Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations

Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations, David Lewin's masterpiece, has prompted a twenty-year efflorescence in the field of mathematical and systematic music theory. GMIT leads readers to the head of a series of distinct paths, suggests by example where each path leads, and leaves readers to their own explorations. Many music theorists now spend their careers working out different aspects of the vision presented here; there is plenty and enough to go around. (Richard L. Cohn, Battell Professor of the Theory of Music, Yale University)

David Lewin's great gift was his ability to connect sophisticated mathematics to musical experience in ways that were deeply compelling, never losing sight of either the music, or the experience. Together these two volumes display both his theoretical brilliance and his sensitivity to the individuality of musical works. Most significantly, they are imbued with his unflagging dedication to and abiding love for the acts of making and understanding music. (Andrew Mead, Professor of Music, University of Michigan)

David Lewin's work is among the most important on music theory in the twentieth century. Through some of the examples of practical applications, Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations was the inception and theoretical basis of the 'Neo-Riemannian' strand of tonal music theory. In addition, its transformational network analysis paradigm has become part of every music theorist's standard repertory for analysis, and has since been extended by Lewin himself, Klumpenhouwer, Lambert, Stoecker, Headlam, Rahn, and Mazzola among many others. The analytical essays in Musical Form and Transformations illustrate the new analytical paradigm Lewin introduced in Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations. These seminal works on music theory are essential reading. (John Rahn, Professor of Music, University of Washington)

While David Lewin's thought had been animated for decades by some of these books' ideas―-the complex significance of interval, the audibility of pitch-class inversional indices, the definition of directed motion more by context than convention―-it was their concentrated presentation here that enabled many readers to assimilate them as a 'theory.' The result was a shift in the discipline's conception of its methods, even its goals, to the point where imitation of the books (of their imitable aspects) could become a career path. In a renewed encounter with the originals, we are confronted once more by Lewin's intellectual probity, his intense concern with every construction's relation to hearing (which need not mean anything so simple as that every construction is heard), his fastidious eschewal of hype. With these taken as exemplary, the field would change again. (Joseph Dubiel, Professor of Music, Columbia University)

David Lewin's Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations is recognized as the seminal work paving the way for current studies in mathematical and systematic approaches to music analysis. Lewin, one of the 20th century's most prominent figures in music theory, pushes the boundaries of the study of pitch-structure beyond its conception as a static system for classifying and inter-relating chords and sets. Known by most music theorists as "GMIT", the book is by far the most significant contribution to the field of systematic music theory in the last half-century, generating the framework for the "transformational theory" movement. Appearing almost twenty years after GMIT's initial publication, this Oxford University Press edition features a previously unpublished preface by David Lewin, as well as a foreword by Edward Gollin contextualizing the work's significance for the current field of music theory.

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