Vasili Byros - Towards An Archaeology of Hearing - Schemata and Eighteenth-Century Consciousness

Autumn 2009, Vol. 1, No.
2, 235306
2009 by the Korean Institute for Musicology
All rights reserved.
Aestheticising the historical and historicising the aesthetic are op-
posite sides of the same coin: The argument, the most purple among
several ornate passages woven throughout Dahlhauss Grundlagen der
Musikgeschichte (Eng. trans., 1984, 71), problematically equates the
aesthetic and historical experience of a musical work as one and the
same phenomenological incident. By extension, it suggests that his-
tory is somehow fundamentally integral to the faculty of hearingthat
historical consciousness, even, is immediately available to present-day
modes of listening. Indeed, Dahlhaus maintains that past and present
form an indissoluble alloy; that works extend[ing] from earlier peri-
ods into our own age do not come solitary and sequestered; they bring
their own timea temps perdualong with them (1984, 70). Much in
Dahlhauss argument explicitly derives from closely engaging Gadamers
notion of Wirkungsgeschichte (Gadamer 2003, 300ff.; Dahlhaus 1984,
3, 5860), or historically affected consciousness, which views history as
a broad panorama (Dahlhaus 1984, 71), extending from the past to
the present in a continuous process of reception, or, if you will, as tradi-
tion. The larger implication is that traditions persist beyond the point of
their original habitus (Bourdieu 1993), and therefore resist the pass-
ing of time and the commensurate morphing of culture.
Towards an Archaeology of Hearing:
Schemata and Eighteenth-Century
Consciousness
VASILI BYROS
INDIANA UNIVERSITY
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But the ontology of Dahlhauss twisted aesthetic paradox, as he
calls it, warrants some measure of scrutiny, if only because it appears at
once entirely sound and altogether unlikely. Towards the one extreme,
a theoretical framework capable of sustaining the notion of a historical
mode of hearing, on both cognitive and philosophical grounds, lies in
the concept of a schema in cognitive psychology and recent historically
informed studies in music cognition (Gjerdingen 2007; Byros 2009).
But at the same time, the whole question of historical epistemology
would challenge not the possibility of a historical mode of hearing so
much as its inevitability, as intimated by Dahlhauss aphorism, that
all listening will by nature be historical by virtue of works being from
the past. As Michel Foucault argued painstakingly, the interpretational
grids belonging to the various phases of history are ever mutating, dis-
connected, and often at odds with one another (Foucault 1972; 1994;
see also Cook and Clarke 2004, 3; Hacking 2002). Even this negative
orientation, however, finds a home in the concept of a schema. More
specifically, schema theory invites this otherwise uncomfortable para-
dox, for in order to demonstrate that historical modes of listening may
exist, one must articulate some difference with the present so as to
qualify the situatedness of cognition as historical in some way, while
nonetheless maintaining that differences are somehow mediated all the
same, in order to allow history a place in cognition.
Example 1
Ludwig van Beethoven, op. 2, no. 1 (1795), ii, Adagio, bars 68:
cadence galante schema
Towards an "Archaeology" of Hearing: Schemata and Eighteenth-Century Consciousness
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On the one hand, when the British musicologist Charles Cudworth
rst related the problem, he maintained eighteenth-century music made
use of many mannerisms, such as the cadence galante (Example 1), that
were so markedly of [their] period, but the effect of which is largely
lost on modern ears (Cudworth 1949, 176; see also Heartz 2003, 23).
On the other hand, as Robert Gjerdingen (2007) most recently and most
comprehensively arguedwhile acknowledging, alongside Cudworth,
that strong habits in the present easily mask differences in the past
(2007, 4)schemata nonetheless provide a means of access to the past,
precisely because of their historical contingencybecause of the histori-
cal determinacy of these mannerisms or schemata, and of musical
style in general: perhaps the most central thesis in Leonard Meyers style
program and its legacy (1956; 1967; 1973; 1989; 2000). Both Meyer
and Gjerdingen, as Michael Spitzer summarizes the position, presup-
pose that eighteenth-century consciousness is immediately accessible
(Spitzer 2004, 49) by means of these style forms, or schemata, owing
to their historical situatedness (Meyer 1989; Gjerdingen 1986; 1988;
2007). And so, between these positive and negative orientations sur-
rounding Dahlhauss paradox, we may sketch a framework for objecti-
fying less a historical mode of listening, than what might be styled as an
archaeology of hearing for music of late eighteenth-century Europe
(cf. Gjerdingen 2007, 1619). Waiting for us at the end of either line of
thought, we will nd the concept of a schema.
