Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems
This page is a discussion of Fred Lerdahl's article "Cognitive Constraints on
Compositional Systems" published in the Contemporary Music Review,
1992, vol. 6. (Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH)
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In the article, Lerdahl explores the relationship between composing and listening.
He begins with the stated problem:
Boulez's Le Marteau sans Maitre was widely hailed as a masterpiece of postwar
serialism. Yet nobody could figure out, much less hear, how the piece was serial. (p. 97)
In order to account for what Lerdahl sees as "a huge gap between compositional system
and cognized result", he proposes a simplified model of the entire musical process.
Very briefly, he describes a Compositional Grammar as the
rules by which a composer composes. The composed "sequence of events"(i.e. the
Music) is then interpreted or parsed by the Listening
grammar (37K gif file). This listening grammar is the model
that Lerdahl and Jackendoff proposed in their work on music cognition,
A Generative Theory of Tonal Music.
The Problem ...
... in the case of Le Marteau (according to Lerdahl) is that there is no
feedback from the listening grammar to the compositional grammar. SO, Lerdahl
began considering models for composition that take into account how scholars
believe people listen to music.
Info, Corrections and Feedback are welcomed!
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