Exploring the structural principles underlying the capacity of groups of notes to function concurrently in music

Abstract

This is a theoretical article, building on one of Irène Deliège's major areas of interest in the field of music psychology: the perception of similarity between groups of notes. Here the issue is concurrence: what are the cognitive and music-structural consequences when groups of musical sounds occur simultaneously, in whole or in part? Couched in the context of ‘zygonic’ theory, a taxonomy is presented of how musical events of discernible duration can relate in time, and what forms such relationships can take. A distinction is drawn between perceptual similarity and functional similarity. There is an extended discussion of the capacity of concurrent groups to exist within a single line of music, which entails a fresh look at the notion of hierarchy in musical structures and the Schenkerian notion of prolongation, using a phenomenological approach based on the thinking of Edmund Husserl. In this context, the music-theoretical concept of the appoggiatura is examined, and is shown to result from a cross-domain hierarchical anomaly. The article concludes with a consideration of the reality of hierarchical ‘depth’ in music, in relation to listening, compositional and analytical grammars.