John Cage and the Theory of Harmony

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,” “harmonic relations,” etc.; such definitions, he contends, will emerge from a more careful analysis of the “total soundspace” of musical perception. Tenney begins with a discussion of the current disparity between harmonic theory and compositional practice before explaining what a true theory of harmony should be: a theory of harmonic perception (one component in a more general theory of musical perception) consistent with the most recent data available from the fields of acoustics and psychoacoustics but also taking into account the extended range of musical experiences available to us today. Tenney outlines the conditions that such a theory ought to satisfy and goes on to consider a multidimensional space of pitch perception called harmonic space.