... offers a full range of methods to help musicians, not only grasp, but remember those key elements upon which the music they play is built: pitch, rhythm, scales, key signatures, and harmony.

... introduces a number of tools for analyzing a wide range of twentieth-century musical styles and genres. It includes discussions of harmony, scales, rhythm, contour, post-tonal music, set theory, the twelve-tone method, and modernism. Recent developments involving atonal voice leading, K-nets, nonlinearity, and neo-Reimannian transformations are also engaged.

... describes a new framework for thinking about music that emphasizes the commonalities among styles from medieval polyphony to contemporary rock. Tymoczko identifies five basic musical features that jointly contribute to the sense of tonality, and shows how these features recur throughout the history of Western music.

... makes a significant contribution to music theory and to the growing conversation on metric perception and musical composition. Focusing on the chamber music of Haydn and Mozart produced during the years 1787 to 1791, the period of most intense metric experimentation in the output of both composers, author Danuta Mirka presents a systematic discussion of metric manipulations in music of the late 18th-century.

...chronicles the emergence of a new musical reality between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a reality in which beauty and the complementary idea of celestial harmony were gradually replaced by concepts of expressivity and emotion....