Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems

Comprehensibility and value

• Aesthetic Claim 1: The best music utilizes the full potential of our cognitive resources.
• Aesthetic Claim 2: The best music arises from an alliance of a compositional grammar with the listening grammar.

To these ends he proposes the use of the terms "complexity" and "complicatedness", complexity being hierarchical structural richness, and complicatedness being "numerous non-redundant events per unit time." On Lerdahl's view complexity has aesthetic value, while complicatedness is neutral. He writes, "All sorts of music satisfy these criteria—for example, Indian raga, Japanese koto, jazz, and most Western art music. Rock music fails on grounds of insufficient complexity. Much contemporary music pursues complicatedness as compensation for a lack of complexity. In short, these criteria allow for infinite variety but only along certain lines."

"I find this conclusion both exciting and—initially at least—alarming...the constraints are tighter than I bargained for."

"My second aesthetic claim in effect rejects this ['progressivist'] attitude in favor of the older view that music-making should be based on 'nature.' For the ancients, nature may have resided in the music of the spheres, but for us it lies in the musical mind."

Reception

Lerdahl's paper has elicited many responses.

Roger Scruton praised it, calling it "hard-hitting".

Nicholas Cook wrote, "The idea that music is a process of communication in which listeners decode structures that composers have encoded... is... based on several disputable assumptions: that people choose to listen grammatically; that there is, or ought to be, an equivalence between compositional and listening grammars; and, most fundamentally, that there is such a thing as musical grammar". He writes that Lerdahl

assume[s] that there should be a more or less linear relationship between the manner in which a composer conceives a composition and the manner in which a listener perceives it. ...Lerdahl's aim is to specify the conditions that must be fulfilled if there is to be conformity between "compositional grammar" and "listening grammar". And... he ends up by measuring existing music against the stipulations of his theory, using this as a basis for aesthetic evaluation. The result is to write off not only the Darmstadt avant-garde and minimalism, but also huge swathes of non-Western and popular music.

He asks:

What... does an article like Lerdahl's "Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems" actually do? By subordinating the production and reception of music to theoretically defined criteria of communicative success, it creates a charmed hermeneutic circle that excludes everything from critical musicology to social psychology. It slips imperceptibly from description to prescription, so reinforcing the hegemony of theory. In this way, while the literary genre of Lerdahl's article is the scientific paper – a genre predicated on the transparent representation of an external reality – its substance lies at least equally in its illocutionary force.

Morag Josephine Grant wrote, "The paradox of Lerdahl's argument... is that while it is perfectly acceptable to adopt the composer's own system when dealing with compositional-technical analysis, it seems equally acceptable to revert to musical thinking of a quite different type when the aural result comes to be analysed". She continued, "Lerdahl's argument that musical language, like spoken language, is generative in structure excludes the possibility of other, non-hierarchical methods of achieving musical coherence... Lerdahl's concentration on the audibility of the row... blinds or deafens him to the simple fact that the use of the row is itself a constraint, not just on the composer, but in the aid of comprehensibility as well".

John Croft's master's degree thesis examines Lerdahl's essay in depth. In his conclusion, he wrote:

we have plenty of music that does not conform to Lerdahl's grammar: what, then, are people who claim to find it as interesting as tonal-metrical music actually doing? Either they are deluding themselves, or they are lying, or they have non-human brains. None of these answers seems entirely satisfactory. But if we do not like any of these answers, then we must admit that it is a matter of exposure and acquired understanding after all, in which case we are certainly a far cry from innate psychological universals [...] Vague language and tacit assumptions can be brought into the service of conservatism and aesthetic authoritarianism. It points to the misguided nature of attempts to turn the question of the dissemination of post-tonal music from an aesthetic, political, and indeed economic issue into a cognitive-scientific one. In this age when words like "accessibility" and "communication" are used too frequently and with too little understanding, it is of some significance that at least one major attempt to give scientific respectability to the conservative side of the debate fails.

For additional opinions and discussion, see Boros (1995), Boros (1996), Denham (2009), Dibben (1996), Heinemann (1993), Heinemann (1998), and Mosch (2004).