The Schema Concept
Throughout its long history in Western empirical philosophy and cogni-
tive psychology, the underlying concept of a schema, if not the term, has
upheld a remarkable degree of consistency and renement (e.g., Aristo-
tle De memoria; Locke 1706; Hume 1777; Bartlett 1932; Piaget 1947;
Piaget and Inhelder 1968; Minsky 1975; Rumelhart 1975; 1977; 1980;
Neisser 1976; Rumelhart and Ortony 1977; Schank and Abelson 1977;
G. Mandler 1979; J. Mandler 1984). Most generally, schema refers
to the mental encoding of a statistical regularity or redundancy in the
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environment that reciprocally informs cognition. It was precisely under
these circumstances that Aristotle rst associated the term with the con-
cept. He wrote, We know things . . . by a psychic process analogous to
them. There exist in the mind schemata () and processes ()
corresponding to the external objects (De memoria, 452b.815; slight-
ly modied translation from Ross 1906, 115). The most elaborate mod-
eling of a schema from the perspective of cognitive psychology is argu-
ably that proposed by David Rumelhart, James McClelland, and the
PDP Research Group. The image reproduced in Figure 1, adapted from
their Parallel Distributed Processing of 1986 (Rumelhart, Smolensky, et
al. 1986, 10), presents a formalization that resonates astoundingly with
Aristotles earliest conception.

Figure 1
Connectionist modeling of a schema (Rumelhart, Smolensky, et al. 1986, 10)
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Beneath lies the image of a geometric gure, or an external object
by Aristotles terms. Above lies a representation of the schema, or
psychic process, corresponding to that object, that gives rise to its
interpretation or perception as a cube. The wire-frame drawing is of no
ordinary cube, however, but of a so-called Necker Cube. Like Wittgen-
steins famous rabbit-duck illusion, the image is ambiguous (2001, 166;
Jastrow 1900). The drawing may be perceived as either a southwest- or
a northeast-facing geometry. To state it otherwise, the viewing subject
assumes a spatial perspective that is oriented either from above and
to the right, or below and to the left of the object. Therefore properly
speaking, the psychic process above involves two sub-schemata, L and R,
each responsible for one of two possible interpretations. Each schema is
a network of small, discrete, and simple mental operations, correspond-
ing to the primary data structures of memory, which function in paral-
lel to map an interpretation onto each ambiguous corner of the gures
intersecting lines. By way of example, the lower- and left-most node in
Schema L, labeled FLL, projects the interpretation of Front-Left-
Lower Corner onto the lower- and left-most vertex, to perceive a cube
whose front face lies at the lower left. Schema R, on the other hand,
imposes the inverse interpretation onto the same vertex as Back-Left-
Lower Corner (BLL), which moves the front face to the upper right,
and so forth.
But the greater signicance of the exercise resides not in the dual ac-
tivity of seeing a right-facing cube as a left-facing cube and vice versa.
Nor in the ability to alter ones orientation towards the object. Rather,
as Roger Scruton (1999, 78) and Michael Spitzer (2004, 9) argue in
respect to Wittgensteins reading of the rabbit-duck phenomenon, the
exercise properly involves seeing the neutral material trace, that is, the
drawing, as either the one or the otheras being able to form a spatial
orientation to begin with. In other words, the emphasis falls on the re-
lationship between the drawing as a substrate, and the occurrence of
a psychic process, or schema, upon that substrate. The schema and, in
consequence, the ability to see either a right- or a left-facing cube in this
drawing, is a product of having already seen cube-like geometries in the
world, or of projecting that previously acquired knowledge from ones
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ecology onto the image. The visual exercise is a testament to the reality
of a schema as a determinant of cognition, because no cube exists on
the printed page, only a series of intersecting lines absent of any cues of
depth or perspective. Perceiving a cube is entirely an act of the imagina-
tion. This projection of knowledge onto the image amounts to forming
a context for interpretation, by imposing ones experience of cube-like
geometries in the world in the form of a copy (; Aristotle, De
memoria, 451a.1519)not in the sense of a fixed image, but in the
sense of imitating a prior experience as an active reconstruction of past
experience in Frederic Bartletts terms (1932, 213). The schema, by this
estimation, is a re-forming of associations or connections already made
in the past according to a (continual) reencounter with the same or simi-
lar environmental stimuli: in a word, an image-inative reconstruction of
past experience. This reconstruction involves the learned and previously
abstracted affordances of the environment (Gibson 1966; 1979), and
the ecologically imposed necessary connexions (Hume 1777) among
them in the mind. The affordances of the environment are encoded in
these connections among memory modes (Becker 1973), which build
up to an organised setting (Bartlett 1932, 201), or schema, as a con-
text for interpretation.
