Implicit Counterpoint in Gjerdingen's Schemata

Abstract

Robert Gjerdingen has claimed that schema finding diverges from contrapuntal pitch reduction, Schenkerian or otherwise. Commentators have criticized his approach (see the reviews by Joel Lester in Journal of Music Theory [1990] and Kofi Agawu in Music Theory Spectrum [1991]) and have discussed intersections between schemata and contrapuntal reduction (see the articles by Folker Froebe and Oliver Schwab-Felisch in Music Theory and Analysis [2014] and by Stefan Rohringer in Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie [2015]). Here I address this conundrum from a different angle: I propose that schema analysis may be approximated by two heuristics, which are closely related to the issue identified in Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff's A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (1983) as finding the head of a time span. By giving the highest priority to tritone resolutions within a metric segment and otherwise realigning consonances with strong beats by removing dissonances, it is possible to approximate the reductive workings of schema analysis. This is demonstrated through a preliminary sample of two hundred tacit reductive decisions from Gjerdingen's Music in the Galant Style. I suggest the possibility that Gjerdingen's locally top-down search for complete patterns interacts with a more bottom-up, implicit reductive process, regardless of the identity of the emergent schema. I also discuss some of the potential implications of the heuristics for theory and analysis as well as for interdisciplinary work on schema finding.

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