The Syntax of Tonal Music

UMD Syntax Lunch Oct. 3, 2006

Outline of this talk

  

Background Introduction to musical phenomena Motivating and characterizing the syntactic nature of music

Notational evidence Experimental evidence Theories of Heinrich Schenker Theories of Lehrdal & Jackendoff

Comparison with linguistic theories

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The mental representation of music



What happens when we listen to music?

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Tonal music
  

European classical music, 1600-1900 Most modern popular music Highly developed tradition

Lots of materials
    

Bach Beethoven Brahms Berlin (Irving) Britney (Spears)

Standard notation

 

Natural system Music in a key (Forte & Gilbert 1982)

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Non-tonal music


Atonalism

Developed in Vienna, early 20th century Very short, atmospheric pieces 12-tone composition (Serialism) developed to give structure to the pieces


Schnberg, W ebern, Berg Very small number of compositional decisions made, then the piece writes itself Little perceptual awareness of the organization

Compositions highly structured

 

Augenmusik

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Other music


Music from other cultures

Divisions of the octave into larger and smaller numbers of pitch classes The role of harmony generally far less than in (Western) tonal music Natural systems

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Musical primitives: pitch

   

Octaves group pitches into equivalence classes Each octave subdivided into 12 pitch classes

A, A# = B , B, C, C# = D , D, D# = E , E, F, F# = G , G, G# = A Octaves are exact, however Two variants Mixture of whole steps (-) and half steps (.) Major: - - - . - - - . Minor: - - . - - . - - // - - . - - - - .
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Exact tuning of intervals may vary

Diatonic scales

Musical primitives: overtones

 

Any signal can is equivalent to the sum of sine waves with frequencies related to each other in simple whole-number ratios These simple ratios turn out to be musically significant

Observed since Pythagoras Same intervals in many musical cultures

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Musical primitives: intervals

  

Distance from one pitch to another May be absolute

Number of half-steps Minor third (m3), major third (M3), perfect fourth (P4), diminished fourth (d4), perfect fifth (P5) Multiple interpretations of one interval (M3 and d4 both have the same number of half steps)
 

May be tonal, diatonic interval

Different spellings based on different tonal contexts One is consonant and the other is dissonant 10/3/2006 Syntax of tonal music

Musical primitives: harmony

  

Synchronic look at musical context Multiple tones sounding simultaneously Often associated with specific expectation (ie, functions)

Tonic, dominant, subdominant, submediant (=relative minor)

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Musical primitives: harmony



Conventionally notated with Roman numerals

I = tonic, IV = subdominant, V = dominant Number based on the root of the chord Lowercase = minor, Uppercase = major

 

Associated with specific harmonic expectations Tonic example:

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Musical primitives: harmony



Dominant example:

Functional harmony

Tonic (I) goal, stability, complete Dominant (V, V7) incomplete, expectation for contination

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Harmony is more abstract than chords!

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Musical primitives: voice leading

 

Diachronic look at musical context W here do the individual pitches lead as the music moves from one moment to the next? Complex (perceptual/formal) rules for determining when an interval will be perceived harmonically or as voice movement
?

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Musical primitives: phrases

 

Music groups into phrases, roughly melodic Traditional classical melodies have two parts:

Antecedent (ending on V) Consequent (ending on I)

Example: Mozart, Sonata in A major, K. 331, I

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Understanding music


Context

Depending on the surrounding music, a particular interval, pitch, or harmony can have vastly different function

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Evidence for hierarchy in music

What notation tells us about music

  

History of notation is as long and varied as the history of music Constants: pitch (vertical, log scale), duration in time (horizontal, linear) Some indications of hierarchy in notational conventions

Ornaments as diacritics

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Notational conventions


Ornaments as diacritics

Aria from the J.S. Bach Goldberg Variations (BW V 988)

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Notional conventions
 

Hierarchically minor notes notated as grace notes Grace (small) notes should be played with equal length as the notes they are attached to!

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Their smallness indicates their structural value.

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Notational conventions


Figured bass structurally unimportant notes were not even written!

