Fred Lerdahl, born March 10, 1943, Madison, Wisconsin. He is Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University, is a composer and music theorist, best known for his work on pitch space and cognitive constraints on compositional systems or "musical grammar^*."

Lerdahl studied with James Ming at Lawrence University, where he earned his BMus in 1965, and with Milton Babbitt, Edward Cone, and Earl Kim at Princeton University, where he earned his MFA in 1967. He then studied with Wolfgang Fortner at the Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg/Breisgau in 1968-69, on a Fulbright Scholarship. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Lawrence University in 1999.

See also

• Music cognition

Bibliography

• Lerdahl, Fred (1992). Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems, Contemporary Music Review 6 (2), pp. 97-121.
• Lerdahl, Fred and Jackendoff, Ray (1996). A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. MIT Press. ISBN 026262107X.
• Lerdahl, Fred (2001). Tonal Pitch Space. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195058348

External links

• The Official Fred Lerdahl Homepage
• Columbia Department of Music Faculty: Fred Lerdahl
• Fred Lerdahl's Attack on Serialism by Ken Overton
• Art of the States: Fred Lerdahl
• New Music Box asks Fred Lerdahl: What role has theory played in your compositions and how important is it for people to know the theory behind the music in order to appreciate it?

American composers | Living classical composers | Living people | Music theorists