opening paragraph is relevant: "For an American music theorist, Guerino Mazzola’s The Topos of Music (henceforth Topos) can be a forbidding book: dense, intricately systematic, and more complex in its mathematics than the writings of Allen Forte, John Clough, or David Lewin.
And where American theorists can be somewhat apologetic in their invocations of advanced mathematics, offering simplified tutorials for untrained readers, Mazzola can seem almost aristocratic in his disdain for nonmathematicians. If you can’t learn algebraic geometry, he sometimes seems to be saying, then you have no bu…