(p.

ix) Acknowledgments

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online

Tonal Pitch Space

Fred Lerdahl

Print publication date: 2005

Print ISBN-13: 9780195178296
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2008
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195178296.001.0001

(p.ix) Acknowledgments
It is a pleasure to acknowledge some of the people who and institutions
that helped me during the long gestation of this work. Pride of place
goes to Ray Jackendoff, in whose company I learned how to do the kind
of music theory that matters most to me. Without our prior work
together, this volume would have been inconceivable.

Just as our collaboration was drawing to a close, I had the good fortune
to participate—thanks to Karl Pribram and Diana Deutsch—in three
Ossiach conferences (1980, 1983, 1985) organized by Juan Roederer.
These meetings opened my eyes to the worlds of psychoacoustics and
experimental music psychology. Around the same time, I spent a
number of residencies and visits at IRCAM (1981, 1983, 1984, 1988,
1991). This was my introduction to the world of computer music. Jean‐
Baptiste Barriére, Tod Machover, Stephen McAdams, Yves Potard, and
David Wessel supported and assisted me in undertaking a number of
computer‐music projects. For various technical and logistical reasons
none of these projects was completed, but working on them proved a
gold mine for subsequent theorizing.

My thoughts about pitch space germinated not only from my timbrai

studies but also from the theoretical work of Daniel Werts (1983) and
especially the psychological research of Carol Krumhansl (1983, 1990).
Articles by David Lewin (1982) and Richard Taruskin (1988)—though
they would hardly have guessed it—led me to novel conceptions of
harmonic functionality and nondiatonic tonal organization, respectively.

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 (p.ix) Acknowledgments

Conversations with William Rothstein in the late 1980s sharpened my

understanding of the relationship of my work to Schenkerian analysis.
A probing remark in 1987 by Célestin Deliège concerning cognitive
constraints (p.x) ignited my attempt at an atonal prolongational theory.
In 1991 Emmanuel Bigand helped crucially on the issue of tonal tension
by suggesting that it might have something to do with pitch space. (I
had previously tried to find the solution purely in terms of patterns of
prolongational branchings.) In 1994 Caroline Palmer advised my
pursuit of the quantification of harmonic tension to the point reached
here. Steve Larson's (1994) work on tonal forces motivated my theory
of tonal attractions.

At Columbia University, my doctoral students Kevin Mooney and Mine

Dogantan provided historical background on nineteenth‐century music
theories. John Halle sustained my conviction in the pertinence of the
theory for contemporary compositional practice. David Temperley both
clarified the theory of attractions and pushed me toward an alternative
approach to tonic‐finding. Joshua Fineberg helped refine the treatment
of atonal prolongations and its relation to tension.

It was through a series of lectures that I gave in 1990 at the Sibelius

Academy in Helsinki that I began to see how I could organize my
disparate ideas into a coherent framework. In 1990–1991 I benefited
from a fellowship to begin this work from the National Endowment for
the Humanities, with further support arranged by Dean Paul Boylan at
the University of Michigan and Vice President Martin Meisel at
Columbia University. During 1993–1994 I was a Fellow at the Center for
Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California, with
support provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Traces can be
found in the following pages of valuable conversations with the other
members of the CASBS Music Cognition Group: Jamshed Bharucha,
Robert Gjerdingen, Carol Krumhansl, Leonard Meyer, Eugene Narmour,
and Caroline Palmer. I am grateful to them all.

Portions of this book originated in material from invited lectures. The

work on cognitive constraints was developed for a conference on that
topic in 1987 in Geneva, Switzerland, organized by Etienne Darbellay.
The theory of atonal prolongations was originally advanced in 1988 at
an IRCAM conference organized by Stephen McAdams and resumed for
a session, put together by Miguel Roig‐Francoli, of the 1996 annual
meeting of the Society for Music Theory. My journeys into pitch space
were initiated at a 1990 music psychology conference at Ohio State
University organized by Mari Riess Jones. Work on the analysis of
chromatic music and on functionality was reported at the 1994 annual
meeting of the Society for Music Theory at a special session, arranged

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 (p.ix) Acknowledgments

by Justin London, devoted to the tenth anniversary of the publication of

GTTM. The approach toward generating chromatic spaces was
sketched in 1994 at an ESCOM conference in Liège, Belgium,
organized by Irène Deliège. The analogy between tonal space and
metrical grid was proposed in 1998 in the Poland lecture I was
privileged to give at a second music psychology conference at Ohio
State University, organized by David Huron.

Louise Litterick, David Temperley, and Carl Voss read the complete
manuscript and made many suggestions about content and style that
significantly improved the book. Further comments by Christopher
Hasty, Jonathan Kramer, and an anonymous reader, as reviewers for
Oxford University Press, were invaluable for the final revisions. Joan
Bossert initially undertook this project at OUP, and (p.xi) Bruce Phillips
provided patient encouragement for it. Maribeth Payne, Maureen Buja,
and Cynthia Garver skillfully oversaw the publication processs. Barbara
Wild did the expert copyediting. A subvention from the Society for
Music Theory helped defray costs of the complex musical figures, which
were superbly realized on the computer by Don Giller.

Here and there in this volume I have reworked material from earlier
publications (Lerdahl 1988a, 1988b, 1989a, 1989b, 1991, 1992, 1994a,
1994b, 1996, 1997b, 1999). I gratefully acknowledge permission from
Academic Press, the American Psychological Association, Analyse
Musicale, Contemporary Music Review, Current Musicology, Journal of
Music Theory, Music Perception, and Overbird Press. Belmont Music
Publishers granted permission to reproduce the first part of
Schoenberg's Klavierstuck, Op. 33a.

This book is dedicated with love to my wife, Louise Litterick, and my

children, Julie, Ruth, and Sophie. (p.xii)

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