ABSTRACT
Music theory has by now attained a development in which the use of mathematics to model music, and in particular number to model intervals, should not be problematic for anyone. Music theorists should allow themselves the freedom taken by physicists and computer scientists to express formal ideas in less than fully formal form without having their credentials impeached. There are many styles and degrees of formal expression. Michael Kassler's pioneering work in music theory reflects the style and concerns of his teacher, the logician Alonzo Church, in an interesting way: rather than use the kind of predicate calculus Church developed directly, Kassler constructed logistic systems in a way analogous to the way such a system of predicate calculus might be constructed. Some theories, which may, for example, provide only for the identification of a vocabulary in the music being modeled, ensure that utterances within them be relatively poverty-stricken.
