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.
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.