1
History as the Projection of Knowledge
Now, suppose the acoustic signals or sound stimulus (Meyer 1956,
4547) produced by an orchestra were analogous to the visual signals of
the wire-frame drawing in Figure 1. That is to say, imagine there existed
an acoustic substrate that is prior to music, as there exists a visual
substrate that is prior to the perception of a cube. Then, a historical
mode of listening, or a historical means of making music cognitively
(cf. Boretz 1995), would involve the projection of history as a form of
knowledge onto that substrate. To assume a historical orientation to-
wards the acoustic substratum would involve what Spitzer (2004, 9)
following Scruton (1999, 78)calls hearing as, a mode of perception
informed with knowledge. As knowledge structures that mediate per-
ception or determine behavior in this way (Rumelhart, Smolensky, et al.
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1986, 7; Rumelhart 1980; Spitzer 2004), schemata provide a means for
realizing not so much a historical but an archaeological mode of hearing
in a Foucauldian sense. The difference turns on understanding history
less as the pastness of music, than as a space of knowledge, con-
ceptual field (Foucault 1994, xiii; 1972, 126), normative system
(Vodika 1975, 90), or mode of behaviour (Dahlhaus 1984, 61) that
schemata embody and thereby aestheticize, corresponding to one side
of Dahlhauss coin. As Leo Treitler relates it, It isnt the pastness of our
objects that distinguishes them as historical . . . but music in the past . . .
as a principle of knowledge (Treitler 1982, 154). The problematics of
historically informed listening would then be situated in a transposition
of history from a connotation of pastness to one of epistemology.
Music of Late Eighteenth-Century Europe
But music of late eighteenth-century Europe is ideally poised in this
detailing of the problem, to the extent that a transposition of this kind
becomes immaterial and virtually unnecessary. Because the music is it-
self inherently schematic, highly conventionalized, thereby knowledge-
driven and predicated on regularity (cf. Mirka and Agawu 2008), any
distinctions between history and knowledge qua schema collapseor
rather, following our Dahlhausian point of departure, they reverse into
one another as if occupying two sides of the same proverbial coin. Be-
cause schemata follow a life cycle within a discrete historical setting,
any cognitive engagement of music by means of them would simulta-
neously constitute aesthetic and historical activities. By virtue of their
cultural determinacy, musical schemata, as albeit aesthetic objects and
structures of knowledge, are stamps of their period (Cudworth 1949,
176) and therefore inescapably historicized nonetheless, corresponding
with the opposite side of Dahlhauss coin.
Statistical Evidence: The 17, 43 and lesolsol Schemata
Evidence substantiating both the immanently schematic nature of music
from late eighteenth-century Europe, and the historical contingency of
these schemata, lies in ever growing programs of empirical musicology
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(Clarke and Cook 2004) dedicated to this repertoire, within the larger
context of a newly rising interface between historically informed the-
ory and cognition (e.g., Mirka 2005; 2008; 2009; Gjerdingen 2007; By-
ros 2009). The most impressive among the evidence undoubtedly comes
by way of statistics, which reconstruct what Leonard Meyer would
call the perceptual redundancy of a musical object within a specied
musical corpus (1967). Whereas the affordances and regularities in
the environment that go into building a visual schema for perceiving
a universal category such as a cube in Figure 1 may easily be taken for
granted, statistical surveys and corpus studies reconstruct evidence for
such regularities in a culturally-specic musical environment that may
otherwise not be self-evident, or lost to modern ears, in Cudworths
terms.
Among the first of these redundancies to be objectified, following
Cudworths thought-piece on the cadence galante (1949), is what Meyer
called the 17, 43 archetype (1980; see also Meyer 1973). Illustrated
in Example 2, from the opening of Mozarts Piano Sonata in G major,
K. 283 (1774), the schema consists of a tightly knit pair of sub-phrases
consisting of a tonic-dominant, dominant-tonic parallelism, articulated
by the 17, 43 rhyme in the top voice, the schemas most charac-
teristic feature, whose pairing also circumscribes the two stages of the
schema.
Example 2
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Piano Sonata in G major, K. 283 (1774),
i, Allegro, bars 14: 17, 43 schema
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The harmonic parellelism and statement-response paradigm between
stages (Caplin 1998) is a feature shared by several of Meyers other
changing-note archetypes, as well as the bisected variant of the Ad-
este Fidelis schema (Meyer 1973; 1989; see also Gjerdingen 2007,
85, 108, 119, 120; 1988, 5559, 6396). But it was Gjerdingen (1986;
1988) who brought concrete evidence demonstrating the great frequen-
cy and stylistic localization of the 17, 43 on a historical continuum,
by conducting a historical survey summarized in the graph of Figure 2,
which gives a population distribution of the schema across nearly two
centuries, from 1720 to 1900.
