Reconstructing historical conceptions of harmonic distance, Audacious Euphony advances a geometric model appropriate to understanding triadic progressions characteristic of 19th-century music. Rick Cohn uncovers the source of the indeterminacy and uncanniness of romantic music, as he focuses on the slippage between chromatic and diatonic progressions and the systematic principles under which each operate.

• Table of Contents


• 1. Mapping the Triadic Universe


• Three Methods for Calculating Triadic Distance


• Triads in Chromatic Space


• Remarks on Syntax and Maps


• 2. Hexatonic Cycles: A First Preliminary Model of Triadic Space


• A Minimal-Work Model of the Triadic Universe


• The Hexatonic Trance


• Contrary Motion and Balance


• Hexatonic Progressions, Tonnetz Representations, and Voice-Leading


• Transformations


• Near Evenness, Minimal Voice Leading, and the Central


• Role of the Augmented Triad


• Remarks on Dualism


• Triadic Structure Generates Pan-Triadic Syntax


• Triads are Homophonous Diamorphs


• 3. Reciprocity


• The Historical Emergence of Augmented Triads


• Consonance/Dissonance Reciprocity


• Two Early-Century Examples: Beethoven and Schubert


• Three Late-Century Examples: Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov, Fauré


• Reciprocity in Weitzmann's Der Ubermässige Dreiklang


• 4. Weitzmann Regions: A Second Preliminary Model of Triadic Space


• The Structure of a Weitzmann Region


• Weitzmann Transformations and N/R Cycles


• Remarks on the Tonnetz


• Historical Origins of Weitzmann Regions


• The Double-Agent Complex


• Expanded N/R Chains


• Weitzmann Regions without Sequences: Wagner and Strauss


• 5. A Unified Model of Pan-Triadic Space


• How Hexatonic and Weitzmann Regions Interact


• Chromatic Sequences


• Transformational Substitutions


• Voice Leading Zones


• Remarks on Disjunction and Entropy


• 6. Navigating the Triadic Universe: Three Scripts


• Neighborhoods and Pitch-Retention Loops


• Departure Þ Return Scripts


• Continuous Upshifts


• 7. Integrating Dissonant Harmonies into the Model


• Four Eighteenth-century Approaches to Dissonance


• Reduction to a Triadic Subset


• Hexatonic Poles in Parsifal


• The Tristan Genus as Nearly-Even Tetrachord


• Circumnavigating the Tristan-Genus Universe


• Scriabin's Mystic Species and Generalized Weitzmann Regions


• 8. Syntactic Interaction and the Convertible Tonnetz


• Some Previous Proposals


• The Diatonic Tonnetz


• Horizontal Extensions


• Vertical Extensions


• The Convertible Tonnetz


• Two Analytical Vignettes: Wagner and Brahms


• 9. Double Syntax and the Soft Revolution


• A Summary Example from Schubert


• Double Syntax and its Skeptics


• Code Switching and Double Determination


• Cognitive Opacity


• The Soft Revolution


• On Musical Overdetermination

Richard Cohn is Battell Professor of Music Theory at Yale University. His work on chromatic harmony has been the topic of a series of summer seminars convened by the late John Clough, and has been developed in about a dozen doctoral dissertations, at Chicago, Indiana, Yale, Harvard, and SUNY-Buffalo. His articles have twice earned the Society for Music Theory's Outstanding Publication Award. Cohn edits the Oxford Studies in Music Theory series. In preparation is a general model of meter with applications for European, African, and African-diasporic music, and a co-edited collection on David Lewin's phenomenological writings.