[zozbot234]

Thing is, NR theory is almost as far from fundamentals as you can get; loosely speaking, it's a description of how very "far" modulations between triads (and to some extent, scales/keys) can nonetheless be made to work. It's describing a "trick", so to speak. Tymoczko's additions make the approach somewhat more useful, but it's still nowhere near the actual fundamentals of how music is understood in general (which is what one would expect "theory" to be about).

[a_lieb]

Huh, maybe his intro-level materials are far different, then. I'm not going to die on the hill that there's any connection; I don't even know whether he claims there is. But it at least seems that this specific stuff (at least in the early chapters I've read) is both more fundamental and more grounded in math (very basic math in this case) than the other intro theory stuff I've seen.