Allen Forte is a music theorist

Music theory

Music theory is the study of how music works. It examines the language and notation of music. It seeks to identify patterns and structures in composers' techniques across or within genres, styles, or historical periods...

 and musicologist. He was born in Portland, Oregon

Portland, Oregon

Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...

 and fought in the Navy at the close of World War II before moving to the East Coast. He is now Battell Professor of Music, Emeritus at Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

. Forte is arguably best known for his book The Structure of Atonal Music, in which he extrapolates from the serial theory of Milton Babbitt

Milton Babbitt

Milton Byron Babbitt was an American composer, music theorist, and teacher. He is particularly noted for his serial and electronic music.-Biography:...

, proposing a musical "set theory"

Set theory (music)

Musical set theory provides concepts for categorizing musical objects and describing their relationships. Many of the notions were first elaborated by Howard Hanson in connection with tonal music, and then mostly developed in connection with atonal music by theorists such as Allen Forte , drawing...

 of pitch-class-set analysis analogous to mathematical set theory

Set theory

Set theory is the branch of mathematics that studies sets, which are collections of objects. Although any type of object can be collected into a set, set theory is applied most often to objects that are relevant to mathematics...

 with the avowed intention of providing a method for the analysis of non-serial atonal music. The musicologist Richard Taruskin

Richard Taruskin

Richard Taruskin is an American-Russian musicologist, music historian, and critic who has written about the theory of performance, Russian music, fifteenth-century music, twentieth-century music, nationalism, the theory of modernism, and analysis. As a choral conductor he directed the Columbia...

 and the composer and music theorist George Perle

George Perle

George Perle was a composer and music theorist. He was born in Bayonne, New Jersey. Perle was an alumnus of DePaul University...

 are among the most vocal critics of this method. Forte was also the editor of the Journal of Music Theory

Journal of Music Theory

The Journal of Music Theory is a peer-reviewed academic journal specializing in music theory and analysis. It was established by David Kraehenbuehl in 1957....

during an important period in its development, from volume 4/2 (1960) through 11/1 (1967). His involvement with the journal, including many biographical details, is addressed in David Carson Berry

David Carson Berry

David Carson Berry is an American music theorist and historian, writer about music, and college professor. Among his diverse research interests are American popular music of the 1920s-60s, including a focus on Irving Berlin and Jimmy Van Heusen; the theory and aesthetics of music of the...

, "Journal of Music Theory under Allen Forte's Editorship," Journal of Music Theory 50/1 (2006): 7-23.

Forte has published analyses of the works of Webern

Anton Webern

Anton Webern was an Austrian composer and conductor. He was a member of the Second Viennese School. As a student and significant follower of Arnold Schoenberg, he became one of the best-known exponents of the twelve-tone technique; in addition, his innovations regarding schematic organization of...

 and Alban Berg

Alban Berg

Alban Maria Johannes Berg was an Austrian composer. He was a member of the Second Viennese School with Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, and produced compositions that combined Mahlerian Romanticism with a personal adaptation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.-Early life:Berg was born in...

 and has written about Schenkerian analysis

Schenkerian analysis

Schenkerian analysis is a method of musical analysis of tonal music based on the theories of Heinrich Schenker. The goal of a Schenkerian analysis is to interpret the underlying structure of a tonal work. The theory's basic tenets can be viewed as a way of defining tonality in music...

 and American popular song. A complete, annotated bibliography of Forte's publications appeared in David Carson Berry

David Carson Berry

David Carson Berry is an American music theorist and historian, writer about music, and college professor. Among his diverse research interests are American popular music of the 1920s-60s, including a focus on Irving Berlin and Jimmy Van Heusen; the theory and aesthetics of music of the...

, "The Twin Legacies of a Scholar-Teacher: The Publications and Dissertation Advisees of Allen Forte," Gamut 2/1 (2009), 197-222, accessible at http://dlc.lib.utk.edu/web/ojs/index.php/first/article/view/105. Excluding items only edited by Forte, it lists ten books, sixty-three articles, and thirty-six other types publications, from 1955 through early 2009. The article also provides a list of all seventy-two of Forte's Ph.D. advisees at Yale University. The list is ordered chronologically by dissertation submission (which ranges from 1968 to 2002), and each advisee is given an "FA" number to denote his or her ordering among the advisees. ("FA" stands for "Forte Advisee," and is also a retrograde of Allen Forte's initials.)

Forte has been honored by two Festschrift

Festschrift

In academia, a Festschrift , is a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during his or her lifetime. The term, borrowed from German, could be translated as celebration publication or celebratory writing...

en (homage volumes). The first, in commemoration of his seventieth birthday, was published in 1997 and edited by his former students James M. Baker, David W. Beach, and Jonathan W. Bernard (FA12, FA6, and FA11, according to Berry's list). It is titled Music Theory in Concept and Practice (a title derived from Forte's 1962 undergraduate textbook, Tonal Harmony in Concept and Practice). The second was serialized in Gamut: The Journal of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic

Gamut: The Journal of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic

Gamut is a peer-reviewed academic journal specializing in music theory and analysis. It is a fully online journal, sponsored by the and published by , a digital imprint of the University of Tennessee Libraries...

, and commenced in vol. 2/1 (2009). It is ongoing, and is edited by Forte's former student David Carson Berry

David Carson Berry

David Carson Berry is an American music theorist and historian, writer about music, and college professor. Among his diverse research interests are American popular music of the 1920s-60s, including a focus on Irving Berlin and Jimmy Van Heusen; the theory and aesthetics of music of the...

(FA72); it is titled A Music-Theoretical Matrix: Essays in Honor of Allen Forte (a title derived from Forte's 1961 monograph, A Compositional Matrix).

Now retired from Yale, Forte is traveling and giving lectures and seminars, sometimes in conjunction with his wife, the pianist Madeleine Forte.

External links

• AllenForte.com
• http://music.fsu.edu/Quicklinks/Music-Library/Research-Resources/Special-Collections/Personal-Collections/Allen-Forte-Treatise-Collection The Allen Forte Treatise Collection at the Warren D. Allen Music Library at Florida State University
• http://forte.music.unt.edu/ Allen Forte Electronic Archive (AFEA): Unpublished papers, notes, sketches, and video clips available for viewing and download through the Center for Schenkerian Studies at the University of North Texas.