The Concept of Musical Grammar

Music analysis and, in particular music criticism, two fundamental tools of historical research and musicology in the broadest sense have become extremely difficult and problematical disciplines in the last few decades. The actual practice of analysis and criticism has by no means come to a halt, but the amount of 'truth' which was once thought obtainable from them or, at least, which was believed to have been won in the actual moment of undertaking them has diminished. We have begun to question the validity of certain elementary notions current in musicological parlance, for instance those connected with the concept of phraseology;' the harmonic concepts which have been the pillars of our musical thinking are now being discussed and reexamined from different points of view,2 and even the very idea of 'talking about music' must be revised with regard to its epistemological foundations.3 From all this it is clear that no scholar today can write about music with the same confidence and equanimity as his predecessors. His responsibilities are greater, and the fields he has chosen to research require kinds of knowledge that had previously been thought neither necessary nor relevant. These difficulties arise from at least two factors. First, there is the obvious problem that the analysis (or description) of a musical text always presupposes, sometimes implicitly or even quite unconsciously, some underlying theoretical basis: even in the most elementary analytical discussions for example when numbers of bars are counted, or corresponding phrases are distinguished reference is inevitably made to a set of theoretical ideas4 sometimes even without the writer being directly acquainted with it. What is more, the latent ideas which support an analytical or descriptive statement are