Allen Forte

Allen Forte ( born December 23, 1926 in Portland / Oregon) is an American musicologist and music theorist.

Forte had in his childhood piano and organ lessons. After attending high school, he served to the end of World War II in the U.S. Navy. His musical studies at Columbia University (from 1945) he graduated summa cum laude. He taught for a time at Columbia Teachers College and the Mannes School of Music, before he became a professor at Yale University. With a one-year interruption at M.I.T. He worked there until his retirement as professor of music theory and is Battell Professor Emeritus of Music Theory. 2000 founded the Yale University and an Allen Forte Professor of music theory.

In addition to a dozen books Forte has written articles for music magazines such as the Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Spectrum, Music Analysis, Perspectives of New Music, and the Journal of the American Musicological Society, in which he is particularly concerned with Josef Matthias Hauer, Alois Haba, Joseph Schillinger and Milton Babbitt justified Musical Set Theory, the reduction analysis by Heinrich Schenker, the Second Viennese School and the music of Olivier Messiaen dealt. In 1958 he published the first detailed musical analysis study on the American jazz music.

Forte is married to concert pianist Madeleine Forte.

Writings

• Tonal Harmony in Concept and Practice, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962
• The Harmonic Organization of The Rite of Spring, Yale University Press, 1978
• Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis ( with Steven E. Gilbert ), WW Norton & Co., 1982
• The Atonal Music of Anton Webern, Yale University Press, 1998