Leonard Gilbert Ratner (July 30, 1916 – September 2, 2011) was an American musicologist and Professor of Musicology atStanford University. He was a specialist in the style of theClassical period and is best known as a developer of the concept oftopic theory (seemusic semiology).^[1][2]

Ratner was born inMinneapolis,Minnesota. He studied the violin and viola, as well as composition withFrederick Jacobi,Arnold Schoenberg,Ernest Bloch, andArthur Bliss. UnderManfred Bukofzer, he received a Ph.D. in musicology from theUniversity of California at Berkeley, the first such degree to be given by that university.^[3]

In 1947, he joined the newly formed Department of Music atStanford University, and continued there until his retirement in 1984, composing, teaching, and conducting research on music theory. He composed a chamber opera, The Necklace, and several chamber works. He taught composition and theory to advanced students and coached chamber music; he also taught elementary music appreciation courses for undergraduates, Stanford alumni, and the general public. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (1962) and elected as a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998.

His research was devoted to emphasizing "sonata form's harmonic underpinnings as an antidote to the thematic perspective"^[3] and developing a theory of musical period and form.

• Music: The Listener's Art NY: McGraw-Hill. 1st ed. 1957; 2nd. ed 196; 3rd ed. 1977
• Harmony, Structure, and Style NY: McGraw-Hill, 1962
• Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style NY: Schrimer, 1980
  • Review by Jane Stevens,Journal of Music Theory 27 (1983)
• The Musical Experience: Sound, Movement, and Arrival NY:Freeman, 1983
• 'Romantic Music: Sound, and Syntax NY: Schrimer, 1992
• the Beethoven String Quartets: Compositional Strategies and Rhetoric Stanford: Stanford Bookstore, 1995

• "Harmonic aspects of Classic Form"Journal of the American Musicological Society 2 (3), Autumn, 1949 p.159-68
• "Eighteenth-Century Theories of Musical Period Structure"Musical Quarterly 42(4) Oct. 1956 p 439–454
• "On the nature and value of theoretical training" ("A Forum: Music theory for the Layman")Journal of Music Theory 3 (1959) 58–69
• "Approaches to Musical Historiography of the Eighteenth Century"Current Musicology 9 (1969) 154–57
• "Key Definition: A structural problem in Beethoven's Music"Journal of the American Musicological Society, 23(3) Autumn, 1970 472–83
• "Texture: A Rhetorical element in Beethoven's Quartets"Israel Studies in Musicology 2 (1980) p. 51-62
• "Topical content in Mozart's Keyboard Sonatas"Early Music' 19 (4) (1991) 615–19
• "'Mozart's Parting Gifts"Journal of Musicology 18(1) Winter, 2001, 189–211

• "Development" and "Sonata Form" inHarvard Dictionary of Music, 2nd ed., 1969.
• "Koch, Heinrich Cristoph" "Period" and "Riepel, Joseph" inNew Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 1980

• 1916 births
• 2011 deaths
• People from Minneapolis
• Pupils of Ernest Bloch
• Pupils of Arnold Schoenberg
• University of California, Berkeley alumni
• Stanford University faculty
• American musicologists
• Beethoven scholars
• Haydn scholars
• Mozart scholars
• Schubert scholars

• Articles with hCards