Theories of musical syntax have rarely relied on simple music-language analogies but were rather conceived music-specifically. As in Hugo Riemann’s Musikalische Syntaxis, they often tried to systematize all feasible combinations of elementary musical compo- nents, e.g. triads or four-part chords. In contrast to these poietic accounts, the cognitive turn in music theory placed the conceptualization of a listener at the core of an understanding of musical syntax. Theories emerging from this background such as Lerdahl’s and Jackendoff’s »Generative Theory of Tonal Music«, however, are often limited by their simplistic separation of syntax and semantics and their nativist underpinnings, sometimes linked to misleading aesthetic judgements of post-tonal music.
The present essay aims to develop a perception-based, anti-essentialist theory of musical syntax, reacting to Albrecht Wellmer’s discussion of the syntax concept in music. Three aspects challenge the idea of a generalized syntax of music, in particular of post-tonal music: (1) The innovations of twentieth-century music have sensitised us to the contingency of musical progressions to the point where any two subsequent sound events can be perceived as syntactically meaningful. (2) Serial music and John Cage’s aesthetics have placed a dissolution of any preconceived kind of coherence at the centre of their attention, resulting in an emancipation of sound and musical presence from syntactic process. (3) The high degree of diversification of musical styles seems to undermine the idea of generalisable syntactic principles. In response to this bold challenge of the syntax concept, the morphosyntactic model of musical syntax discussed here elaborates ideas from Albert Bergman’s »auditory scene analysis« and traces music-syntactic experience back to elementary perception modes in everyday life, namely causal or categorical contiguity, equivalence, and similarity between sound events. These modes constantly switch between metaphorical and sensual-sonorous fields of auditory experience, a tension that is also traced in a number of musical examples. Although the three excerpts from works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Arnold Schönberg share a common contrapuntal-harmonic model or schema (the »secunda syncopata«), interactions between relationships of contiguity and similarity, and a medium-scale tonic-dominant relationship, their enactment as represented by salient »surface« events is highly idiosyncratic and essential to the experience of syntax. In turn, three examples from post- tonal music (Schönberg: Piano Piece op. 11,3, Pierre Boulez: Structures Ia, Brian Ferneyhough: Funérailles) demonstrate an increasing emancipation from tonal phrase structure and harmonic centrism, but nonetheless retain or even gain morphological profile through their reinventions of musical structure. Contour- and gestalt-based analyses make it clear that a morphosyntactically oriented perception of such works does manifoldly connect to elementary modes of everyday and tonal listening, suggesting a new model of post-tonal listening that ultimately frees itself from an author- and analysis-centred structuralist approach.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:87405 |
| Date | 12 October 2023 |
| Creators | Utz, Christian |
| Publisher | PFAU-Verlag, Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | German |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion, doc-type:bookPart, info:eu-repo/semantics/bookPart, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | 04, urn:nbn:de:bsz:14-qucosa2-854206, qucosa:85420 |
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