Figure 2
Historical population distribution of the 17, 43 schema,
17201900 (Gjerdingen 1988)
The population peaks sharply in the 1770s (the decade in which the
Mozart sonata was composed) with a period of generally increased ac-
tivity between 1760 and 1790. Now by itself, Gjerdingens study may
do little to single-handedly sustain the larger argument by having to
bear the burden of representation. But Meyers and Gjerdingens argu-
ments and predictions about the historical contingency of schemata, as
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Musica Humana
drawn from these statistics, are strongly perpetuated by my own com-
parable study in several respects.
My dissertation on eighteenth-century tonality as a form of cultur-
ally situated cognition (Byros 2009) conducts a similar historical survey
of another, entirely unrelated convention: the progression excerpted in
Example 3, from the et lex perpetua section of the Introitus to Mo-
zarts Requiem in D minor, K. 626 (1791), what I have termed the le
solfisol schema. The defining property, and consequently the name
given the convention, derives, unlike the 17, 43, from its chromatic
turn of phrase in the bass (Byros 2009)specically, from the scale-
degree progression, 6, 5, +4, 5. The schema further differs in its highly
dominantizing orientation, its rst three events collectively assuming the
same function as an augmented sixth chord, by realizing its characteris-
tic interval as a diminished third in the bass. In the Mozart Requiem, the
schema punctuates a large half cadence, as would an augmented sixth,
by unraveling the two dominant-oriented tendencies of scale degrees 6
and +4, and positioning them in a diachronic setting (Example 3). In
this connection, the harmonic-functional symbols in Example 3 derive
from the implicit probability profiles (cf. Huron 2006, 14374) that
were assigned to the scale degrees by the nomenclature of eighteenth-
century French thoroughbass practice (see Byros 2009, chaps. 23): as
Franois-Joseph Ftis summarized the situation in 1844, The degrees
of the scale are designated by names, some of which indicate the me-
lodic or harmonic character of the tones that constitute the scale (Ftis
1844, 2; added emphasis).
2
Scale degrees not belonging to the three
tones of the tonic triadtonique, dominante, and mdiantewere
defined by their orientation to the hierarchically superordinate scale
degrees 1, 3, and 5. Among the subordinate scale degrees, 6 and 4 were
called sus-dominante and sous-dominante, which literally meant the
scale degrees lying immediately above and below the dominant (see e.g.,
Dandrieu 1719; and Ftis 1844, 23). The S category in Example 3
derives from the probability prole of dominant-orientedness implicit in
the terms sus-dominante and sous-dominante, by collapsing these two
complementary functions into a single dominantizing S category be-
cause of their analogous probability proles.
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Musica Humana
As Meyer described it, in many theoretical systems the importance of
probability relationships is made clear in the way in which the tones of
the system are named. . . . [T]he normative tones, those toward which
other tones will probably move, have been given basic names, while the
other tones have been given names related to these, often in terms of
their probable motions (Meyer 1956, 56).
Furthermore, the harmonic function of a chord represented by the
analytic notation of Example 3 involves not simply the membership of a
chord in one of the functional categoriesthat is, membership based on
its tonique, dominante, or sus- and sous-dominante scale-degree afli-
ationsbut the combination of these with a specic scale degree in the
bass. Tsol in Example 3, for instance, species a particular function
which recognizes the tonic 6/4 as a characteristic passing chord between
sus- and sous-dominantebased harmonies, as frequently occurs, for ex-
ample, in what Gjerdingen calls the Indugio schema (2007, 27383,
464), where it appears between IV
6
and IV or ii
(k)
, and the other way
round, as seen in bar 12 of Example 11. The schema serves to elabo-
rate or linger (It. indugiare) on a sous-dominantebased harmony
(Gjerdingen 2007, 274). This notion of harmonic function as a chord-
form against a scale degree in the bass is consistent with eighteenth-
century conceptions of harmony, as seen, for example, in the Rule of the
Octave and the Italian partimento tradition, whereby chords and chord
progressions are functional to the extent that they suggest a position
within a known scale-degree pattern in the bass (Byros 2009, chaps. 23;
Gjerdingen 2007, 2007a; Holtmeier 2007), or within a set of possible
wholes (Gjerdingen 1991, 553). When Ftis penned the first explicit
mention of harmonic function in the history of music theory, it was pre-
cisely in these probabilistic terms: Each tone of a scale, having a par-
ticular character and carrying out a special function (fonction) in music
[cf. Meyers probable motions], is accompanied by a harmony analo-
gous to this character and to this function (fonction). The collection of
harmonies proper to each degree of the scale determines the tonality (la
tonalit) (1844, 3).
