Emeritus Faculty

Allen Forte

Bio: Allen Forte is Battell Professor of Music Theory Emeritus in the Department of Music, Yale University, where he was instrumental in initiating the Ph.D. program in music theory. His publications include some twelve books and eighty articles, published in Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Spectrum, Music Analysis, Perspectives of New Music, and Journal of the American Musicological Society, reflecting his interest in pitch-class set theory, the study of avant-garde music of the twentieth century, principally that of the Second Viennese School and the music of Olivier Messiaen, Schenkerian analysis, and other aspects of music theory. In addition, he has written about and recorded music of the classic American popular song repertoire. His 1958 monograph on the development of diminutions in American jazz was the first detailed analytical study of that repertoire. Professor Forte was founding President of the Society for Music Theory and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. During his tenure at Yale, Professor Forte advised seventy-two Ph.D. dissertations. In 2000 Yale established an endowed professorship in his name, the Allen Forte Professorship of Music Theory. He resides in Hamden, Connecticut with his wife, concert pianist Madeleine Forte. More information, including links to unpublished papers, is at www.allenforte.com.
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Leon Plantinga

Bio: Leon Plantinga graduated from Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1957.  He received a M.Mus. in piano performance from Michigan State University in 1959, and a Ph.D. in the History of Music from Yale University in 1964.  On the Yale faculty from 1963 until his retirement in 2005, Plantinga served as chair of the Department of Music for ten years.  For six years in the 1990s, he was the Director of the Division of the Humanities.  After retirement Plantinga spent a year at the Princeton Institute for Advance Study, and is currently Interim Director of the Yale Collection of Musical Instruments.  He has written widely on music of the later eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, with books on Schumann as a music critic, a life and works study of Muzio Clementi, a history of nineteenth-century European music, and a study of the Beethoven concertos.  Plantinga has published many articles and reviews in professional journals, and, lately, in the TLS of London. 
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