Allen Forte

Battell Professor of the Theory of Music

Allen Forte, B.A. and M.A., Columbia University; faculty member at Yale since 1959: Your work set the research agenda for music theory in the second half of the twentieth century: the analysis of tonal music, the analysis of atonal music, and the revitalization of the history of music theory. Although much of your work has focused on the twentieth-century music of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Stravinsky, Ives, and Debussy, you also have made important contributions to the analysis of works of nineteenth-century composers such as Liszt, Wagner, Brahms, and Mahler. Your recent work on the American popular song rounds out your career with one of your true musical loves, and your two books on the subject have stimulated interest among other scholars in researching our American musical heritage. 

During your years at Yale you built from nothing the pre-eminent doctoral program in music theory in the United States, and indeed the world. You advised the extraordinary number of 72 Ph. D. dissertations, and produced generations of graduate and undergraduate students who are now leaders in their field. Recently in your honor, an anonymous donor has enabled Yale to establish the Allen Forte Professorship of Music theory. It is no surprise that in the year of your “retirement” you are at work simultaneously on two projects: a book on Debussy’s “Pelleas and Melisande” and your own compact disc on American popular songs. As you leave formal teaching to continue your extraordinary contributions to musical life and musical scholarship your colleagues send you off with a Hallelujah chorus.

Tribute Editor: Penelope Laurans