Allen Forte (Portland, 23 dicembre 1926Hamden, 16 ottobre 2014) è stato un teorico musicale e musicologo statunitense[1]. Era professore emerito di teoria musicale presso Università Yale e specializzato in musica atonale del XX secolo e analisi musicale[2].

Allen Forte

Biografia

Forte nacque a Portland, Oregon. All'età di dieci anni apparve "in uno spettacolo radiofonico [locale] come pianista solista in mezzo ad una folla di artisti altrettanto giovani", dove ha suonato la musica di Cole Porter ed altri.[3] È stato arruolato nella Marina degli Stati Uniti e prestò servizio nella Guerra del Pacifico verso la fine della seconda guerra mondiale.

In seguito, si trasferì a New York per studiare musica alla Columbia University, dove conseguì la laurea, il master e il dottorato. Lì studiò composizione con Otto Luening e Vladimir Ussachevsky, sebbene i suoi interessi principali si stessero focalizzando sulla teoria e l'analisi della musica.[4]

Carriera accademica

Alla fine degli anni '50 Forte insegnò musica in varie istituzioni di New York: il Columbia University Teachers College, la Manhattan School of Music e il Mannes College of Music. Nell'autunno del 1959 iniziò il suo incarico a lungo termine a Yale, dove alla fine divenne "Battell Professor of Music" (ritirandosi nel 2003).[5] Fu importante sia come studioso che come insegnante e in quest'ultima veste fu supervisore di settantadue tesi di dottorato completate tra il 1968 e il 2002. (Yale non offriva un dottorato di ricerca in teoria per i primi anni in cui Forte era lì.) Un elenco di tutti i suoi dottorandi e dei loro titoli di tesi appare in "David Carson Berry, "The Twin Legacies of a Scholar-Teacher: The Publications and Dissertation Advisees of Allen Forte," Gamut 2/1 (2009), 197-222. L'elenco è ordinato cronologicamente per data di presentazione e ad ogni dottorando viene assegnato un numero "FA" per indicare il suo ordine tra i consulenti. ("FA" sta per "Forte Advisee" (Dottorato di Forte) ed è anche una versione retrograda delle iniziali di Allen Forte.)

Pubblicazioni

Forte is well known for his book The Structure of Atonal Music (1973), which traces many of its roots to an article of a decade earlier: "A Theory of Set-Complexes for Music" (1964).[6] In these works, he "applied set-theoretic principles to the analysis of unordered collections of pitch classes, called pitch-class sets (pc sets). [...] The basic goal of Forte's theory was to define the various relationships that existed among the relevant sets of a work, so that contextual coherence could be demonstrated." Although the methodology derived from Forte’s work "has had its detractors ... textbooks on post-tonal analysis now routinely teach it (to varying degrees)."[7]

Forte published analyses of the works of Webern and Berg and wrote about analisi schenkeriana and music of the Great American Songbook. A complete, annotated bibliography of his publications appears in the previously cited article, Berry, "The Twin Legacies of a Scholar-Teacher." Excluding items only edited by Forte, it lists ten books, sixty-three articles, and thirty-six other types publications, from 1955 through early 2009

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

Onorificenze e premi

He has been honored by two Festschriften (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 was 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 five installments of Gamut: The Journal of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic, between 2009 and 2013. It was edited by Forte's former student David Carson Berry (FA72) and was titled A Music-Theoretical Matrix: Essays in Honor of Allen Forte (a title derived from Forte's 1961 monograph, A Compositional Matrix). It included twenty-two articles by Forte's former doctoral advisees, and three special features: a previously unpublished article by Forte, on Gershwin songs; a collection of tributes and reminiscences from forty-two of his former advisees; and an annotated register of his publications and advisees.

Vita privata

Forte was married to the French-born pianist Madeleine (Hsu) Forte, emerita professor of piano at Boise State University.

