Rating: 
Summary: Very Objective and Approachable Writing Style
Review: Sorry, I beg to differ with both "fatuous" and "childish and absurd". As an aspiring composer who is not a formally trained instrumentalist, and is not formally trained, but self-taught, in music theory, this book is FAR more objective than Perle's (I didn't even finish reading Perle's, the writing style was so opaque), and doesn't assume either the ability to read music or an affinity for Schoenberg, Berg and/or Webern. Plus the writing style is way more transparent. Perle's book is mostly a musicological piece, not an objective assessment of available musical materials.
Rating: 
Summary: pass
Review: The author's method of "revealing...deeper organizational characteristics" is to arbitrarily circle arbitrary sets of notes, assign them meaningless names like "4-17", and make trivial assertions about the integers from zero to eleven.
Rating:
Summary: Best Alternative Scale Handbook?
Review: The Forte pitch class set table is still the most highly concentrated form of objective information on all possible structurally distinct 12TET scales that exists.The text of the book just gives the logic behind the table. Whether or not pitch class set theory is a viable way to analyze "dead" (already finished) compositions is irrelevant, since it's painfully obvious that the most beautiful music surely hasn't been written yet! :) Perle's books are inscrutible examples of Schoenbergian cultist/apologist propoganda/navel-gazing. I haven't read Pentatonic Scales for the Jazz-Rock Keyboardist yet, but judging from my previous experiences with "musicians", I'd be willing to bet that it doesn't include all 38 possible structurally distinct 5-tone scales! :)
Rating: 
Summary: The beginning of 30 years of critical music theory.
Review: There are plenty of grievances that one can lodge against pitch-class set theory as an analytic method; especially in this earliest of formulations of that theory. The fact remains, however, that thirty years of critical music theory work by many important scholars trace their lineage from this book and cite it as a standard reference. It cannot be easily dismissed as many reviewers are inclinded to do. The weakest aspect of this book is not how mathematically unsound the theory may be. (In comparison, for example, to "real" mathematical set theory...it is not a mathematical
text book and the math that is used is adapted to its purpose, which is musical analysis.) This is an old and tired complaint which is quite beside the point. The weakness of this book lies in the complete absence of a reasonable and contextual basis for making decisions about segmentation. The analysis which is presented in this book is often less than palpable because of the convenience of the segmentation; the basis of such segments seems to often be that "they work" rather than that they reveal anything especially cogent about the music being analysed. That hardly makes a compelling reason to dismiss the entire toolbox that Forte begins to build in this book however. What it does mean is that the techniques of applying this "theory" were in need of considerable refinement. There is an enormous body of analytical literature that does just that. If you are interested in that body of literature, you would do well to study this book carefully to understand the origins (and pitfalls) of pitch-class set analysis as it was first formulated. The more difficult issues that Forte begins to try to tackle are still the central issues of PC-set theory today: similarity and transformation of set types into one another, membership of subsets into larger harmonic units etc. We should not be surprised that the inital pioneering work in this area required further refinement. The book remains significant to music theorists for a variety of reasons not least of which is its historical precedence. Rameau's "traite" remains an important music theoretical text too, but few people think about harmony in exactly the same way that Rameau presents it.
Rating: 
Summary: Not the best but...
Review: While many of those who have read this book have come down upon it rather harshly, it was a valuable book. Allen Forte was really one of the pioneers in atonal theory insofar as attempting to conceptualize the mathematics behind it. While this book has many obvious flaws, we must realize that it was published thirty years ago. At the time it was written it probably made sense to the author, anyway to analyze in such a fashion. So where does that leave us on the issue of purchasing this book? As a historical study of why everybody has been groomed to use this method, this book is invaluable. How else can we understand what many believe to be the truth? If one wants to truly understand the concept of atonal music, however, this book is not a good choice. This book should be viewed in much the same light as the sun orbiting the earth. Sound, logical thought, that when inspected more closely was found to be completely off base. We needed this book to show us what not to do. Let's thank its author for opening up the subject in the first place.
Rating:
Summary: childish and absurd
Review: You'll learn nothing about atonality here. Read George Perle's "Serial Composition and Atonality" instead. I also recommend "Pentatonic Scales for the Jazz-Rock Keyboardist" by Jeff Burns.
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