3
The key-dening character of the lesolsol therefore operates by
way of two stages, consisting of four events that correspond to the pro-
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Autumn 2009
gression of the bass. Events are represented by scale-degree nodes in
Example 3. Simple lines without arrows between nodes designate and
group intrastage and intrafunctional relations. Bold lines with arrows
indicate a higher-level syntactic articulation between the two stages
of the schema, which corresponds to the larger SD progression and
almost invariably to a metric division. The first stage expands domi-
nantizing function by harmonizing a lesol bass with sus-dominante,
tonique, and chromatic sous-dominante chord-forms, which collectively
express the same function as an augmented sixth, whose characteristic
harmonic interval is composed-out as a diminished third in the bass.
The aggregate effect of the three events in the rst stage involves a simi-
lar lingering as the Indugio schema, but on a chromatically intensi-
ed and therefore even more dominant-oriented augmented sixth-chord,
with reiterations of scale degrees 1 and 3 in the upper voices. The sec-
ond stage is simply an expression of the dominant, often highlighted by
a cadential 6/4, as seen in the Mozart example. In a mental representa-
tion of the schema, each event would be abstracted and encoded into a
single memory node, corresponding to the pairing of a specic chord-
form (in thoroughbass terms) and scale degree in the bass, as illustrated
in Figure 3, adapted from a notational convention in Gjerdingen 2007.
4
Figure 3
lesolsol schema: abstract mental representation (Byros 2009)
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The rectangular nodes in Figure 3 and their connections are directly
proportionate to the affordances (Gibson) in the musical environ-
ment and their necessary connexions (Hume) imposed by custom
(, Aristotle, De Memoria, 451b.2535; Locke 1706, Book 2, Chap.
33, 6)that is, by the statistical and perceptual redundancies of the
relevant style system (Meyer 1956; see Byros 2009, chap. 5).
The Life Cycle of the lesolsol and 17, 43
Figure 4a distributes the total population of 544 instances of the lesol
fisol schema across a 17201840 timeline, from a corpus of roughly
3000 musical works throughout all Europe (Byros 2009). Figure 4b
displays Gjerdingens statistics for the same time period, adapted to the
same criteria of representation by distributing the 17, 43 population
at ten-year intervals, to facilitate comparison. Of great moment, both
surveys show population distributions that approximate a Gaussian
or normal distribution, otherwise known as a bell curve, with sharp
peaks in the 1790s and 1770s, respectively, decades that represent the
heyday of the Classical style (cf. Gjerdingen 1988, 99ff.; Bulmer 1967).
Besides that, the numbers display a period of overall stylistic consistency
that extends more broadly from 1750 to 1820. The populations of both
schemata are highly concentrated into a period of only seven decades,
nearly half the overall time: 88.2 and 90.4 percent of the instances
respectively occur between 1750 and 1820 (Figure 4). But more sig-
nicantly still, with some informed interpretation we might view these
schemata and their populations as telling a larger story. Figure 5 as-
similates the numbers from both studies (Gjerdingen 1988; Byros 2009)
by treating the 17, 43 and lesolsol schemata more generally as
symptoms of the Classical style. Once more, the now combined popula-
tions bell in 175060 and 181020, while also sustaining a minimum
of 67 percent of the population peak from 1760 to 1800, decades com-
monly associated with the High Classical style. Not only may one
liken the graph, accordingly, to something of a metaphorical image of
the history of the Classical style, but also to something of a historical
prediction.
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Autumn 2009
Figure 4a
Historical population distribution of the lesolsol schema, 17201840: from a
corpus of roughly 3000 musical works, throughout all Europe (Byros 2009)
Figure 4b
Historical population distribution of the 17, 43 schema,
17201840 (Gjerdingen 1988)
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Between these two mutually complementing data sets, we may antici-
pate that other Classical schemata would either follow analogous life
cycles, or otherwise sit comfortably within the larger stylistic consis-
tency. Not only do the statistics bring strong empirical evidence to sup-
port Adornos famous argument respecting the historical immanence
of musical material (Adorno 2004). By extension, they suggest that
listening by means of this material would equally comprise a histori-
cal activitythat schema-driven listening would by nature be historical
through and through (Adorno 2004, 36).
