Allen Forte

Forte was born in Portland, Oregon. At the age of ten he appeared "on a [local] radio show as a solo pianist among a bevy of similarly youthful performers," where he played the music of Cole Porter and others. He was in the US Navy and served in the Pacific Theatre toward the end of World War II.

Afterwards, he relocated to New York City to study music at Columbia University where he received his bachelor's and master's degrees. There, he studied composition with Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky, although his main interests were forming around music theory and analysis.

Academic career

In the late 1950s, Forte taught music at various New York institutions: Columbia University Teachers College, Manhattan School of Music, and Mannes College of Music. In fall 1959 he began his long-term appointment at Yale, where he eventually became the Battell Professor of Music (retiring in 2003). He was influential there as both scholar and teacher, and in the latter capacity served as adviser to seventy-two Ph.D. dissertations completed between 1968 and 2002. (Yale did not offer a Ph.D. in theory for the first several years Forte was there.) A list of all his advisees and their dissertation titles appears in David Carson Berry, "The Twin Legacies of a Scholar-Teacher: The Publications and Dissertation Advisees of Allen Forte," Gamut 2/1 (2009), 197-222. The list is ordered chronologically by submission, and each advisee is given an "FA" number to denote his or her ordering among the advisees. ("FA" stands for "Forte Advisee," and is also a retrograde of Allen Forte's initials.)

Forte taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1967 to 1968 on integrating music theory with computer systems. He was also a visiting music professor at Harvard University in 2008.

Forte was married to Herta Lynd Waitzfelder Sharland (1915–2000), and later to the French-born pianist Madeleine (Hsu) Forte, emerita professor of piano at Boise State University.