The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory

Thomas Christensen is Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago.

"This first single-volume history of music theory in English is a significant addition to literature about music. [...] It should be part of all academic music collections" Choice

• Introduction Thomas Christensen; Part I. Disciplining Music Theory: 1. Mapping the terrain Leslie Blasius; 2. Musica practica: music theory as pedagogy Robert W. Wason; 3. Epistemologies of music theory Nicholas Cook; Part II. Speculative Traditions: 4. Greek music theory Thomas J. Mathiesen; 5. The transmission of ancient music theory into the Middle Ages Calvin Bower; 6. Medieval canonics Jan Herlinger; 7. Tuning and temperament Rudolf Rasch; 8. The role of harmonics in the scientific revolution Penelope Gouk; 9. From acoustics to tonpsychologie Burdette Green and David Butler; 10. Music theory and mathematics Catherine Nolan; Part III. Regulative Traditions: 11. Notes, scales, and modes in Carolingian thought David Cohen; 12. Renaissance modal theory: theoretical, compositional and editorial perspectives Cristle Collins Judd; 13. Tonal organization in seventeenth-century music theory Gregory Barnett; 14. Dualist tonal space and transformation in the nineteenth century Henry Klumpenhouwer; 15. Organum, diaphonia, discantus, contrapunctus in the Middle Ages Sarah Fuller; 16. Counterpoint pedagogy in the Renaissance Peter Schubert; 17. Performance theory Albert Cohen; 18. Steps to Parnassus: contrapuntal theory in 1725: precursors and successors Ian Bent; 19. Twelve-tone theory John Covach; 20. The evolution of rhythmic notation Anna Maria Busse Berger; 21. Theories of musical rhythm in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries William Caplin; 22. Rhythm in twentieth-century theory Justin London; 23. Tonality Brian Hyer; 24. Rameau and eighteenth-century harmonic theory Joel Lester; 25. Nineteenth-century harmonic theory: the Austro-German legacy David W. Bernstein; 26. Heinrich Schenker William Drabkin; Part IV. Descriptive Traditions: 27. Music and rhetoric Patrick McCreless; 28. Form Scott Burnham; 29. Thematic and motivic analysis Jonathan Dunsby; 30. Energetics Lee Rothfarb; 31. The psychology of music Robert Gjerdingen.