Rothenberg Propriety

In music, Rothenberg propriety denotes an important concept in the general theory of scales which was introduced by David Rothenberg in a seminal series of papers in 1978. The concept was independently discovered in a more restricted context by Gerald Balzano, who termed it coherence. The notion belongs to the class of concepts often, but misleadingly, termed diatonic set theory; in fact, as with most concepts of diatonic set theory, it applies far more widely than simply to the diatonic scale.