From a narrativistic point of view, history is a staging of the past. This book has placed PC set theory, an evolving theoretical discourse on music, in the foreground, without adding much scenery. It has only made casual reference to its social, cultural, and technological setting. Now that we are about to bring two crucial elements of that setting onstage—the computer and the university—we should realize that their mere presence does not provide an explanation for their infl uence on music theory. They have exerted that infl uence because music theorists reacted to them, probably for a complex of reasons. This chapter seeks to investigate these reasons, with particular emphasis on the roles of Allen Forte and Milton Babbitt.

A: Formalization and Forgetfulness

The Computer as a Role Model

Analyzing with PC sets can be laborious. The process of coding tone combinations and establishing their relations in terms of their intervallic structures, the operations that connect them, or the complexes to which they belong, is timeconsuming. Moreover, it is extremely prone to inaccuracy. The slightest error can result in the wrong classifi cation of a PC set, and this, in turn, can have distorting consequences for an analysis. PC set relations do not necessarily follow syntactical rules, so that, in the absence of detailed information about the composition process, we have little that can help us verify them. Accuracy is the only foundation on which the analyst can build.

PC set theory has done a lot to regulate the extraction of information from scores and to ensure its correct classifi cation. It has provided very precise coding protocols, and it has mapped out a considerable number of musical relations in the abstract. But what is most important, its notation also allows the electronic storage and manipulation of this information. This has not been a response to the

cognitive demands PC set theory made upon analysts; composers and music analysts did not start to use computers because the number of PC sets was so vast, because their interval vectors were so hard to memorize, or because their relations were so intricate. On the contrary, it was by means of computer technology that this information had become available in a comprehensive form in the fi rst place.

Few people realize that PC set theory was actually devised for computer-aided analysis—today, this fact is ignored in most analytical textbooks.