In this class, I will advance and attempt to defend the following thesis (from Katz & Pesetsky, in prep.):
Identity Thesis for Language and Music
All formal differences between language and music are a consequence of differences in their fundamental building blocks (arbitrary pairings of sound and meaning in the case of language; pitch-classes and pitch-class combinations in the case of music). In all other respects, language and music are identical.
A starting point and touchstone for the entire class will be the foundational study of tonal music from a generative perspective, Lerdahl & Jackendoff's 1983 Generative Theory of Tonal Music (GTTM). This may seem surprising, since the authors of this book themselves concluded explicitly that ""[T]he generative music theory developed here does not look much like generative linguistics.". I will try to argue that they reached this conclusion in part because their goals and research questions were not actually aligned with those that have characterized generative grammar (rightly or wrongly) throughout its history. When one realigns and "repurposes" some of the components of the GTTM theory, striking similarities emerge. These properties themselves suggest further avenues of investigation, and in the end (I will argue), the Identity Thesis comes to seem plausible after all.
Current plans for the course include:
1. A general introduction to what has been said previously about the relation of music to language, to general issues concerning music as a cognitive system -- with possibly some remarks on universals of scale systems
Patel, Aniruddh D. 2008. Music, language, and the brain.
Hauser, Marc D., and Josh McDermott. 2003. The evolution of the music faculty: A comparative perspective. Nature Neuroscience. 6:663-668.
Hauser, Marc D. and Josh McDermott 2005. The origins of music: innateness, uniqueness and evolution Music Perception, 23, 29-59
Jackendoff, Ray. 2009. Parallels and nonparallels between language and music Music Perception. 26:195-204.
Balzano, Gerald J. The Pitch Set as a Level of Description for Studying Musical Pitch Perception.Iin Music, Mind, and Brain, Manfred Clynes, ed., Plenum Press, 321-351.
2. A sketch of the GTTM system.
Jackendoff, Ray. 1987. Levels of Musical Structure. chapter 11 of Consciousness and the computational mind.
Lerdahl, Fred, and Ray Jackendoff. 1983. A generative theory of tonal music
3. The Identity Thesis
for now, you might look at the following handouts:
The Recursive Syntax and Prosody of Tonal Music (2009; with Jonah Katz)
[handout from a talk at the conference Recursion: Structural Complexity in Language and Cognition; includes clickable sound (OS X users: Adobe Acrobat only, sound does not work in Preview, though the file is viewable otherwise)]
Music Syntax is Language Syntax (2007)
[Updated version of a handout from a talk first delivered at the conference Language and Music as Cognitive Systems]
Two short surveys of linguistic prosody will also be useful in this part of the discussion:
Selkirk, Elisabeth. 2003. Sentence phonology, International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, 2nd ed.
Selkirk, Elisabeth. 2002.The syntax-phonology interface International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Section 3.9, Article 23.
There may be a draft of a paper corresponding to the first of these handouts by the time EGG happens.
Audience (i.e. who you come?):
A tough question! If you cannot read music and have no knowledge of music theory whatsoever, the class may be hard after the first session. On the other hand, it is probably more important to have some prior knowledge of generative syntax (introductory level is probably enough) than it is to have extensive knowledge of music theory. I myself have more background in music than your average syntactician, but I am a thorough amateur in this area (be warned!), and you can expect a fair number of errors from me, and lots of "I don't know" (even in case where I should know). So if you are in the same boat, don't be embarassed to come.
Disclaimers:
My own knowledge of music and music theory is largely limited to Western tonal music, and -- even worse -- to classical variants thereof.. GTTM is similarly oriented. (My collaborator in some of this work, Jonah Katz, is a jazz pianist with much wider musical knowledge than mine -- but he will not be with us, unfortunately.) As in generative linguistics, considerations of "poverty of the stimulus" suggest that conclusions we reach on the basis of data from a single musica; idiom may teach us something about the human music faculty nonetheless. Still, you should be aware of this limitation of the class in advance, because almost every question you may ask about other musical idioms will be greeted with great interest and equally great ignorance as to the answer -- at least on the part of the instructor.
Web site:
There will be a class website with links to all readings (not just the ones linked here). URL to be announced.