Fred Lerdahl

How Linguistics and Mathematics Have Influenced My Music

Among Fred Lerdahl's many honors are the Koussevitzky Composition Prize (1966), the Composer Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1971, 1988), the Guggenheim Fellowship (1974-75), the Naumburg Recording Award (1977), and the Martha Baird Rockefeller Recording Award (1982). He has also received the Creative Arts Award from the Michigan Council for the Arts (1989), a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1991) and a research fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1993-94). He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music (2001) and earned the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Special Recognition Award (2002). He has received annual ASCAP awards since 1984.  His books on music and composition include  are A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, co-written with linguist Ray Jackendoff (1983, second edition, 1996, MIT Press) and Tonal Pitch Space (2001, Oxford University Press). In addition, he has written numerous articles about computer-assisted composition, music cognition and other topics for leading publications and has been a consulting editor to Music Perception since 1983 and to Musicae Scientiae since 1999. He was the American co-editor of Contemporary Music Review from 1986-2004.  He currently teaches at Columbia University, where he has been the Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition since 1994 and co-directed the Computer Music Center from 1994-98.

Schedule of Events for the Maurice Abravanel Visiting Distinguished Composers Series