The following paper will be a good starting point if by modern mathematical point of view you take in consideration topology and group theory, where it discusses how Beethoven's Ninth Symphony makes a torus and "chord progression" is a path on it: Music and Mathematics by Thomas M. Fiore.

Edit: Since the term modern is so broad with no specific field specified, you may also be interested in use of stochastic approaches in algorithmic composition as used by Xenakis:

Xenakis used the computer's high-speed computations to calculate various probability theories to aid in compositions like Atrées (1962) and Morsima-Amorsima (1962). The program would "deduce" a score from a "list of note densities and probabilistic weights supplied by the programmer, leaving specific decisions to a random number generator" (Alpern, 1995). "Stochastic" is a term from mathematics which designates such a process, "in which a sequence of values is drawn from a corresponding sequence of jointly distributed random variables" (Webster's dictionary). As in the previous example of the Illiac Suite, these scores were performed by live performers on traditional instruments.

The following paper will be a good starting point if by modern mathematical point of view you take in consideration topology and group theory, where it discusses how Beethoven's Ninth Symphony makes a torus and "chord progression" is a path on it: Music and Mathematics by Thomas M. Fiore.