GTTM and post-tonal music
Authors: Baroni Mario 
Published: November 2015

A musical grammar, according to Fred Lerdahl's theory (Lerdahl 1988), is not only formed by a system of rules able to produce music, but also by structural aspects allowing listeners to implicitly infer a description of a piece and to build a mental representation of it: a compositional grammar also includes a listening grammar. In much avant-garde music (starting from Schönberg's serial system) a coherence between compositional and listening procedures is lacking: for example some works by Pierre Boulez follow private codes, idiosyncratic grammars, unknown to the listeners, who cannot form efficient mental representations of the piece.

Several aspects of this theory are discussed in the article. One of these is the concept of musical style: sometimes Lerdahl speaks of musical “idioms” suggesting that they are variants of the musical language he is speaking about. But musical styles are often radically different from one another. The list of cognitive constraints he proposes in order to define the conditions of a “natural” listening is in fact deduced from the European music of the “classical” epoch that is not necessarily a universal model of music.

Other aspects of the theory can raise further problems. Musical structures, compositional procedures and listening strategies are different phenomena: even if they are strictly related to each other, it is necessary to distinguish their different functions. A listener can grasp important syntactical relationships among different structural units, but is not necessarily able to reconstruct, and even less to perceive, the operational techniques (the composition procedures) by means of which the musical events have been built. The main object of listening is not to infer the procedures used by the composer, but to understand their results.

A third aspect to be discussed and deepened is the listening component of a musical grammar. The attention of a listener is not only attracted by “primary” parameters such as pitch and duration, and by musical syntax, but also by “secondary” not discrete parameters, such as timbre, dynamics or time nuances and by the expressive and emotional purposes of a composition. The status of a musical grammar requires particular conditions: in order to manifest aesthetic purposes a composer must undertake a careful selection and dosing of different parametric units (both of primary and secondary nature) and of their changes in time; in order to understand a piece of music a listener must make hypotheses with regards an appropriate interpretation of the expressive purposes of the compositional choices.

In complex societies many musical grammars are present, each of them linked to a different musical genre. Musicians always live in a culture where different stylistic models are at their disposal. Normally composers are subtle experts of a given style, because of their attentive and passionate listening to it. When they compose a work taking into account their listening experiences, they are able to choose a note or a group of notes to be written in their own score. At this moment their compositional choices belong to an actual grammar, if by grammar we mean the system of structural rules that connect composing to listening.

Can we say that serialism adopts an “artificial” grammar out of touch with listening because listeners cannot perceive and understand the logic of a series? The serial rules are techniques employed to obtain particular kinds of musical structures. What a listener can perceive are not such techniques but their results, that is the musical structure itself. While it is absolutely true that serial techniques are not perceptible, it is also true that the aims of listening are not normally oriented towards knowing the compositional strategies of a composer, but understanding their syntactic results and interpreting their aesthetic purposes.