Jack Douthett’s letters

Abstract

This publication transcribes seven previously unpublished letters from Jack Douthett. The earliest four letters, from 1992–94, were written to John Clough, who was the Slee Professor of Music Theory at SUNY Buffalo from the early 1980s to 2001. They are hand-written, mailed by postal service, and are among the founding documents of the sub-field that emerged in the 1990s that has come to be known under the catch-all label of “neo-Riemannian theory.” The three remaining letters, word processed and circulated via email to a working group of researchers known informally as the “Buffalo group,” are from 1997 and 2000, and responded to emerging work of a remarkable cohort of PhD students then working on neo-Riemannian topics. The first three letters were the first of a flurry of eleven that were precipitated by some ideas that I sketched over lunch with John and Jack in late October 1992 at the Society for Music Theory annual meeting in Kansas City, and subsequently detailed in a written document that I mailed to them shortly thereafter.1 In that document, I defined (1) a “P relation” when two pitchclass sets are connected by single-semitonal displacement, for example {C, E, G} P {C, E, G }, (2) a “P property” for any Tn/TnI set class2 that contains P-related pairs, and (3) a “PP property” for any set class that partitions into cycles of three or more P-related pairs. These definitions, which are presented more systematically at the end of this introduction, supported my central finding: that the structures that co-anchor the European tonal system, major/minor triads and major/minor scales, together with their complements, uniquely possess the PP property (nontrivially).3 In that document, I also identified set classes with the PP property in universes with fewer than twelve elements, and advanced some theorems about the relation of the PP property to other properties and relations central to theories of atonality and diatonicism. Douthett’s first response, from 11/24/92, is primarily concerned with connections between my central finding and his research with Clough on maximally even sets (Clough and Douthett 1991). That letter is primarily algebraic, but ends with a graph-theoretic turn that is developed a few days later in the brief letter of 11/30/92, and emerges in mature form in the longer letter of 12/12/92, where the two graphs that became respectively known as “Cube Dance” and “Power Towers” are first described. These three letters, together with eight subsequent letters from the