Harmonic Practice in Tonal Music. By Robert Gauldin. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. [xxii, 680 p. ISBN 0-393-970744. $38.]

Robert Gauldin's Harmonic Practice in Tonal Music, a welcome new music-theory textbook, will likely find favor with those who have taken to heart the theoretical and analytical writings of Heinrich Schenker. For them, harmony is primarily linear, consisting of small- and large-scale extensions of fundamental chords and scale degrees. But for those who conceive harmony as mainly vertical, as motion from one chord to another, the book may be less appealing. This is unfortunate, because it has much to offer anyone who teaches or studies undergraduate theory.

The book consists of four parts, the first of which reviews scales, rhythm and meter, triads, and seventh chords and introduces the principles of four-part writing. The second part covers diatonic harmony, the third and fourth parts, chromatic harmony. Parts 2 through 4 culminate in analytical essays on the topics just presented.

How, exactly, is this harmony textbook Schenkerian? Gauldin's concentration on the tonal axis of tonic and dominant is a consequence of his overtly Schenkerian concept of tonality; as he explains in chapter 9, tonality may be understood "as the melodic and harmonic extension of the opening tonic within the total span of the composition" (p. 98). As for the dominant, students are encouraged, even at the beginning of their study of harmony, to distinguish essential dominants, those that serve...