Fred Lerdahl

Fred Lerdahl, born in Madison, Wisconsin, on 10 March 1943, is an American composer and theorist whose work and research on tonal music have carried considerable weight in the second half of the twentieth century. His training combined Lawrence University, Princeton and, on a Fulbright scholarship, the Freiburg Conservatory, where he studied with Wolfgang Fortner.

In his early period, his music, which had a post-Schoenbergian character, drew on literary texts. In Wake (1968) he recomposed fragments of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, with the instrumentation and rhythm placed at the service of the text. By the mid-1970s he had incorporated tonal elements and a more rigorous form. Eros (1975), based on a poem by Ezra Pound, consists of 21 continuous variations of twenty bars each, and the text is sung in full only in the first. This variation technique gave rise to his two string quartets (1978-1982), written in a form of “expansive variation”, in which each variation lasts about half as long again as the previous one.

Lerdahl received numerous prizes and commissions, among them the Koussevitzky Prize for composition (1966), two awards from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was composer in residence at IRCAM in Paris in 1981, 1984 and 1991, and taught at Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia and Michigan, where in 1991 he was appointed Fritz Reiner Professor of Music Composition at Columbia.

His best-known contribution as a theorist is A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (1983), written with the linguist Ray Jackendoff, which carries the models of generative linguistics and cognitive science over into music. From 1988 he also developed a theory of tonal pitch space, and his work on timbre and compositional perception extends that line of inquiry. For Lerdahl, theoretical reflection and creative practice nourish each other, and his legacy lies at that intersection of composition and analysis.