For this seminar, the Musical Representations team of the STMS Laboratory (Ircam, Sorbonne University, CNRS, Ministry of Culture) invites you to meet Dmitri Tymoczko, a lecturer at Princeton University, an internationally-acclaimed composer and one of the world’s leading music theorists.

Dmitri Tymoczko will outline ideas from his just-published book, Tonality: An Owner’s Manual and explain how to draw on them for composition, algorithmic composition, improvisation and analysis. These concepts include new theories on chordal inversion, motives and sequences, as well as new representations of musical structure that apply voice-leading geometry in recursive harmonic hierarchies. They make it possible to generalise initial tonal procedures to any chord-and-scale environment (including microtonal environments); this means that we can adapt basic tonal strategies to atonal and post-tonal worlds, and to imagine new forms of tonality. All these ideas are embodied in a musical programming language called ‘Arca’, which can be used for both analysis and composition.