Schemata are said to collapse apparent oppositions between nature
and nurture, because the information-processing mechanism is modeled
on the outside world or environment (Spitzer 2004, 46; see also Meyer
1992): as the cognitive psychologist Donald A. Norman describes it,
the fundamental notion that underlies the concept of a schema is that
culture determines the mental structures (in Baars 1986, 386; original
Figure 5
Combined historical distributions of the lesolsol and 17, 43 schemata
as symptoms of the Classical style
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emphasis). By a similar estimation, schemata would dissolve the opposi-
tion between past and present because this environment is historically
determined; because historyas culturedetermines the mental struc-
tures. The affordances of [the] environment, in Gibsons terms, are
resources for, and constraints on, cognition (Smith and Semin 2004,
75). History provides the constraints that structurally impact the mind
(Byros 2009) through a process of re-enacting the perceptual redun-
dancy represented at the heart of the historical distribution statistics in
Figures 4 and 5: massive exposure to the style system may turn the
historical repertoire into ones proper musical environment, and thereby
re-create the original process of statistical learning and recuperate the
historical center (Spitzer 2004, 46).

Forming a spatial orientation in
respect to the visual image of Figure 1, and forming a historical orienta-
tion towards some musical work or passage, are different individuations
of the same cognitive process. In this way, Dahlhaus aphorismthat
works bring their own time along with themwould stand on secure
footing.
The Negative Component: Mutation and Recovery
But on the other hand, the ultimate paradox in Dahlhauss twist still
lies in the necessity of a negative, discriminating component. That is,
for Dahlhaus to be right, he must also be wrong, and I believe this to
be the reaction he intended, by way of a latent contradiction. Notice
that, while he claims works bring their own time along with them, this
time is also paradoxically a lost time, a temps perdu, the French un-
mistakably being a reference to Proust (191327), whose deliberations
on memory always involve an element of recovery. As it happens, else-
where Dahlhaus makes the condition of recuperation explicit: histori-
cism, he writes, considers the task of performers and audiences not
only to reconstruct part of the past but to make us sense our distance
from it (1989, 323; added emphasis). The argument strongly resonates
with the main outlines of Foucaults archaeology of knowledge. To
reconstruct the episteme or historical a priori underlying a given
period requires that one also locate those moments of mutation, or
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disconnect in the history of ideas, that bring such epistemologies into
relief by way of negation: archaeology, by addressing itself to the gen-
eral space of knowledge, to its congurations, and to the mode of being
of the things that appear in it, denes systems of simultaneity, as well
as the series of mutations necessary and sufcient to circumscribe the
threshold of a new positivity (Foucault 1994, xxiii; added emphasis).
Beyond statistical evidence, the problematics of historically informed
listening require that one demonstrate marked differences between sche-
ma-driven and potentially modern-specic modes of cognitionto out-
line occasions where historical and modern habits would compete with
one another. To do so may be an endlessly difcult exercise, not least
because gauging modes of hearing from the past will always involve a
reconstruction from documents. But such a historical ethnography, as
it were, need not fall into disrepute simply because the cultural mosaic
of the initial historical situation will always remain a reconstruction,
and therefore necessarily incomplete: selected documentary evidence, or
a few tiles from the mosaic, often betray a pattern that may be gener-
alized into a principle,
5
and it is this pattern that I should like to explore
in the following, by touching briey on three case studies.
Three Case Studies
Mozart, String Quartet in C Major, K. 465, Dissonance (1785)
Beyond question, the most famous historical account of Mozarts cele-
brated Dissonance Quartet is by Gottfried Weber. The essay original-
ly published in Ccilia (1832), and later appended to his Versuch einer
geordneten Theorie der Tonsetzkunst (183032), represents something
of a pinnacle of eighteenth-century thought about harmony, in its virtu-
ally obsessive reading of the tonality at a moment-by-moment level (We-
ber 1832; Eng. trans. in Bent 1994). As Gjerdingen describes eighteenth-
century modes of listening in general, The lodestar of galant music was
not a tonic chord but rather a listeners experience, and global tonal-
ity . . . was foreign to their more localized preoccupations (2007, 21;
original emphasis).
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BYROS
254
Musica Humana
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255
Autumn 2009
In Weber, a listeners experience is represented and objectified by
das Gehr (the ear), and, more specifically, by the Habits of the
Ear (Gewonheiten des Gehres), of which the Mozart analysis was to
be an exemplary illustration (183032, 2:126155; Eng. trans. 1851,
1:34567).
6
Between bars 1 and 14, a minimum of ve key changes are
registered following Webers reading and Webers categories for key per-
ception outlined in the Versuch, as shown in Example 4.
Each modulation emerges as the consequence of some schema. C mi-
nor and B minor in bars 14 and 58 respectively owe to variations
of the lesolsol, which appears here in the viola, instead of the bass
(bb. 14, 58), as an instance of a top-voice variant of the schema
(Byros 2009).
