The Exciting Universe Of Music Theory

Forte errata

Added 2025-06-07 13:09:49 +0000 UTC

I think I've found an error in "The Structure of Atonal Music" on page 52.

Maybe I'm wrong. I posted about it here on Reddit, hoping that someone might take time to sanity-check my findings:
https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/comments/1l5k4t0/forte_r2_relation_is_there_an_error_in_the_book/

I have to cut Forte some slack, I mean that book was published in 1973, and you know what computers looked like back then? He was probably doing this stuff with punch cards on a machine that cost $$$ per minute to run and the program would probably take hours.

While I enjoy the smug pride of righting historic wrongs by verifying Every Single Fact that I put into my book, it bothers me finding errors in source material because then I have to chase down the reason for the discrepancy. If my calculations and the source material agree with each other, I'm satisfied and I move on. Yes it's possible that maybe we're both wrong, but that's improbable.

Contrarily when the source disagrees with me, I have to investigate, and that can take a long long time and a lot of second-guessing, carefully calculating scale properties by hand, refactoring the methods and writing so many unit tests... until I'm satisfied that there's no possibility that I've made a mistake.

This is one of those situations where I've calculated the Rp, R1, and R2 relationships by hand and I believe that Forte's chart is wrong.

It could very well be that Forte had the correct calculations, but in preparing the book he typed out that chart with a typewriter and it's literally a typo where a finger hit "X" instead of the space bar.

We'll never know.