twentieth-century avant-garde
composers. (Forte 1991, p. 161n)
MusicAnalysis, 1 7/ii (1998) 177
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178
JONATHAN
DUNSBY
The first
question I
wanted to
address in
connection with the
present
publica-
tion, the event from which it
derived, and the
literature that
underpinned it,
was the
simple one of why a
theory of pc set
genera
fundamentally
matters,
which would be to
answer, if it does matter
fundamentally, how it
transcends or
even in some sense
supplants
classic
Fortean, his own, pc set
theory. Forte is
not of course
recanting, so we can
expect to see ever more clones of that foot-
note - which one is
almost
surprised not to meet as an
automated click
button,
be it PC or Mac - 'cf. The
Structure of Atonal Music (New
Haven:Yale
Univer-
sity Press,
1973)'. I do not know (yet?) of any way in which pc set genera
theory
radically
contradicts classic
Fortean pc set
theory, but I do feel that it may lead
to a
different
practical,
analytical focus, as
mentioned below.
In his 1988 article Forte at last
publicly
addressed the issue of
probability.
Fifteen years is a very short time in the
advancement of
musical
understand-
ing.
Probability was always a
niggle-and-a-half in
respect of The
Structure of
Atonal
Music. How can 50
hexachords
survive the
onslaught of 12
trichords?
Every time a
hexachord is
'used', or
perhaps we may say
'found', it is just that
much less likely to be used or found in
comparison with any
particular tri-
chord, which has a 1 in 12
chance of
appearing
among the
universe of
normal
trichords, a lot better than 1 in 50, which is the
natural
selection field of the
hexachords. Or you can turn the
probability issue onto its other head, and say
that any
particular
hexachord is more
important as a
musical
instance,
because
it is
statistically less likely to
appear than is any
particular
trichord. This
comes
down to the same point. Not only
probability, but
actuality,
presence
marked
out the
hexachord. After all, that '*' in a K* entry in a
set-complex table is
telling us three
things: 1) this
Z-related set is
special by virtue of being a hexa-
chord; 2) not only that, but it carries a
special '*' by virtue of being one of two
species of
hexachord; 3) and not only that, but it is
actually used in this piece of
music. Eat your heart out,
3-1/9-ls
everywhere!
Now, with the
calculus
'difference
quotient' Forte
provides a
formal
expres-
sion for the
'extent to which a given genus differs from the other
genera' (Forte
1988, p. 220) . The
crucial next step is to take
account of the
'cardinalities of the
constituents' (my
emphasis), with the
expression:
Difquo=
(X/Y)/4
Less
crucial in the
abstract
perhaps, but vital in
practice, is
Forte's
extension of
probability
exclusion (my
phrase) by means of an index
termed a status quo-
tient, which 'is a
further step
toward
refining and
interpreting the matrix struc-
ture for the
analysis of actual
compositions'
(Forte 1988, p. 232). For the
record, the squo
formula iS:3
((XIY)IZ)- 1 0
What we have here is an
explanation of the
semitonal, or
half-step
universe
that really is a
theory, in that it not only frees us from the
philosophically dis-
Music
Analysis, 1 7/ii ( 1998)
c Blackwell
Publishers Ltd. 1998
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FORTENOTES
179
tracting world of compositional practice (the K* syndrome), but also frees it-
self also from the statistical spin of the hexachord in theory, of which even
more anon.
In the introversive world of pc matters I obviously have a second question:
Never mind probability (theory), what about segmentation (analysis?)? I have
put that parenthetical question mark there because it is not at all obvious that
analysis and theory can be segregated in the convenient way that some Ameri-
can colleagues assume or have been led to assume. The Structure of Atonal Mu-
sic may be a bit long in the tooth, yet there is no publication or downloadable or
commercially available software that I know of which essentially faults it: if
other theories asking similar questions were better, there are an awful lot of
people to whom they never got through; and yet it made little ingress into the
world of segmentation.
My second question, then, is how the theory of pc set genera may affect
segmentation. I cannot be alone in having taught, StrAMly, surreptitiously,
'hunt the hexachord'. That's the way you made a set-complex work, asking a
student to interrogate whether that embarrassing challenger-set really mat-
tered so much and could not perhaps be excluded as a feature of the music, or
whether there were not many more lurking hexachords that s/he had heard/
seen (I am almost tempted to add '/played', but presumably in this forum I can
write shielded from the Perception Police); and research showed again and
again that SecondViennese composers were, in different ways, composing with
hexachords. The seduction of an overlap between the poietics and the esthesics
was of course compelling.4 It seems to me that in pc set genera theory, although
hexachords have by definition lost none of their special properties, they have no
special place in the results of an analysis, and thus there is no danger of them
having a special place in the segmentation on which the analysis of the results is
based. My study of Forte's analyses of Schoenberg, Ravel, Musorgsky, Chopin,
Messiaen, Webern, Stockhausen, Carter, Stravinsky and Debussy (the rela-
tively extensive treatment of La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune), all in
Forte (1988, pp. 238-63), and Chris Kennett's detailed work on music by
Frank Bridge (Kennett 1995) that it was my privilege to supervise, suggest an
approach that is palpably closer to some kind of'neutral' level than what I
earlier called 'classic' pc set approaches.