Usually, a melody given, often used in accompaniment

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Notational conventions


Guitar tablature

Indicates chords, inversions Says nothing about

 

Rhythm Arpeggiation pattern to

Extremely common in jazz, pop music

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Schenkerian Analysis

An impossibly brief introduction

Heinrich Schenker
  

1868-1935 Viennese music theorist Reactionary against post-tonal music (ie, music that violated traditional musical syntax for artistic effect) Sought to explicate the genius of great music, especial German music
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Schenkerian Analysis


First non-prescriptive theory of music with a perceptual angle

Previous work on music perception

 

Pythagoras (582-507 BCE) Helmholtz (1821-1894)

Other analytic methods in music focused on surface motivic relationships

Major innovation: hierarchical organization

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Schenkerian Analysis: the Ursatz



Ursatz = Fundamental structure

3 forms


All tonal music is really just one of three melodies.

Fundamental structure is an elaboration of tonal relationships:

 

Harmonic Voice-leading

Tonal relations are not temporal (ie, not rhythmic and not metrical)

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The Ursatz
Central to Schnkers work is the notion that the tonic triad, an image of the overtone series generated by the tonic note, functions as a matrix As Lerdahl & Jackendoff write the tonic is in some sense implicit in every moment of the piece - Schachter 1999

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Schenkerian analysis


Three layers
  

Foreground (surface) Middleground Background (fundamental structure) Neighbor note Passing tone Arpeggiation Register transfer Composing-out
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Series of transformations or prolongations

    

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Prolongation examples


Take a basic melody

Certain structure-preserving transformations may be applied:

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Schenkerian analysis


Goal of Schenkerian analysis: recover underlying structure

Explain surface harmonic, voice-leading phenomena (and problems) in terms of deeper structure Several levels of abstraction present in one graph

Analyses are graphical

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Schenkerian analysis: example

 

J.S. Bach Ich bins, ich sollte ben from the Matthus-Passion (BWV 244) This middle-ground graph shows the relationship of the surface structure to the fundamental structure
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Schenkerian analysis: example

Hear foreground

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Schenkerian analysis: example

Hear middleground

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Schenkerian analysis: example

Hear background

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Lerdahl & Jackendoff: A Generative Theory for Tonal Music



1973 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard

Leonard Bernstein asks for a musical grammar to explain the human capacity for music the same as Chomskys approach to linguistic theory had done for language

1983 A Generative Theory for Tonal Music

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L&J: GTTM


Focus on hierarchical dimensions of music

Grouping structure


Break music in motives, phrases, sections Events in music occur at regular (isochronous) intervals Hierarchy of strong and weak beats at various levels of abstraction Given metrical and grouping structure assign pitches a hierarchy of structural importance Assign pitches a hierarchy based on harmonic and melodic (voiceleading) tension (closest aspect to Schenkerian analysis)

Metrical structure
 

Time-span reduction


Prolongational reduction


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Music theory vs. linguistic theory



Three rule types in GTTM

W ell-formedness rules


Specify possible SDs Fudge the strict hierarchical organization a bit Given a set of SDs, which ones will be preferred?

Transformational rules


Preference rules


 

The first two establish the SDs for a segment of music What about preference rules?
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Preference rules
   

Structural descriptions not sufficient Ranking various structural descriptions according to coherence is essential Grammaticality far less important for music Almost any passage of music is vastly ambiguous (ie, many possible SDs). Not seemingly the case with language. According to L&J: musical grammar must be able to express preference rules among interpretations (absent from generative theories of language)
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Reduction hypothesis
 

One musical passage can be hear as an elaboration (or variation) of other passages In some cases, passages may be heard as elaborations of an abstract structure that is never overtly stated

Bach Goldberg Variations (BW V 988)

 

Aria + 30 variations W hy not 31 separate pieces?

