The Complete Musician: An Integrated Approach to Tonal Theory, Analysis, and Listening by Steven G. Laitz (review)

The Complete Musician is a comprehensive theoretical training text for undergraduates. The main volume, containing the principal text and exercises, with a disc of recorded examples, is accompanied by a workbook of supplementary exercises with its own CD. The main volume has four appendices: these either offer further material on basic subjects for less experienced students or they extend various sections of the text, with such topics as intervals, sequences, and invertible counterpoint. Appendix 3, subtitled ‘The Motive’ (pp. 768–803), provides a useful analogue to Part 7, on ternary, rondo, and sonata forms. The book was first published in 2004, a second edition appearing in 2008. Under present review is the third edition. This includes a number of revisions listed in the Preface (pp. xv–xvii) such as: a reduced number of chapters; more material on musical fundamentals; solutions to certain exercises in Appendix 6; many new examples from the repertory, and a new companion website (www.oup.com/us/laitz).

The scale of the enterprise is imposing indeed. Its ambitious aim of comprehensiveness is enshrined in the title. The third edition has thirty-one chapters. The early ones deal with the fundamentals (pitch and rhythm; characteristics of melody; two-voice counterpoint; triads and seventh chords); the later chapters approach the major Classical-era forms and nineteenth-century harmony. The final chapter, entitled ‘At Tonality’s Edge’, charts the frontier of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tonality. The intervening parts traverse the expansive realm of diatonic harmony, taking in primary triads; tonic and dominant functions; the dominant seventh; inversions of these chords; and, later, melodic and harmonic ‘embellishments’ of the basic diatonic framework. Harmonic embellishments incorporate further chord types and venture into the realm of chromaticism. With their thorough coverage of chord types, cadences, sequences, and periodic structures, Parts 2 to 7 pave the way for the treatment, in Part 7, of ternary, rondo, and sonata forms. Throughout Parts 1–6 a number of analytical methods are also introduced that equip students for subsequent compositional tasks and the analysis of large-scale form. Quite properly, the author emphasizes the distinction between descriptive ‘first-level analysis’, which might involve chord labelling or cadential identification, and interpretative ‘second-level’ analysis, which seeks to establish function. Quite early on in the book, Laitz enforces a message that is all too often neglected in more traditional systems of harmonic instruction and consequently forgotten by students: ‘Merely labeling each harmony with a roman numeral does not constitute an analysis; it is more a description. An analysis with the sole aim of placing roman numerals beneath every chord is a mechanical and dull exercise, one that is doomed to fail’ (p. 148).

Methodologically, this book perpetuates several broad trends arising from pedagogical texts of the last few decades. Like Miguel A. Roig-Francoí’s Harmony in Context (New York, 2003) and Jane Piper Clendenning and Elizabeth West Marvin’s A Musician’s Guide to Theory and Analysis (New York, 2005), The Complete Musician is predicated on Schenkerian principles. Don Traut has linked these books, together with the first edition of Laitz’s The Complete Musician, to ‘the seminal work of Edward Aldwell and Carl Schachter’, namely their Harmony and Voice Leading (New York, 1989). (D. Traut, ‘A Comparative Review of The Complete Musician by Steven G. Laitz, Harmony in Context by Miguel A. Roig-Francoí, and The Musician’s Guide to Theory and Analysis by Jane Piper Clendenning and ElizabethWest Marvin’, Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, 20 (2006), 151–160 at 151.) Accordingly, the reportorial underpinning of Laitz’s work comes from the ‘common-practice’ era whose epicentre is the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The author does, however, quite often venture beyond these boundaries. Particularly gratifying are the periodic references to non-Classical repertory: Chapter 1 includes a discussion about syncopation that juxtaposes...