A Theory for All Music: Problems and Solutions in the Analysis of Non-Western Forms by Jay Rahn (review)

522 LETTERS IN CANADA 1983 ones, which find their impact unhappily distorted. However, the tritone printing technique and quality, by Meriden Gravure Company of Connecticut, is superb; the details are rendered with laudable accuracy on a difficult matte paper which cannot reproduce the sheen of the albumen prints. The resulting velvety images let you forget that the originals undoubtedly do not share this consistency of texture. A final remark must be made about the organization of the book. As the catalogue of an exhibition from the holdings of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the images have been arranged largely according to the show. Unfortunately, this repeats certain dislocations. For example, the title implies a chronological order; yet, within that, items similarin subject matter and place are grouped together despite widely varying dates (for example, plates 66 and 67 show the Parthenon, first in 1869, then in 1928; the prints are deceptively similar in surface rendering). Further confusion is caused in the catalogue by the large print face announcing each biography, inserted as each photographer's work is first mentioned. This implies an organization by photographer quickly denied by the lack of alphabetical sequence, itself awkward, and the insertion between biographies of catalogue entries for other photographers' images. Ultimately, however, these considerations are small when compared with the overall excellent commentary enriching this part of the book. The eighty-three biographies and their accompanying catalogue entries deserve praise for their general readability, while the bibliography presents a laudable selection of literature. As a whole, the book both celebrates a resource of international stature in the Canadian Centre for Architecture and contributes a sensuous volume to the library on architectural photography . (LILLY KOLTUN) Jay Rahn. ATheory for All Music: Problems and Solutions in the Analysis of Non-Western Forms University of Toronto Press. x, 267. $35.00 Ethnomusicologists, a small group of scholars pleasantly preoccupied with the study of folk and non-Western music, and music theorists are the audience for this complex and carefully reasoned book. Rahn, a music theorist, provides the logical and conceptual basis of 'a theory for all music,' whether tonal, atonal, modal, or based on some other structural principle. In constructing, in effect, a theory of music theories, he writes to and for ethnomusicologists because they, more than music theorists and historians of music, have tried to include all music, not just 'classical' or 'great' or 'common practice' music, within their purview. Faced with the task of studying all music, ethnomusicologists have worried about two basic problems. First, they inherited the vocabulary HUMANITIES 523 and concepts of traditional Western music theory but have used them with a certain trepidation, fearful that these culture-specific categories distort the interpretation of other cultures' music. To avoid the problem, they have either invented, ad hoc, new terms thought better able to capture certain subtle distinctions in non-Western music or stopped talking about non-Western forms altogether, moving quickly on to the second problem: the relationship between music and culture. They have expended a good deal of intellectual energy positing various kinds of causal, covariant, and symbolic relationsbetween music and, for example, social structure, economics, politics, and cognitive domains in particular societies. This concern with 'music in culture' has led them to be rather sceptical ofattempts, such as Rahn's, to study music cross-culturally from a single, unified perspective. Rahn wades undaunted into the muddy waters created by these ethnomusicological problems with the goal of clarifying them. The result is a tour de force of scrupulous definition and logical thinking. The central portion of Rahn's book, and its most important contribution, deals with the first problem, how to talk senSibly or, to use his phrase, 'determinately ' about all music. Working outward from the smallest number of undefined concepts, such as those found in logic and set theory plus the properties of tones (pitch, 'moment,' and loudness), he carefully defines successively more complex ones: interval, duration, precedence, adjacency , altitude, and bisection. His goal is to use the minimum number of concepts to achieve the maximum interpretive richness. His basic insight is that pitch and rhythmic materials in music, traditionally analysed separately in a kind of earth-air-fire-waterapproach...