Listeners have intuitive understanding of relative structural importance of different pitches

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Reduction hypothesis


Basic version

The listener attempts to organize all pitch-events of a piece into a single coherent structure, such that they are heard in a hierarchy of relative importance. Pitch-events are heard in a strict hierarchy (partial overlaps are forbidden). Structurally less important events are not heard simply as insertions, but in a specified relationship to surrounding more important events.
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Strong version

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Prolongational rules


Tension and relaxation as fundamental processes of musical primitives of harmonic/melodic progress

t r

t r

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Prolongational rules: tree notation

Progression
x y x y

Strong prolongation
x y x y

Weak prolongation
x t y x r y

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Prolongational rules


Example

t r 

Note: strict hierarchy forbids the passing tone from simultaneously prolonging the first and third notes, it must be dominated by one or the other!
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Prolongation and reduction

 

All large-scale strong prolongations are right branching. All large-scale weak prolongations are left branching (moving from less consonant to more consonant)

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Online processing studies

Mireille Besson, Frdrique Fata. 1995. An EventRelated Potential (ERP) Study of Musical Expectancy : Comparison of Musicians With Nonmusicians J. Exp. Psych: HPP. Maess, B., S. Koelsch, T. Gunter, A. Friederici. 2001. Musical syntax is processed in Brocas area: an MEG study Nature Neuroscience.

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Maess, et al. 2001

a)

unaltered chord progression Out-of-key chord (Neopolitan 6th) at 3rd position Neopolitan at 5th position
*

a)

a)

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Maess, et al. 2001

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Maess, et al. 2001



The ability to perceive distances between chords (and keys, respectively) and to expect certain harmonies (and harmonic functions) to a higher or lower degree can only rely on a representation of the principles of harmonic relatedness described by music theory. These principles, or rules, were reflected in the harmonic expectancies of listeners and may be interpreted as musical syntax. The present results indicate that Brocas area and its righthemispheric homologue might also be involved in the processing of musical syntax, suggesting that these brain areas process considerably less domain-specific syntactic information than previously believed.

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Interpreting the results



Origins of syntactic representations

Statistical distributions in input?



Possible, but unlikely given rampant experimentation with alternative compositional formalisms Three different common continuations for the leading tone, each with very different expectations satisfied

The leading tone (7) is followed conventionally by the tonic (1) In compound melody contexts (extremely common), it may be also followed by the a tone of the dominant chord (2, 4, or 5) It may moved down to the submediant (6)

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Innateness of musical syntax



Universals in music

Isochronous organization extremely common Stresses tend to be heard as strong beats (stresses never are used to suggest weak beats, except to create a marked context) Sensitivity to the overtone series Tendency to understand music as a hierarchically organized (events are subject to prolongation) is too abstract to be observable Universals

Innateness

Good example of learning without negative evidence: what could it possibly be? (No, Georgie, you didnt hear that as a consonant passing tone!)
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What can linguists take home?



Major innovation of L&J: preference rules

Similar in structure to OT constraints Find minimal cost Used successfully in subsequent cognitive theories of music, e.g. Temperley (2001) Unclear implementation/learnability
 

Computational approaches use dynamic programming Temperley (2001) argues that dynamic programming provides an elegant way of describing revision phenomena, but does not go into any detail
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What can linguists take home?



Preference rules and language (L&J)

Quantifier scope resolution Pragmatics



Gricean implicature encoded as preference rules

Musical acquisition, unlike language acquisition fails (amusia, arhythmia)

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Music vs. minimalist syntax



Conspicuous lack of displacement phenomena

Or is there?
 

Musical statement as a kind of derivation unfolded in time Unstable features implicit in initial material checked during the course of the derivation (3 2 1)

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Music vs. minimalist syntax

 

What are the interfaces where a derivation can crash? Primitive operations

Merge Label/project Differences



The process of merging and label seems to be interpreted always as one of dominance/subordination

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University of Maryland Sinfonietta Sunday, October 15, 7:30pm Dekelboum Concert Hall, Clarice Smith Center
Mozart, Symphony No. 35 in D major Haffner W agner, Siegfried Idyll Beethoven, Piano Concerto No. 5 Emperor with Santiago Rodriguez, piano
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References
   

Lehrdal & Jackendoff. 1983. A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. MIT Press. Forte & Gilbert. 1982. Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis. W. W. Norton & Company. Schachter, C. 1999. Unfoldings: Essays in Schenkerian Analysis Temperley, D. 2001. The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures. MIT Press.

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