# Audacious Euphony by Richard Cohn



## Truckload

Awesome book!









"Audacious Euphony" by Richard Cohn presents an alternative syntax for analyzing chromatic harmony. It has been especially illuminating for me regarding the middle to late romantics. It is on a post graduate music theory level.

I wish this book had been written 40 years ago, but it was only published in 2013. This book has been of enormous help to me in better understanding the music of the romantic era. I highly recommend this book.

Has anyone else on the forum read this book? I would really like to discuss with someone some of the ideas presented in this book.


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## drfaustus

I would like know the book's ideas. I stayed with the analysis of Schenker.


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## Truckload

As you know, common practice era analysis can explain every harmony used by Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. One can do roman numeral analysis on every harmony and progression and analyze the logic behind every decision made by the composer.

Common practice era music theory can not explain the music of the composers after Beethoven, for example Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, and Bruckner.

During the previous 30 years, music theorists have made great strides in creating methodologies for analyzing the very tonal music of these composers, even though the music defies analysis by the traditional approaches.

Cohn's book is a synthesis of these new approaches that brings additional clarity to the continuing advancements in theory.


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## EdwardBast

Truckload said:


> Awesome book!
> 
> View attachment 77992
> 
> 
> "Audacious Euphony" by Richard Cohn presents an alternative syntax for analyzing chromatic harmony. It has been especially illuminating for me regarding the middle to late romantics. It is on a post graduate music theory level.
> 
> I wish this book had been written 40 years ago, but it was only published in 2013. This book has been of enormous help to me in better understanding the music of the romantic era. I highly recommend this book.
> 
> Has anyone else on the forum read this book? I would really like to discuss with someone some of the ideas presented in this book.


i will have to get this. I know some of Cohn's earlier work on maximally smooth cycles, which dealt with altered mediant and submediant relationships. Nice title too.


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## Nimrod

To be honest, I am disappointed by this book. It's long in the wind and half of it seems to be ****-covering with the "community" for being presumptuous enough to write such a book. It spends 3 chapters just to get to the point, in the process throwing around terms like "involution" for no good reason (used only once, never used again; and coming from STEM background, I know what "involution" means, imagine someone who doesn't). Maybe it speaks to the quality of writing in this field in general.

One nice thing about such verbose fluff is that you get through it quickly. I've read about half of it tonight. The point so far seems to be that you can construct a formal geometry of triadic space using voice-leading distances of various types (kind of a duh observation for anyone who plays music, or maybe not). The more interesting point is that chromatic compositions ostensibly live in this space in the sense that their motivic structures tend to be reasonable walks in this space, whatever "reasonable" subjectively means to you. It however makes diatonic pieces have "unreasonable" walks, so I don't think this qualifies as a "universal" geometry. It somewhat becomes an exercise in model-fitting for one particular style of music.


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## Truckload

Nimrod said:


> To be honest, I am disappointed by this book. It's long in the wind and half of it seems to be ****-covering with the "community" for being presumptuous enough to write such a book. It spends 3 chapters just to get to the point, in the process throwing around terms like "involution" for no good reason (used only once, never used again; and coming from STEM background, I know what "involution" means, imagine someone who doesn't). Maybe it speaks to the quality of writing in this field in general.
> 
> One nice thing about such verbose fluff is that you get through it quickly. I've read about half of it tonight. The point so far seems to be that you can construct a formal geometry of triadic space using voice-leading distances of various types (kind of a duh observation for anyone who plays music, or maybe not). The more interesting point is that chromatic compositions ostensibly live in this space in the sense that their motivic structures tend to be reasonable walks in this space, whatever "reasonable" subjectively means to you. It however makes diatonic pieces have "unreasonable" walks, so I don't think this qualifies as a "universal" geometry. It somewhat becomes an exercise in model-fitting for one particular style of music.


Interesting points. Yes, there is a lot of fluff. It seems that everyone that writes a new book extending musical theory must "review" all of the previous books on theory before they add their new point, which is tiresome. However, I did find some significant meat here. In particular, applying his ideas to Dvorak and Tchaikovsky (I just picked two late romantics I liked) does give me a greater understanding of their harmonies. Look at the Dvorak "American" quartet, 1st movement, and the key centers are an exact match for hexatonic geometry. Admittedly, the style of music being addressed is one style, the late romantic.


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## EdwardBast

Truckload said:


> Look at the Dvorak "American" quartet, 1st movement, and the key centers are an exact match for hexatonic geometry. Admittedly, the style of music being addressed is one style, the late romantic.


I wonder why anyone would think addressing one style of music is a bad thing? That is precisely what theory needs. Specificity rather than the quest for universality - at last. Moreover, hexatonic geometry is fundamental to the language of several important Russian composers of the 20th century. Others are getting to this, and it will turn out that Cohn's insights have broader implications than he is claiming.


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