This truly remarkable book is unique in several important ways. In the first instance it deals with the music and lyrics of these extraordinary songs in ways that reflect the author's extensive experience as a musician and as a writer on musical subjects, drawing upon his eclectic background to present fresh ideas that illuminate and inform. In the words of Henry Martin, jazz authority and expert on popular music of the golden era: "In this highly accessible book, Allen Forte delights us with unique, thought-provoking insights into some of the great songs from the '20s, '30s, and '40s."

The book comes fully equipped to provide the reader with everything needed to acquire a very close familiarity with the major attributes of this beautiful repertoire of popular song, including simple musical notation or "lead sheets" of all the songs (a basic knowledge of music notation is needed, and Chapter 1 fills that gap, if required), perceptive discussions of lyrics as they relate to the melodies, harmonies, and rhythms of the songs, and, as a special and unique innovation, a compact disc that provides the reader with easy access to the music. Moreover, background material places each song in its historical-social context. Implicitly, for each song, the author answers the question: "Why has this song withstood the test of time to become a classic?"

The writing style is informal, bright, and often humorous, without in any way "writing down" to the audience. It is a pleasure to read. The text and the accompanying compact disc, which includes recordings especially made for this volume, are beautifully matched. And the performances by baritone Richard Lalli and pianist Gary Chapman are superb. On two of the tracks we also hear the author as arranger and pianist, testifying to his close connection to this music as a performer.

Accessible, intelligent, and highly enjoyable, this book and recording will make delightful additions to the libraries of a broad range of readers/listeners -- from those who are already familiar with this repertoire and who seek an enriched understanding of the songs and their contexts, to those who may be hearing and learning of these alluring works for the very first time.

Wow! What can I say? This book is very well structured with a lot of useful information. If you are into music theory, this is the book for you. If you don't have any ideas for a composition, all you need to do is read a little passage in this book to get you started on your way to writing a song. I highly reccomend this book to you.

Never fear. No one is likely ever to mistake the author of "Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis" for Ernest Hemingway. In fact there exist many eloquent and elegantly written music theory textbooks, Walter Piston's "Counterpoint" and Cecil Forsyth's "Orchestration" among them. But I don't expect eloquence. I expect that a writer who can't distinguish adjectives and nouns, who doesn't understand that pronouns require antecedents, and who mangles his diction should not be published--or at least that his manuscript should be carefully edited. By this criterion alone I might reasonably withhold from "Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis" as many stars as I am allowed. (Alas, I am not so reasonable.) I don't have room now to discuss its treatment of Schenker's theories. I should like to point out, however, (to belabor the obvious) that 1) no book can be excused its faults on the ground that it is intended as a classroom supplement and that 2) it is illogical and...rude to gratuitously assume criticism the concomitant of ignorance or opacity.

I've been looking for a book like this for a long time. I'm using it for self-study of Schenker's theories. I find Schenkers own works to assume that one already understands a lot about his theories. This book starts from the beginning, and leads you through some very complex and worthwhile ideas. I think any serious musician not acquainted with Schenker and interested in more than a superficial understanding of his thought could greatly benefit from reading this book (and working through the exercises).

Forte's "Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis" is most effective when used by a good teacher. After all, this is a textbook and not a novel. I feel that some of the reviewers of this book are comparing Forte to Ernest Hemingway, or Robert Frost. Writings on music theory are extremely technical; they are almost never going to be eloquent or poetic. Sometimes things are difficult to understand. THAT'S WHY PROFESSORS EARN $90,000 PER YEAR.

This book contains several examples from the tonal literature that define, explain, and illuminate the principles associated with Schenkerian theory in a candid, matter-of-fact way. I recommend this book for anyone interested in music theory.

According to its blurb this book "seeks to illuminate this extraordinary music indigenous to America by revealing its deeper organizational characteristics". Professional music theorists and graduate students familiar with the earlier and notorious "The Structure of Atonal Music" know that this is something more ominous than "heavy handed academese". The author's method of "revealing...deeper organizational characteristics" is to arbitrarily circle arbitrary sets of notes, assign them meaningless names like "4-17", and make trivial assertions about the integers from zero to eleven. If you're interested in American popular music you should get hold of something that really has to do with American popular music, not this.

The author is a professor of the theory of music at Yale. As such, he's on to something here, but in his hands American popular music becomes little more than an academic subject. Missing in his heavyhanded academese is the accessability that has made these songs so popular in the first place. As a pianist who plays these songs over and over and who takes them seriously as a pre-eminent American contribution to world culture, I learned little except some biographical facts (inexplicably, though he has a gender-oriented chapter on women in this genre, he leaves out Dorothy Fields, one of the best in either sex). Additionally, the book is not inexpensive and no discount is offered. My thanks to Amazon for its liberal return policy. Note: There's an enthusiastic five-star review of this book which I suspect was written by the author or a close friend. It's undeserved. Alex Wilder's American Popular Music is much the better book, and much cheaper, too!

More analytical than Wilder's similar reference, but Wilder covers a few more composers. Anybody who is serious about the subject will need both sources.

This is certainly an improvement over "The Structure of Atonal Music", but nevertheless a very grudging one. It backs away from some of the absurdities of the earlier book (which received a barrage of just criticism), whereas it ought simply to abandon them.

