(p.

ix) Preface

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online

Foundations of Musical Grammar

Lawrence M. Zbikowski

Print publication date: 2017

Print ISBN-13: 9780190653637
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2017
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190653637.001.0001

(p.ix) Preface
Lawrence M. Zbikowski

Thomas Busby opened his 1818 A Grammar of Music—one of the many such volumes
produced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—with this observation:

Music is a science having sounds for its element, and teaching their due division,
succession, and combination. By the theory of Music, we are enabled to measure
the intervals between sonorous impressions; to calculate upon their effects, as
resulting from their succession and their union; and so to understand the
principles of melody and harmony, as not only to be qualified to comprehend and
appreciate the compositions of others, but to produce compositions of our own.

(Busby 1818, vii)

He then, in one long but carefully worded paragraph, surveyed the history of music
from antiquity through the end of the eighteenth century and, after a few more
preliminaries, finally turned to his main topic. “Musical Grammar,” Busby wrote,
“comprehends the knowledge necessary to the just arrangement and combination of
musical sounds, and to the proper performance of musical compositions” (Busby 1818,
1).

Busby’s perspective is hardly unique, conforming in its basic outlines with countless
musical textbooks and primers produced over the past two hundred years. The only
thing that has changed is that “musical grammar,” as a term, has fallen into disuse.
Today, were we to describe the discipline that “comprehends the knowledge necessary

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to the just arrangement and combination of musical sounds, and to the proper
performance of musical compositions,” we would simply call it “music theory.”

In this volume I aim to return to the idea of musical grammar and to revivify it by
drawing on recent research in cognitive science. Although I consider the result to fall
well within the domain of music theory, it is not a very typical theory of music. One
reason is that the understanding of what is involved with grammar that is developed
here is shaped to a considerable extent by the work of a group of linguists who, over
the past three decades, have been exploring how humans’ cognitive capacities shape
the construction of language and the way it is used to communicate meaning. The
approach they have developed has come to be known as cognitive linguistics. One of
the foundations of cognitive linguistics is the notion that the basic elements of
language consist of stored pairings of form and function. The result is what is often
called a cognitive grammar, with “grammar” here understood to combine features of
both syntax and semantics.

(p.x) Applying this notion of grammar to music has a number of interesting

consequences. Perhaps the most important is a fresh view of musical organization.
While many music theorists are more or less comfortable with the notion of musical
syntax, understanding it to be the basis for the “just arrangement and combination of
musical sounds,” the question of musical meaning remains quite open. The idea that
the basic grammatical elements of music combine features of both syntax and
semantics thus invites us to look a bit further into how musical utterances are
constructed and how they are used to communicate meaning. This idea also offers an
opportunity for a thoughtful comparison of the expressive resources offered by
language and music. That these resources are, in some measure, distinct from one
another seems evident from the different roles language and music have played in
human cultures past and present. That said, this distinction has not always been clear
in accounts of how language and music are organized to create meaningful utterances.
It is often the case, for instance, that language is accorded a privileged status in the
way we think about communication. Thus Leonard Bernstein, in his 1973 Norton
lectures, proposed that “by studying in depth why we talk the way we do—by
abstracting the logical principles of language—we may be in a position to discover how
we communicate in a larger sense: through music, through the arts in general, and
ultimately through all our societal behavior” (1976, 8). An approach of the sort I would
like to pursue here, which puts the “how” of communication (its syntax) on an equal
footing with the “why” of communication (its semantics), offers the possibility of
thinking about grammars that are specific to each communicative medium: the point is
not how much music is like language, or how much language is like music, but how
each is organized for specific communicative purposes. The model of musical grammar
that emerges is one in which the dynamic nature of musical utterances is brought into
the foreground, and which in many cases involves interwoven syntactic layers that
unfold simultaneously. It is a model markedly different from any of the models currently

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 (p.ix) Preface

proposed for language, and one that is consonant with the resources music offers for
human communication.