7
The variant places the characteristic doti progression
normally found in the top voice of the default form (see Example 3)
8
in the bass, as also seen in Example 5. We know Weber had the schema
in mind because he rationalizes the famous dissonances of the opening
against the schema as a norm.
Example 5
Joseph Haydn, Symphony no. 96 in D major, The Miracle (1791),
i, Allegro, bars 19497: lesolsol schema top-voice variant (Byros 2009)
BYROS
256
Musica Humana
Example 6 reproduces six potential solutions Weber offered for re-
aligning the rhythmically displaced nonharmonic tones, all of them
according to the harmonic criteria of the lesolsol.The rst notable
disturbance Weber lights upon, for example, is the apparent half-dimin-
ished seventh chord on beat 2 of bar 2 (Example 4). The recompositions
in Example 6 interpret the A in the rst violin as either having entered
too early, and therefore as an anticipation, or G and F in the viola as
having entered too late, or both. The adjustments expose an underlying
harmonic syntax of VI
6
iII;(or +iv
o
l)V
6
, one of the paradigmatic har-
monizations of the lesolsol top-voice variant (cf. Examples 46).
Example 6
Mozart, Dissonance Quartet, recomposition of dissonances in bars 14, from
Weber 183032, 466
17
(and Weber 1832, 17) based on the harmonic criteria of
the lesolsol top-voice variant
257
Autumn 2009
Moreover, G, B, and F minor at bars 4, 5, and 8 are all instances of
what Weber describes in the Versuch as Neuer Anfang, or New Begin-
ning (Weber 183032, 2:127128; Eng. trans. 1851, 1:34546), one
among five of Webers Habits, or, one might say, schemata of the
Ear (cf. Saslaw 1991). Weber describes the emergence of G minor and
B minor in bars 48 as occurring virtually ex nihilo:
On its own authority, and without any apparent motivation, [the B in
bar 4] takes the law into its own hands and seeks to overthrow the G
major triad [as dominant] . . . transforming it now unilaterally into the
triad of G minor. . . . The [BD] dyad, seen in the context of the next
bar (b. 6), emerges as a genuine B minor triad in intentionindeed
as the tonic chord of B minor. It has therefore precipitated a modula-
tion from G minor, which has barely had time to establish itself, into
B minor . . . ; and precipitated it, furthermore, by way of a wholly un-
prepared chord of b: i following directly from the G minor triad g: i; in
short two utterly remote keys stated one immediately after the other. (in
Bent 1994, 168, 170)
But in addition to Neuer Anfang, Weber does reference a more interme-
diate process between the two distant tonalities. With the passage given
in Example 7, Weber maintains that the modulations and cross relations
occurring in bars 45 would be better mediated if the harmonic rhythm
of the underlying progression proceeded at a slower pace.
Example 7
Dissonance Quartet, recomposition of bars 45, from Weber 183032,
495 (cf. 466
19
)
The underlying progression is a three-voice version of what Gjerdingen,
following Joseph Riepel (175268), would call a Monte schema (Figure
BYROS
258
Musica Humana
6). By Gjerdingens definition, the Monte consists of two stages, each
containing two events that involve the resolution of a dissonant seventh
chord, most often in 6/5 position in gured bass terms, to a consonant
5/3 harmony. The outer voices of each stage characteristically have a 71
and (5)43 pairing (Figure 6).
Figure 6
Monte schema, from Gjerdingen 2007, 458
The resolving 5/3 chord may be a tonic or a dominant, and the second
stage of the schema is normally a step higher than the rst. The Monte
in bars 45 of the Dissonance Quartet, however, involves an interval
of displacement of a third, a similarly frequent variation of the schema,
particularly in more chromatic environments. The recomposition in Ex-
ample 7 brings this variation of the Monte, operating in bars 45 of the
Quartet, further into relief.
Beyond Webers categories and analysis, G minor and F minor in
bars 5 and 8 emerge from a telescoped instance of a Fenaroli schema
(Gjerdingen 2007, 22540, 462), which consists of a 7123 bass, fre-
quently counterpointed by a 4371 countermelody (Figure 7).
259
Autumn 2009
Figure 7
Fenaroli schema, from Gjerdingen 2007, 462
In the Dissonance Quartet the countermelody is absent, owing to a
thinning of the texture towards the end of bar 4. But more relevant to
the Quartet is the Fenaroli schemas close association with a modula-
tion to the dominant of the home key, as it frequently occurs following
a modulation to V (Gjerdingen 2007, 228, 462). In the Quartet, the
schema enacts the actual modulation, with an implication for G minor
to continue across the barline at bars 45as Weber also described it
with a completion of the Fenaroli, as does occur in the analogous music
in F minor at bars 89 (see Example 4). But at bar 5, the unexpected D
in the rst violin, along with the ensuing parallelism between bars 14
and bars 58, retrospectively turns the Fenaroli into a Monte schema.
