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Studies in Music with Text.

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Studies in Music with Text. By David Lewin. (Oxford Studies in Music Theory.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. [xii, 409 p. ISBN 0-19-518208-1. $65.] Music examples, index.

David Lewin (1933-2003) was doubtless the most significant music theorist of the last half century. Oxford brilliantly inaugurates its new series, Studies in Music Theory, with a collection of essays that gives a more complete sense of Lewin's achievement than if we had been left with only the two extraordinary but highly technical volumes published during his lifetime, Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) and Musical Form and Transformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

The essays comprise nineteen chapters, distributed over seven parts, each associated with a composer--six canonical German composers, organized chronologically from Mozart to Schoenberg, and Milton Babbitt (whom Lewin places as following in the German tradition). Seven of the chapters appear here for the first time. Among the twelve that have previously appeared are a number that may reasonably be considered to have achieved the status of classics of music theory and analysis: "Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception," "Auf dem Flusse: Image and Background in a Schubert Song," "Amfortas's Prayer to Titurel and the Role of D in Parsifal," and most...

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