Klarinet Archive - Posting 000017.txt from 2001/11

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: [kl] Jourdain and Jackendoff
Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2001 13:29:51 -0500

On Wed, 31 Oct 2001 16:26:00 -0600, sjh@-----.edu said:

> > Tony Pay writes:
> >
> > > My point would only be that Dan and his (fictional?) opponent just
> > > haven't between them come up with a sufficiently rich theory of
> > > how music works. That's not surprising, because *no-one* has come
> > > up with much of a theory about that.
> >
> > Stan Geidel writes:
> >
> > For a fascinating discourse on how music works and why we respond to
> > it as we do, see: Music, the Brain & Ecstasy : How Music Captures
> > Our Imagination, by Robert Jourdain.

> I suggest _A Generative Theory of Tonal Music_ by Fred Lerdahl and Ray
> Jackendoff, which attempts to deal with the same topics but filtered
> through Schenkerian theory, psychology, and linguistics.

I haven't read Jourdain, which I'll try to rectify; but it seems to be
necessary to import it to the UK at some expense.

Lerdahl and Jackendoff GTTM I never quite got through in its entirety,
but I've read the shortened synopsis in Jackendoff's 'Consciousness and
the Computational Mind', chapter 11 (Levels of Musical Structure) and
its slight extension in his 'Languages of the Mind', chapter 7 (Musical
Parsing and Musical Affect). These are to be recommended to anyone not
feeling up to GTTM itself.

When I wrote, above, "a sufficiently rich theory of how music works", I
was thinking about the bit to do with why we like it, and I suppose
that's what Jourdain would mostly be talking about. GTTM and Jackendoff
seem to me to contribute very substantially, mainly to the analytical
side; but there's a wonderful bit on affect in the references by
Jackendoff himself, about why we can still be 'surprised' and delighted
by the good bits in pieces we already know. He also hints at a level of
'body representation' in the first reference, as pointing towards why
music engages with our emotions, and he has something to say about why
connections between analysis and affect are difficult to make:

"One may still be skeptical [about whether the linguistic approach of
GTTM bites], in that musical responses are somehow felt as more direct,
more primal, than linguistic or visual responses. The reason for this,
I think, is that musical representations do not lead ultimately to the
construction of conceptual structures. Since it is the presence of
conceptual structures that makes verbalization possible, the musical
response in large part simply cannot be verbalized. Having less verbal
access to it and to the steps in its derivation, we find it less
describable yet phenomenologically more immediate and intuitive.

"In turn, this difference between musical and linguistic experience
tends to invoke certain all-too-common prejudices. The ability to
verbalize and explain an experience is often taken as a necessary
condition for accepting it as rational or even real. Whatever cannot be
verbalized, especially if it involves emotion, is mysterious,
irrational, threatening, and perhaps does not exist. Or, to take the
opposite side of the dialectic, it is mysterious, wonderful,
holistic, sacred, and what makes us humans instead of machines.
Whichever side we fall on, such a distinction does not encourage
scientific investigation of the musical response." ('Consciousness &
the Computational Mind', ch. 11.)

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE GMN artist: http://www.gmn.com
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... Do I understand English? No, not fully.

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