A Classic Turn of Phrase: Music and the Psychology of Convention (Studies in the Criticism and Theory of Music)

Once, in a general discussion of the problems of musical research, a friend mentioned the maxim that "when your only tool is a hammer, all your problems look like nails." Though I found this witty, I did not at first see its relevance to my own concerns with the analysis of classical music. After all, it seemed self-evident that the salient problem of musical analysis was to reduce the surface complexities of actual music to orderly progressions of structurally significant tones. And while skilled musical analysts might disagree over which tones were structurally significant, there was little doubt that a hierarchical system of pitch reduction was the tool to use. At about the same time, my interest in eighteenth-century musical themes and phrases had led me to consider Leonard Meyer’s ideas about archetypal musical schemata. These are normative abstractions of basic melodic, harmonic, or formal patterns so common as to constitute part of the very fabric of classical music. Meyer’s notion of normative abstractions appealed to my musical intuitions but presented a major technical obstacle to reductive analysis. Simply stated, the rather large patterns identified by Meyer are difficult if not impossible to reduce to uniform, simpler constituents. Apparently the same stumbling block had been encountered by the music theorists Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff,' who, while admitting the intuitive appeal of archetypal musical schemata, nonetheless chose to exclude them from their analytical system in order to preserve its unfettered ability to reduce any musical pattern to a smaller set of constituent tones. To turn one’s back on shared musical institutions merely for the sake of an analytical system seemed, to me at least, unjustified. What profit is there in hammering out a dogmatic analysis of a musical composition if those melodic or formal elements that we perceive to be present must be effaced in the process? Surely it is not the goal of musical analysis to be systematic at all costs. Perhaps this tool of hierarchical pitch reduction was unduly influencing the perceived agenda of musical analysis. My eventual response to the dilemma of choosing between shared musical intuitions and structural-tone reductionism can be summarized by a rewording of the above-mentioned maxim: "When you suspect that your problems may not be nails, don’t keep beating them with a hammer—find a better tool!" The study that follows is an attempt to find a better tool for understanding how knowledgeable listeners perceive many of the sublimely beautiful musical phrases of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I do not propose a universal analytical system based on a few tidy axioms and procedures. Nor do I suggest a grand concept—unity, organicism, perfection—on which to base an exegesis of all great music. My methods are far more modest. I present no more than a framework for examining the musical structures present in classical phrases. To be sure, this framework can yield a detailed and revealing analysis of musical structure, but the framework itself merely guides a simple and straightforward examination of musical patterns and their interactions. Part I: Theoretical Foundation. What Is A Schema? ; A New Look At Musical Structure ; Style Structures And Musical Archetypes ; Defining The Changing-note Archetype ; Schematic Norms And Variations -- Part Ii: Historical Survey. A Schema Across Time ; 1720-1754 : Scattered Examples ; 1755-1769 : Sharp Increases In Population And Typicality ; 1770-1779 : The Peak ; 1780-1794 : New Complications ; 1795-1900 : A Legacy -- Appendix : List Of Musical Examples Cited Or Used In The Statistical Sample. Robert O. Gjerdingen. Includes Index. Bibliography: P. [292]-294.