I complained (to Stephen Dembski, John Schaffer, and others--it may have got back to this author) about the earlier book that it uses "tetrachord" to mean "any set of four notes", whereas "tetrachord" really means a four-note contiguous segment of a scale or tone row. The same complaint applies, of course, to its use of "trichord". This new book at least acknowledges my complaint. It says, "'Trichord', incidentally, is preferred over 'triad,' since the latter is associated with a familiar type of configuration in tonal harmony."

This is like saying, "Since 'fork' is associated with the thing with which I eat roast beef and mashed potatoes, if ever I am served lasagna I will eat it with my hands." No: We can use language in a civilized manner. A triad in general is a set of three things. A triad in music is a set of three notes. (A set--in both the general and the mathematical senses--by definition is unordered.) The "tri" in "triad" refers to the number of notes ONLY; it does NOT refer to the interval by which a chord is constructed. Thus we can speak of quartal triads as well as of diatonic tertian triads ("a familiar type of configuration in tonal harmony"). Note, for example, that a chord built in fifths is quintal, which is Latin, whereas a five-note scale is a pentatonic scale, which is Greek. We use Latin for the interval of construction (tertian, quintal); we use Greek for the number of notes in the scale (pentatonic), chord (triad, pentad), or contiguous scale, melody, or tone row segment (trichord, pentachord). The metric system makes an analogous distinction: decimeters, centimeters, and millimeters (Latin) are little, whereas decameters, hectometers, and kilometers (Greek) are big. (That the Romans were rather like "Star Trek"'s The Borg, intent on assimilation, has unfortunate small and large consequences: 1) We can't make this distinction between octal chords and octads, and "tri" actually passed from Greek to Latin--essentially it's Greek, though. 2) The Roman Catholic Church.)

The youngsters here making.taking quips at Herr Forte should read/lead with the book,not offering perfunctory commentary based on appriasals and gut wrenches somewhere below the belt. One cannot speak enough about this diamond cutter as Igor Stravinsky had mentioned. When Igor's creativity had run out.

The high points here are the orceshtral music the Cantatas, and the scourings of miniature form. The "bagatelles" for string quartet was quite literally timbres from another sphere,perhaps the sulphur still in the air to be from European bourgeois wars. Forte has plenty of historic data situating each work within a context beyond the tablatures and pitch configurations he is known for. If you are a composer Webern continues to be a viable source for discovery. The first generation, the Darmstadt people, as Nono, Boulez, Stockhausen,Kurtag are all spent,their creativity has run its course. Yet there is/still beauty to be discovered if you know where to look. If all one finds are arrays, and fractal permutations of chordal dyads,hexa.tetra well, please brethren Look Again!, it's all there.

While many of those who have read this book have come down upon it rather harshly, it was a valuable book. Allen Forte was really one of the pioneers in atonal theory insofar as attempting to conceptualize the mathematics behind it. While this book has many obvious flaws, we must realize that it was published thirty years ago. At the time it was written it probably made sense to the author, anyway to analyze in such a fashion. So where does that leave us on the issue of purchasing this book? As a historical study of why everybody has been groomed to use this method, this book is invaluable. How else can we understand what many believe to be the truth? If one wants to truly understand the concept of atonal music, however, this book is not a good choice. This book should be viewed in much the same light as the sun orbiting the earth. Sound, logical thought, that when inspected more closely was found to be completely off base. We needed this book to show us what not to do. Let's thank its author for opening up the subject in the first place.

There are plenty of grievances that one can lodge against pitch-class set theory as an analytic method; especially in this earliest of formulations of that theory. The fact remains, however, that thirty years of critical music theory work by many important scholars trace their lineage from this book and cite it as a standard reference. It cannot be easily dismissed as many reviewers are inclinded to do.

The weakest aspect of this book is not how mathematically unsound the theory may be. (In comparison, for example, to "real" mathematical set theory...it is not a mathematical
text book and the math that is used is adapted to its purpose, which is musical analysis.) This is an old and tired complaint which is quite beside the point. The weakness of this book lies in the complete absence of a reasonable and contextual basis for making decisions about segmentation. The analysis which is presented in this book is often less than palpable because of the convenience of the segmentation; the basis of such segments seems to often be that "they work" rather than that they reveal anything especially cogent about the music being analysed. That hardly makes a compelling reason to dismiss the entire toolbox that Forte begins to build in this book however. What it does mean is that the techniques of applying this "theory" were in need of considerable refinement. There is an enormous body of analytical literature that does just that.

If you are interested in that body of literature, you would do well to study this book carefully to understand the origins (and pitfalls) of pitch-class set analysis as it was first formulated. The more difficult issues that Forte begins to try to tackle are still the central issues of PC-set theory today: similarity and transformation of set types into one another, membership of subsets into larger harmonic units etc. We should not be surprised that the inital pioneering work in this area required further refinement.

The book remains significant to music theorists for a variety of reasons not least of which is its historical precedence. Rameau's "traite" remains an important music theoretical text too, but few people think about harmony in exactly the same way that Rameau presents it.

The Forte pitch class set table is still the most highly concentrated form of objective information on all possible structurally distinct 12TET scales that exists.

The text of the book just gives the logic behind the table.

Whether or not pitch class set theory is a viable way to analyze "dead" (already finished) compositions is irrelevant, since it's painfully obvious that the most beautiful music surely hasn't been written yet! :)

Perle's books are inscrutible examples of Schoenbergian cultist/apologist propoganda/navel-gazing.

I haven't read Pentatonic Scales for the Jazz-Rock Keyboardist yet, but judging from my previous experiences with "musicians", I'd be willing to bet that it doesn't include all 38 possible structurally distinct 5-tone scales! :)