Kyle Hutchinson, visiting assistant professor of music, in discussion with Stephanie Venturino, assistant professor of music analysis and musicianship at Yale University, celebrate the release of Professor Hutchinson's new book, Processual Tonality and the Psychoacoustics of Chromatism.

And, there will be cake!

This event is free and open to the public.

Book orders can be placed through the University Bookstore.

Processual Tonality and the Psychoacoustics of Chromatism, Professor Hutchinson’s first book, is a study of chromatic harmony: though its focus is primarily on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tonal music (ca. 1860–1930), the methodologies it develops are equally applicable to other genres, including jazz, musical theater, and contemporary popular music more broadly. While the book includes a plethora of examples, its focus is primarily on the music of composers whose harmonic practices are less routinely studied—such as Alma Mahler, Richard Strauss and Florence Price—because their complex chromatic palettes more often than not appear to diverge from their antecedents.

The methodology engages the question of how to model a theory of tonal-functional relationships when the sounds heard in this music signal specific harmonic expectations conditioned by familiarity with Western tonal norms, but those expectations ultimately fail to coalesce. In other words, is it possible to circumnavigate the ways in which musical conditioning has corralled the psychoacoustic patterns involved in how we listen to, perceive, and process harmonic relationships in analytic spaces? Responding to these issues, this book develops a theory of processual tonality, recognizing that harmonic perception exists on a psychoacoustic continuum across different listening spaces. In other words, the sounds we hear one way can—through an understanding of linear musical processes—be retrospectively reheard in quantifiably different ways, a musical phenomenon that permeates late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century musical styles.