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In his 1988 review of David Lewin's Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations, Bo Alphonce suggested that Swedish function theory was already "transformational," a comment that was subsequently quoted in several neo-Riemannian texts that furthermore gave the impression that the transformational attitude was characteristic for Scandinavian function theory on whole. This article tests this claim by investigating a large corpus of Scandinavian textbooks from the 20th and 21st centuries. First, the reception history of Scandinavian function theory is outlined, revealing how theorists have influenced each other and identifying three different types of function theory-key-relational, interval-relational, and progressional theories-that became most influential in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, respectively. Then, the presence of "transformational attitudes" is discussed in a series of analytical examples from the textbook corpus. While it is found that the attitude is generally lacking in most Scandinavian theory, there are some transformational perspectives in certain publications, especially in the 1981 textbook Indføring i romantisk harmonik by Danish theorists Teresa Waskowska Larsen and Jan Maegaard. Finally, Larsen and Maegaard's function theory is reframed in a more explicitly transformational light. The result is an analytical approach that integrates chord-to-chord transformations in a functional, tonal context.
In one of the reviews that David Lewin's Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations (1987-henceforth GMIT) received shortly after its publication, a few interesting lines briefly discuss similarities between Lewin's transformational theory and Scandinavian function theory.1 The review in question is Bo Alphonce's, published in Intégral (1988). Alphonce had a Swedish background but obtained his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1977 and subsequently taught at both McGill and Yale. In his otherwise very positive review he disagrees with Lewin's assessment of Hugo Riemann's function theory: Alphonce claims that in his own understanding, informed by the Swedish theorist Sven E. Svensson, who published the first Swedishlanguage textbook on function theory in 1933 (Svensson and Moberg 1933), Riemann's "dominant" function does not only label a Klang, as Lewin suggests, but also a relation: "[I]t comprises the dual aspect of being derived from, and pointing back to, ... the tonic" (Alphonce 1988, 171). Subsequently, several canonic neo-Riemannian texts have referred to this short paragraph of Alphonce's review. For instance, in 1996 Richard Cohn wrote that "Bo Alphonce has suggested that [the transformational perspective] is already...