Customer Reviews

A Generative Theory of Tonal Music

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is a turning point in XXth century music theory.It admits "surface salience" as an important musical attribute (chapter 5), distinguishing it from the "reductional importance" of events. Should we work with a double conception of structure: surface structure (focusing on surface salience) versus deep struture (focusing on reductional importance)? The investigation of surface salience leads to questions related to tension and release, an area that is still to find its best approach. What is best in the book: the ability to uncover the making of a theory; the ability to rejuvenate and integrate schenkerian ideas with a critique of Meyer's approach (rhythmic structure versus metrical structure); the linguistic/cognitive connection. What is not so good in the book: the remarks on contemporary music (with an almost fascist view of inherited abilities)

This very technical work is very interesting and uses a very valuable and relatively new approach. However it is very conservative musically, to the point of losing subjectivity. I would recommend James Tenney's writings instead. META + HODOS: A Phenomenology of 20th-Century Musical Materials and an Approach to the Study of Form (1961; Frog Peak, 1988), is available through amazon, or Hierarchical temporal gestalt perception in music : a metric space model with Larry Polansky, also printed in Soundings Vol. 13: The Music of James Tenney. Garland, Peter (Ed.) (Soundings Press, 1984) which has articles by and about Tenney, who takes a much more progressive and broad view than Lerdahl.

I bought this book for a reading group organized by linguists, and think it's very interesting. It is not an easy read though, it takes time to decipher the proposed rules and sometimes it is not clear what the consequences of adopting those rules are. I don't know how comprehensible the book is for people with little formal or linguistic background, I do think that the authors aim to separate generative linguistic theory from the general idea that underlies it, and work from the latter perspective (not the first).

This formal theory of music does a great job of handling subjective and stylistic issues with different kinds of rules. Very well though-out. I wish they'd have worked out how counterpoint fits into their structure, but otherwise a great book.

This book tried to do for tonal music what Chomsky's work did for language. That is, come up with a theory that is dominant in its field in academia, has tremendous prestige, but ends up having almost no explanatory ability for how language or music actually works in the real world. The book is tedious with only a few interesting points.

The book has been in print more than twenty years (and that amazes me), but has had almost no impact on any musician outside of a small circle of academic thinkers for whom music is more of a technical and arcane game / puzzle than an art of expression and emotion. In fact, bringing up emotion and expression will cause immediate laughter and a great many derisive comments.

Save your time and money. Whenever I am tempted to read a book like this, I realize how little time I get to play my piano. So, I go do that instead and find it a much better use of my time.