Allen Forte

Allen Forte (born December 23, 1926) is a music theorist and musicologist. He was born in Portland, Oregon 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. Forte is arguably best known for his book The Structure of Atonal Music, in which he extrapolates from the serial theory of Milton Babbitt, proposing a musical "set theory" of pitch-class-set analysis analogous to mathematical set theory with the avowed intention of providing a method for the analysis of non-serial atonal music. The musicologist Richard Taruskin and the composer and music theorist George Perle are among the most vocal critics of this method. Forte was also the...