Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory (3rd Edition)

Rating:
Summary: "Supercharged"!!!!
Review: I found that this book is an excellent text and should be used in all post tonal thoery courses. It is easy to use and very informative. To quote him, this text is "Supercharged with cool stuff".

Rating:
Summary: "Supercharged"!!!!
Review: I found that this book is an excellent text and should be used in all post tonal thoery courses. It is easy to use and very informative. To quote him, this text is "Supercharged with cool stuff".

Rating:
Summary: Very useful
Review: I like this book a lot. It is a practical, balanced, to-the-point guide. I have been composing for a long time (14+ years) but I've only been studying it full time for 3 years now, and I found that the book really helped to clarify a lot of my thinking about pitch collections, 20th century harmonies, and 20th century compositional techniques.

RE: The Prime Form debate. There are two methods for computing the prime form, the "Forte" and "Rahn" method. This book uses the "Rahn" method and is perfectly consistent throughout. While this is a minor issue, because it only affect 5 pitch class sets (of 200), perhaps it would be good to add a paragraph about the differences in a future revision to help beginniners avoid confusion.

Rating:
Summary: from the real world of music
Review: I must begin by saying that I found the earlier reviews to be mostly nonsense. Before you buy this book, understand what it is: a college-level introduction to a highly specialized academic field. It is not a general interest music theory book. I have used this book on many occaisions to tutor students in 20th C. Analysis classes. I have used it to help prepare graduate students who are studying for the 20th C. portion of their qualifying exams. Many of the professors to whom I have reccomended this book have adopted it as their primary text for introductory classes in 20th Music. As I mentioned above, this is highly specialized field and this book is merely an introduction. It is also a contentious field in which more opinion than expertise seems to abound (much like Schenkerian Theory); be careful whose opinions you heed...they may know less about the topic than you.

Rating:
Summary: Uninformed reviewers
Review: Reviewers of such a book as Intro. to Post-Tonal Theory should know a bit about set-class theory before trying to discredit Straus's work. "A Reader"'s review (titled "Inaccurate") is itself blatantly wrong. Set [0,3,4,5,8,10,11], this reviewer proposes, does not yield prime form if one applies Straus's methods to it. What the reviewer doesn't seem to realize is that he has failed to apply the first rule of finding normal order, of finding the MINIMUM SPAN of a set, which Straus does tell readers to do. The aforementioned septachord must be put in normal order first with minimum span (that is, 0,1,2,7,8,9) before applying Straus's right-to-left rule. A review must be critical but such a mistaken reading must either be ignorance or willful malevolence, neither of which is appropriate here. "from the real world of music" is arguably a worse review, throwing up a veil of unnecessary "big words," to use the vernacular, to hide a critique based upon nothing. What abuses of terminology, what logical fallacies, and what errors does this reviewer refer to? And if Straus's book is "cliff notes", then what is the real version? I don't discredit these reviews from a difference of opinion on my part but rather I am disgusted by the ignorance present in these reviews.

Having said all that, is is no surpise that I firmly believe that Straus's text belongs at the top of a short list of anyone who wishes to pursue pitch class set theory. It is indeed designed as a text and as such is often times clearer and more practical than the Allen Forte original. He engages precisely the repertoire Forte set out to engage (the second Viennese school mainly) and supports his clear explanations with convincing musical examples and step-by-step analyses. The positive reviews here obviously outweight the astoundingly ignorant negative ones. As well, this book has the blessing of the majority of the music theory community behind it, and rightly so. This is a valuable book that deserves a place on any theorist's (or aspiring theorists's) shelves.

Rating:
Summary: Uninformed reviewers
Review: Reviewers of such a book as Intro. to Post-Tonal Theory should know a bit about set-class theory before trying to discredit Straus's work. "A Reader"'s review (titled "Inaccurate") is itself blatantly wrong. Set [0,3,4,5,8,10,11], this reviewer proposes, does not yield prime form if one applies Straus's methods to it. What the reviewer doesn't seem to realize is that he has failed to apply the first rule of finding normal order, of finding the MINIMUM SPAN of a set, which Straus does tell readers to do. The aforementioned septachord must be put in normal order first with minimum span (that is, 0,1,2,7,8,9) before applying Straus's right-to-left rule. A review must be critical but such a mistaken reading must either be ignorance or willful malevolence, neither of which is appropriate here. "from the real world of music" is arguably a worse review, throwing up a veil of unnecessary "big words," to use the vernacular, to hide a critique based upon nothing. What abuses of terminology, what logical fallacies, and what errors does this reviewer refer to? And if Straus's book is "cliff notes", then what is the real version? I don't discredit these reviews from a difference of opinion on my part but rather I am disgusted by the ignorance present in these reviews.

Having said all that, is is no surpise that I firmly believe that Straus's text belongs at the top of a short list of anyone who wishes to pursue pitch class set theory. It is indeed designed as a text and as such is often times clearer and more practical than the Allen Forte original. He engages precisely the repertoire Forte set out to engage (the second Viennese school mainly) and supports his clear explanations with convincing musical examples and step-by-step analyses. The positive reviews here obviously outweight the astoundingly ignorant negative ones. As well, this book has the blessing of the majority of the music theory community behind it, and rightly so. This is a valuable book that deserves a place on any theorist's (or aspiring theorists's) shelves.