The commitment to a cognitive grammar requires setting out the cognitive capacities
that support the productivity of the grammar—that is, giving some account, based on
what is currently known about human cognitive processing, why utterances take the
form they do and how they realize their intended function. It bears mention that much
of the current work in cognitive science regards the brain and nervous system as
interacting, at practically every turn, with the capacities of the body. Cognitive
processing is thus not strictly limited to what happens within the brain but extends to
the body and, in some accounts—such as that of the philosopher Andy Clark (2008,
2016)—out into the world. The idea of a cognitive grammar fits quite well with the
perspective I set out in my earlier book, Conceptualizing Music, where I explored the
cognitive capacities that make possible the understanding and production of music.
This is hardly surprising, since Conceptualizing Music borrowed from the methodology
of cognitive linguists to develop this perspective, although it stopped well short of
offering anything other than a few scattered observations on musical grammar. Here,
(p.xi) building on and expanding that perspective, I develop those observations quite a
bit further, both in the interests of discovering some of the central features of a
cognitive grammar of music and with the hope that this may further our understanding
of how the cognitive capacities of humans shape the understanding and production of
music.

One of the central goals of Conceptualizing Music was to put the inquiries undertaken
by music theorists in dialog with what we currently know about human cognitive
processing. This book continues that venture by providing music theorists with some of
the tools—by way of an account of the elements of a cognitive grammar of music—
through which they might build systematic interpretations of individual works (or
recordings, or performances) that fit with the findings of cognitive science as well as
with theories about the role various modes of communication play in human cultures.
To that extent, what I offer here conforms, in a general way, with Busby’s notion that
musical grammar comprehends how musical sounds are arranged and combined. In at
least one important aspect, however, what I propose here is markedly different from
the model offered by Busby, for whom music theory was a science of measurement and
calculation. While I would never wish to gainsay the power of mathematical thought,
the approach I take here trusts less in the certainties of mathematics and more in the
contingencies of the human: music is, for me, an expression of what it means to be
human, and what order there is in it is a human order, one constantly transformed by
the quiddities of the human enterprise.

The audience I had in mind while writing this book was one interested in an account of
musical organization grounded in recent research in cognitive science that could
support close readings of musical works. As I envisioned them, such readings could be
put to a variety of uses, including hermeneutic interpretation, the preparation of
performances, historical contextualization, and an exploration of music’s role in social

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 (p.ix) Preface

exchanges, as well as for the study of music’s relationships with expressive genres like
gesture, dance, and poetry. These readings might also be done for the pure pleasure of
discovering some of the compositional strategies behind musical utterances that have,
time and again, held us in thrall. While I have imagined that music theorists, historical
musicologists, and ethnomusicologists might all like to pursue these sorts of close
readings of musical works, I hope the space of discourse I have opened up is capacious
enough that it would extend to anyone who is interested in the challenges music poses
to our ideas about how humans organize their understanding of the world, as well as to
those who would like to explore how nonlinguistic forms of expression might be
organized.

Among the ideas that I develop in the following pages is the notion that, at the most
fundamental level, musical utterances provide sonic analogs for dynamic processes.
This notion fits quite well with a striking image offered by Elizabeth Margulis in her
recent book on the role of repetition in musical organization. Reflecting on the
impression created by music with which we have become familiar, Margulis remarked,
“Each moment seems not like a bead strung along a necklace, resting next to dozens of
other beads, but more like a drink just when it starts to be poured—the cascade of
liquid is so much a part of the gesture as to seem to (p.xii) be contained within
it” (2014, 9). It is this cascade of liquid that I wish to study in what follows, knowing
that the best I can do with the linguistic resources available to me is the equivalent of
setting a slow shutter speed when taking a photograph. Using a slow shutter speed not
only offers a kind of truth about the relentless flow of fluid phenomena, it also saturates
its surroundings in deeper colors. This, then, is the perspective I hope to develop in my
exploration of the foundations of musical grammar. (p.xiii)

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