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 (1960) in connection with tonal music, and then mostly developed in connection with atonal music by theorists such as Allen Forte (1973), drawing on the work in twelve-tone theory of Milton Babbitt. The concepts of set theory are very general and can be applied to tonal and atonal styles in any equally-tempered tuning system, and to some extent more generally than that. One branch of musical set theory deals with collections (sets and permutations) of pitches and pitch classes (pitch-class set theory), which may be ordered or unordered, and which can be related by musical operations such as transposition, inversion, and complementation. The methods of musical set theory are sometimes applied to the analysis of rhythm as well.
Read more about Set Theory (music): Mathematical Set Theory Versus Musical Set Theory, Set and Set Types, Basic Operations, Equivalence Relation, Transpositional and Inversional Set Classes, Symmetry
Famous quotes containing the words set and/or theory:
“A set of ideas, a point of view, a frame of reference is in space only an intersection, the state of affairs at some given moment in the consciousness of one man or many men, but in time it has evolving form, virtually organic extension. In time ideas can be thought of as sprouting, growing, maturing, bringing forth seed and dying like plants.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.”
—Tom Wolfe (b. 1931)