Partitional Harmony: The Partitioning of Pitch Spaces

Abstract

In this preliminary work, we seek to present a brief historical review of the use of partitions in music, to provide a concise introduction to the theory of partitions, and lastly, through an extensive bibliographic revision and a thoughtful theoretical reflection, to lay the foundations of what we call partitional harmony - a comprehensive harmonic conception which relates the theory of partitions to several fields of post-tonal music theory. At the end, some basic operations (pitch, transposition, inversion, and multiplication) are defined and an illustrative musical application is provided, followed by our research prospects.