The musical score is the basis for all analyses in generative music theory because music notation provides a convenient objectification of the ‘musical surface.’ This idea of
taking the ‘musical surface’ as given assumes that the appropriate object of inquiry is
‘musical competence,’ or the knowledge of music that exists in the mind of the listener.
Generativists argue that direct evidence of musical behavior (from actual performances)
is misleading for music cognition research because it includes a great deal that is simply accidental and superfluous. I will argue precisely the opposite: that in studying the production and perception of song sounds we must attend to details of performance that direct attention to relevant communicative features. These features are often eliminated from notated transcriptions because they do not conform to conventional categories of staff notation, or they are included as ornamental features (like glissandi, for instance) that are not categorical in their own right.
The score-based paradigm is not unique to generative music theory. It is indicative of a wider practice in formalist music theory, including the Schenkerian framework upon which much of GTTM is based. Lerdahl and Jackendoff claim that, “the domain of formal analysis lends itself best to exploring the full richness and complexity of musical
understanding.”65 But by ‘musical understanding’ they mean of course ‘musical
competence.’ The ‘object’ of this analysis should be the “musical surface: the array of
simultaneous and sequential sounds with pitch, timbre, intensity, and duration.”66 The musical score is the visual representation of this surface and it is Western tonal music
(classic and popular) that is used almost exclusively for analysis of this sort.67 Because
the notational features of Western tonal music are both cognitive and descriptive they provide a robust system for the analysis of several parameters, especially pitch and duration. Yet despite these advantages, there are also significant drawbacks to using the musical score. We need to recognize that the discrete categories of staff notation are
culture-specific tools that are not equivalent to properties of mind. 68 The categories and
functions delineated by staff notation map to very few other cultures. In many cases they exclude important categories of pitch structure, such as the contours and glides that I describe in Chapter 4 on Zulu song prosody. In sum, a cognitive music theory that is dependent on the categories and relations of staff notation cannot account for many important features of Western and non-Western musics alike. Generative theorists tend to
66 Ibid, 37. “Beyond the musical surface, structure is built out of the confluence of two independent
hierarchical dimensions of organization: rhythm and pitch. In turn, rhythmic organization is the product of two independent hierarchical structures, grouping and meter. The relative independence of rhythmic and pitch structures is indicated by the possibility of dissociating them. […] each of these components has its own characteristic units and combinatorial principles” (Ibid, 37).
67 It is important to recognize that important details of musical performance are lost in staff notation
whether or not the music notated is Western. However, the ‘surplus’ of non-discrete information is greater for many non-Western music cultures that do not conform to the categories it codifies. See: Lerdahl and Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music; Lerdahl, Tonal Pitch Space; Jackendoff and Lerdahl, “The Capacity for Music: What Is It, And What’s Special About It?”
68 “[We] lose sight of the need for explanation when phenomena are too familiar and ‘obvious.’ We tend
too easily to assume that explanations must be transparent and close to the surface. The greatest defect of classical philosophy of mind, both rationalist and empiricist, seems to me to be its unquestioned assumption that the properties and content of the mind are accessible to introspection.” Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind, Third Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 22.
overlook these deficiencies by focusing on a very limited repertoire and by hypothesizing
an innate capacity.69
This ethnocentrism is not unique to GTTM. The grammar of Western common practice tonal music has been used as the basis for many experimental studies. Carol Krumhansl’s
influential Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch (2001), for instance, extrapolates on
the insights of cognitive music theorists who also use this repertory almost exclusively.70
Discrete and absolute pitch categories and intervallic structures are the basis for many of her experiments, including her diagnostic probe tone tests. David Huron has based several experiments on the notated features of Western tonal music as well as the contrapuntal elements of its grammar. It is difficult to see how the results of these studies, insightful though they are, can usefully be generalized as the basis for tonality across
cultures.71 Huron himself points to such limitations with the use of notated structures:
In music theory, naïve realism is evident in two assumptions: that the structures we see in the notated music are the ones we experience, and that the structures we experience can be seen in the notation. Those who aim to describe the music as it is can do so only by abandoning the path of naïve realism. Sophisticated realism begins by acknowledging the separation between the
69 “The grammar that music theory teaches is unavoidably tied to the repertoire to which it refers, and just
how this is generalized to apply to other repertoires is not immediately apparent.” Lawrence Zbikowski,
Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive structure, theory and analysis, AMS Studies in Music (New York: Oxford, 2003): ix.
70 Carol Krumhansl, Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch, Second Edition (New York: Oxford, 2001). 71 David Huron, “Interval-class content in equally-tempered pitch-class sets: Common scales exhibit
optimum tonal consonance,” Music Perception 11, no. 3 (1994): 289-305; David Huron, “Tone and voice: A derivation of voice-leading from perceptual principles,” Music Perception 19, no. 1 (2001): 1-64.
subjective and objective worlds. Sophisticated realism is possible only by making use of empirical methods of observation.72
We should not assume that cognitive functions are embodied in notational conventions, nor should we assume that the “properties and content of mind are open to introspection.” We need to recognize that notation determines not only the performance and composition
of music, but also its analysis. The idea that notation is music remains a powerful
ideology in cognitive music theory. It is a problem that exists on several levels. First, the acoustic data of the auditory signal (including both song and speech) are not easily reduced to the categories of staff notation and cannot be interpreted in a simplistic way as indicative of competence. A ‘musical surface’ of the sort envisaged by Jackendoff and Lerdahl misses out on gradient elements of pitch patterning that cannot be rendered in
staff notation. Notation is a script for idealized performances, not a transcript of the
processes engendered by actual performances. It provides only indirect evidence of select
processes. Notation is a tool that mediates our experience of sound and should not be mistaken for the facts of production and perception. Again, it is in no sense an accurate symbolic rendering of the acoustic signal, nor the processes that engender it.