From prehistoric bone flutes to pipe organs to digital synthesizers, instruments have been important to musical cultures around the world. Yet, how do instruments affect musical organization? And how might they influence players' bodies and minds?
Music at Hand explores these questions with a distinctive blend of music theory, psychology, and philosophy. Practicing an instrument, of course, builds bodily habits and skills. But it also develops connections between auditory and motor regions in a player's brain. These multi-sensory links are grounded in particular instrumental...

In recent years, music theorists have been increasingly eager to incorporate findings from the science of human cognition and linguistics into their methodology. In the culmination of a vast body of research undertaken since his influential and award-winning Conceptualizing Music (OUP 2002), Lawrence M. Zbikowski puts forward Foundations of Musical Grammar, an ambitious and broadly encompassing account on the foundations of musical grammar based on our current understanding of human cognitive capacities.

Musical grammar is conceived of as a species of construction...

Organized Time is the first attempt to unite theories of harmony, rhythm, and form under a common idea of structured time. This is a major advance in the field of music theory, leading to new theoretical approaches to topics such as closure, hypermeter, and formal function.

This encyclopaedic book proposes a sweeping reformulation of the basic concepts of Western music theory, revealing simple structures underlying a wide range of practices from the Renaissance to contemporary pop. Its core innovation is a collection of simple geometrical models describing the implicit knowledge governing a broad range of music-making, much as the theory of grammar describes principles that tacitly guide our speaking and writing. Each of its central chapters re-examines a basic music-theoretical concept such as voice leading, repetition, nonharmonic tones, the origins of tonal...