Voice Leading Among Pitch-Class Sets: Revisiting Allen Forte’s Genera

Abstract

The theory of PC-set class genera by Allen Forte was an important contribution to the understanding of similarity relations among PC sets within the tempered system. The growing interaction between the universes of PC-sets and transformational theories has been explored the space between sets of the same or distinct cardinality, by means of voice-leading procedures. This paper intends to demonstrate Forte’s method along with proposals by other authors like Morris, Parks, Straus, Cohn, and Coelho de Souza. Some analysis demonstrates such operations in passages picked from Heitor Villa-Lobos’s works, like the Seventh String Quartet and the First Symphony.