Bibliografia (Libri e articoli fondamentali)

  • (1955) Contemporary Tone-Structures. New York: Bureau of Publications, Columbia Univ. Teachers College.
  • (1959) “Schenker's Conception of Musical Structure,” Journal of Music Theory, iii, 1–30.
  • (1961) The Compositional Matrix. Baldwin, NY: Music Teachers National Assoc.
  • (1962) Tonal Harmony in Concept and Practice (3rd ed., 1979). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
  • (1967) SNOBOL3 Primer: An Introduction to the Computer Programming Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • (1970) Musicology and the computer : musicology 1966-2000: a practical program : three symposia American Musicological Society, Greater New York Chapter 1965-1966 (with Barry S Brook) New York: City Univ. of New York Press.
  • (1973) The Structure of Atonal Music. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.
  • (1978) The Harmonic Organization of The Rite of Spring. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.
  • (1978) “Schoenberg's Creative Evolution: the Path to Atonality,” The Musical Quarterly, lxiv, 133–76.
  • (1980) “Generative Chromaticism in Mozart's Music,” The Musical Quarterly, lxvi, 459–83.
  • (1982) Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis (with Steven E. Gilbert). New York: W. W. Norton.
  • (1984) “Middleground Motives in the Adagietto of Mahler's Fifth Symphony,” 19th-Century Music, viii, 153–63.
  • (1985) “Tonality, Symbol, and Structural Levels in Berg's Wozzeck,” The Musical Quarterly, lxxi, 474–99.
  • (1987) “Liszt's Experimental Music and Music of the Early Twentieth Century,” 19th-Century Music, x, 209–28; repr. as “Liszt's Experimental Idiom and Twentieth-Century Music,” Music at the Turn of the Century, ed. J. Kerman (Berkeley, 1990), 93–114.
  • (1988) “New Approaches to the Linear Analysis of Music,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, xli, 315–48.
  • (1988) “Pitch-Class Set Genera and the Origin of Modern Harmonic Species,” Journal of Music Theory, xxxii, 187–270.
  • (1990) “Musorgsky as Modernist: the Phantasmic Episode from Boris Godunov,” Music Analysis, ix, 1–42.
  • (1991) “Debussy and the Octatonic,” Music Analysis, x, 125–69.
  • (1991) “The Mask of Tonality: Alban Berg's Symphonic Epilogue to Wozzeck,” Alban Berg: Analytical and Historical Perspectives, ed. D. Gable and R.P. Morgan, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 151–200.
  • (1992) “Concepts of Linearity in Schoenberg's Atonal Music: a Study of the Opus 15 Song Cycle,” Journal of Music Theory, xxxvi, 285–382.
  • (1993) “Foreground Rhythm in Early Twentieth-Century Music,” Early Twentieth-Century Music, ed. J. Dunsby Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 132–47.
  • (1995) The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era: 1924-1950. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press.
  • (1996) “The Golden Thread: Octatonic Music in Webern's Early Songs,” Webern Studies, ed. K. Bailey, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 74–110.
  • (1998) The Atonal Music of Anton Webern. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.
  • (2001) Listening to Classic American Popular Songs. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.

Note

  1. ^ In memoriam Allen Forte, music theorist, su news.yale.edu, October 17, 2014.
  2. ^ http://news.yale.edu/2014/10/17/memoriam-allen-forte-music-theorist
  3. ^ Allen Forte, "Secrets of Melody: Line and Design in the Songs of Cole Porter," Musical Quarterly 77/4 (1993), unnumbered note on 644-645.
  4. ^ David Carson Berry, "Journal of Music Theory under Allen Forte’s Editorship," Journal of Music Theory 50/1 (2006), 8.
  5. ^ David Carson Berry, "Journal of Music Theory under Allen Forte’s Editorship," Journal of Music Theory 50/1 (2006), 9-10; and Berry, "Our Festschrift for Allen: An Introduction and Conclusion," in A Music-Theoretical Matrix: Essays in Honor of Allen Forte (Part V), ed. David Carson Berry, Gamut 6/2 (2013), 3.
  6. ^ Allen Forte, "A Theory of Set-Complexes for Music," Journal of Music Theory 8/2 (1964): 136-183.
  7. ^ David Carson Berry, "Theory," sect. 5.iv (“Pitch-class set theory”), in The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd edition, ed. Charles Hiroshi Garrett (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 8:175-176.

Collegamenti esterni


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