Harmonic proportion and form in nature, art, and architecture

In his debut collection, Some Trees (1956), John Ashbery poses a question that resonates across his oeuvre and much modern art: “How could he explain to them his prayer / that natu...

James Tenney examines some of John Cage's theoretical ideas and their possible implications for a new theory of harmony that he argues requires new definitions of “harmony,” “harmo...

An exploration of the harmonic language of rock is presented, relying heavily on corpus data. Chords in rock are overwhelmingly root-position major and minor triads. The commonly-u...

Palaces like the Aljafería and the Alhambra rank among the highest achievements of the Islamic world. In recent years archaeological work at Córdoba, Kairouan and many other sites ...

What if architecture were not an instrument of capital? How to imagine and build a non-extractivist and non-exploitative architecture. Capital’s voracious appetite f...

The syntactic norms of common practice harmony are well known, but we lack good explanations for them. A theory of convergence is offered to explain how dominant and predominant ha...

In his “Darmstadt Lecture,” one of the few published examples of his public lectures, James Tenney talks about problems of harmony, which he breaks down into a number of other, sma...