Finally, it makes sense to look at large sets (seeWalker 1989), and I do not
need to cite any literature that puts its focus on small sets.5The grand question
of why there should be twelve trichordal progenitor sets is addressed in these
pages by Richard Parks and was defended vigorously by Forte in the discussion
at CUMAC 97. Hovering somewhere in that discussion is the question of what
it is about the trichord that makes it so fundamental, asked here for the nth time
(I don't really even ask it, so much as refer to it) - from where does that magic
three come?6
MusicAnalysis, 17/ii (1998)
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180
JONATHAN
DUNSBY
REFERENCES
Baker, James, 1990:
'Chromaticism in
Mozart's
'Jupiter'
Symphony', in
Mozart-
ffarAbuch 1991, ed.
Rudolph
Angermuller et al.
(Kassel:
Barenreiter), pp.
1050-55.
Burnett,
Henry and
O'Donnell,
Shaugn, 1996:
'Linear
Ordering of the Chro-
matic
Aggregate in
Classical
Symphonic
Music', Music
Theory
Spectrum,
18/i, pp.
22-50.
Dawkins,
Richard, 1995: River out of
Eden:A
Darwinian View of Life
(London:
Weidenfeld &
Nicolson).
Dunsby,
Jonathan, 1997: 'Acts of
Recall', The
Musical Times, 138 (No.
1847), pp.
12-17.
Forte,
Allen,1973: The
Structure of Atonal Music (New
Haven:Yale
University Press).
1988:
'Pitch-Class Set
Genera and the
Origin of
Modern
Harmonic
Species',
3'ournal of Music
Theory, 32/ii,
pp.187-271.
1991:
'Debussy and the
Octatonic',
MusicAnalysis,
10/i-ii,
pp.125-69.
Jalowetz,
Heinrich, 1944: 'On the
Spontaneity of
Schoenberg's
Music', The
Musical
Quarterly, 30/iv, pp.
385-408.
Kennett, Chris, 1995: 'The
Harmonic
Species of Frank
Bridge: An
Assessment of
the
Applicability of
Pitch-Class
Generic
Theory to
Analysis of a
Corpus of
Works by a
Transitional
Composer' (PhD diss.,
University of
Reading) .
Mithen,
Steven, 1996: The
Prehistory of the
Mind:A Search for the
Origins of Art,
Science and
Religion
(London:
Thames and
Hudson).
Nattiez,
Jean-Jacques, 1990: Music and
Discourse, trans.
Carolyn
Abbate
(Prince-
ton, NJ:
Princeton
University Press).
Pople,
Anthony, 1991:
SetBrowser
[analysis
software for
Apple'
Macintosh com-
puters]
(Lancaster: CTI Centre for
Music).
Walker,
Rosemary, 1989:
'Modes and
Pitch-Class Sets in
Messiaen: A Brief Dis-
cussion of
"Premiere
communion de la
Vierge"', Music
Analysis, 8/i-ii, pp.
159-68.
NOTES
1. I was
delighted to hear pc genera theory
discussed so
expertly at the
CUMAC 97
round-table session under the
authoritative
guidance of Craig Ayrey. As Chair of
the
CUMAC 97
Programme
Committee, I
express my thanks to him for
organis-
ing such a
fascinating
session. In this
written
contribution I have tried to retain
some flavour of the
original oral
'article'.
2. See Baker
(1990), and
Burnett and
O'Donnell
(1996). I say
'modern' but this
topic goes back at least to the 1940s: see
Jalowetz
(1944), p. 387,
concerning the
'twelve-tone line' at the
beginning of the
development
section of the Finale of
Mozart's G minor
Symphony, K. 550.
3. Forte
explains X,Y and Z with his
customary
precision (Forte 1988, p. 232). I
have
lingered long and hard over 'what Forte is really saying' type
statements,
concluding that what Forte is really saying is what he says.
Music
Analysis, 1 7/ii ( 1 998)
c Blackwell
Publishers Ltd. 1998
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FORTENOTES
181
4. At the risk of annoying some readers, but since thankfully music analysis is not
just one new world, I add this reference: to the index of Nattiez's Music and Dis-
course (Nattiez 1990, pp. 266 and 263 respectively).
5. If software is a good test of opinion, I note that the seemingly widely disseminated
UK software in Pople (1991) (version 1.2 appeared in 1994), figures sets from
cardinal 2 up to and including 10, without, needless to say, revealing any sub- or
superset of cardinal 2 or cardinal 10 sets respectively.
6. My deep distrust of twos rather than threes is evidenced in my 'Acts of Recall'
(Dunsby 1997). Recent interpretation of archaeological evidence suggests that the
current fashion for dualistic thinking, though it must by definition have its place in
evolution, may be misguided. In The Prehistory of the Mind (Mithen 1996), Steven
Mithen argues that the early development of human cognition involved at least
three areas of awareness - roughly speaking survival, communication and aware-
ness of others (we might say, again in my words: I know I have to eat that animal; I
know I have to pretend to make the sound of this animal to stop that animal killing
me; I know I like this animal - maybe s/he can help me solve my problems?). Of
course, you can say that consciousness is a duality (I/the world). But most of us in
our everyday lives do not find matters so simple. And composers in any case talk of
modern music as being, as Schoenberg often said, 'on a higher plane', when per-
haps the human mind has evolved beyond the 'eat it/not eat it?' mentality. If Forte
insists that nowadays, millions of years into the evolving descendants of our few
and all of them perfect ancestors (see Dawkins 1995,pp. 1-2), we cannot figure
out notes but in threes or more, he may after all be right. It would be intriguing to
compare pc set genera theory with current ethnomusicological theories of the
tritonic scale in prehistoric civilizations! And the relevance? I can let Allen Forte
answer that himself: 'They don't seem to realize', he once said to me about pc set
genera theory, and never mind where and when, and who they were, 'this is a
human thing'.
Music Analysis, 1 7/ii ( 1998) c Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998
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