Berry was educated at the University of Southern California (BMus 1949, PhD 1956), where he studied with Halsey Stevens.
His composition Spoon River, on texts by Edgar Lee Masters (1952), won him national recognition.
The three chapters of Structural Functions in Music thus are titled "Tonality," "Texture," and "Rhythm and Meter."
"[4] The clearest and most concise presentation of Berry's theoretical ideas is the article "Metric and Rhythmic Articulation in Music.
As Berry puts it, "In thus suggesting that there are many interacting or cohering streams of rhythm in any individual structure, one acknowledges as well some ultimate rhythmic composite of all events.