The Construction of Musical Syntax (I)

Abstract

IN THE absence of lexical or conventional referents for the ordering of musical elements in a semantically interpreted structure, the construction of coherent musical entities depends on a contextually inferrable referential basis. Such dependence requires that it be possible to distinguish among individual musical things, and to distinguish classes of such things, on no more elaborate a prior basis than that on which those things are just identified as musical things in the first place. If our subject were (verbal) language, the claim that the above requirement could be met would amount to a claim that given only notions of what language was, of the kind of data that was pertinent to the construction of and of the varieties of identity and function designable for linguistic entities, it would be possible to infer from the perceptual quality-patterns of successions of sounds and/or inscriptions associated with any utterance the particular vocabulary and syntax through which to interpret the meaning and structure of that utterancei.e., to distinguish it as a particular linguistic individual. Thus English, while it would be a cognitively designable in the definiential ascension from language to this utterance, would no longer be an essential to account for by the introduction of new assumptions and conventions, since all the essential characteristics of this utterance would be determinable through construction on the original primitives without the mediate intervention of a conventional English dictionary and grammar. This designability but non-essentiality of a crucial linguistic stage is, of course, unavailable in verbal language, at least presently, but the analogous stages of determination in music, i.e., of tonal, 12-tone, etc. determination, do present such a methodological superfluity; they are convenient but not essential stages to distinguish explicitly in the construction of individual musical entities. And thus musical structures do seem rather special among linguistic-type entities (see