These prospective and retrospective implications are illustrated with ar-
rows in Example 4, with implied motions and scale degrees never real-
ized represented in gray. Between bars 14 and 58, then, a larger Fonte
schema emerges, whose two stages each contain a pairing of a lesol
fisol with a Fenaroli (Example 4): the most basic feature of a Fonte,
as Riepel initially dened it, involves the transposition of some musical
segment one step lower (Gjerdingen 2007, 6176, 456).
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260
Musica Humana
But the historicism of Webers schema-oriented hearing only emerges
when contrasted with competing and potentially modern-specic habits
of listening: Heinrich Schenkers analysis from a century later in Der
freie Satz (1935), reproduced in Example 8, registers no change of key
whatsoever, instead reading the opening as a tonic prolongation in C
minor, which leads to a dominant via a series of parallel-sixth progres-
sions.
Example 8
Dissonance Quartet analysis from Schenker 1935
Unlike the obsessive moment-by-moment orientation in Webers es-
say, Schenkers analysis represents an instance of structural hearing
(Salzer 1982), whereby harmonic phenomena lying outside the context
of the principal tonality are viewed not [as] modulatory agent[s], as
Salzer relates it (1982, 18), but serve a larger contrapuntal process that
ultimately serves to elaborate the triad of the principal key (Schenker
1935). Without diminishing the value of Schenkers later integrative pre-
dispositions, by sacricing phenomena of the moment to the larger
picture in this way, something in the historical resonance of the Quartet
has nevertheless been lost in Dahlhaus and Cudworths terms. To
borrow a metaphor Gjerdingen applies in a related context, without
these alluring and persistent changes in the tonality, these localized
preoccupations, the color of the opening theme, like the Parthenon of
Athens, subsides to a more black-and-white or grayscale image with the
passing of time (2007, 19). The distance in Webers hearing is met only
in diametric relation to Schenkers competing interpretation of the same
261
Autumn 2009
work, and at a time when the very meaning of tonalitys concept was
also undergoing radical mutation in Foucaults terms, as something
of a Kuhnian paradigm shift (Kuhn 1962).
We see this shift literally materializing in a series of misreadings that
Oswald Jonas, as editor, brings to the English translation of Schenkers
Harmonielehre from 1906 (Eng. trans. 1954). To begin with, Jonas de-
liberately suppressed Schenkers own, more historically oriented hearing
of the Quartet (Schenker 1906, 13236)which closely corresponds
to Webersand replaced it with this later analysis from 1935. The
three-page deletion from the original German is a bona de symptom
of the paradigm shift that transpired circa 1930. Jonas responded as if
Schenkers earlier, cumbersome explanation . . . based on modulations
and keys (Eng. trans. 1954, 346), as he puts it, were somehow a threat
to the newly rising epistemology and institutionalization of structural
hearing, in the process of Americanizing Schenker (see Rothstein 1990;
Cook 2007).
Beethoven, Piano Sonata in E Minor, Op. 90 (1814)
Elsewhere in the Harmonielehre, Jonas takes Schenkers description of
Beethovens E-minor Piano Sonata, op. 90 (1814), to be mistaken. In
1906, Schenker dwells on the immediate transformation of the opening
E-minor tonic as a submediant in G major, as illustrated in Example 9.
Indeed, in the context of an eighteenth-century mentalit (cf. Gjerdin-
gen 2007, 19), the opening of the sonata is unmistakably a variation on
what Gjerdingen calls the paired doremi schema (2007, 8588),
the variant of Meyers Adeste Fidelis archetype containing an inter-
nal caesura. In the galant style, the convention customarily appears as
an opening gambit to a movement, and therefore as the rst expression
of a principal tonality, as seen in the opening of the third movement of
Mozarts D-major Piano Sonata, K. 576 (Example 10). The reinterpre-
tation of E minor as submediant in Op. 90 functions within the larger
context of this schema, oriented to the key of G major, as implied by
Schenkers initial description (Eng. trans. 1954, 252); and this same,
modulating variant of the paired doremi similarly brings the tonality
BYROS
262
Musica Humana
from G major to B minor in bars 48 (Example 9). Nothing of this oc-
curred to Jonas: in a footnote, he writes, Obviously, Schenker made a
mistake here. As a matter of fact, the sonata is in E minor (Eng. trans.
1954, 252; added emphasis).

Example 9
Beethoven, Piano Sonata in E minor, op. 90 (1814), i,
Mit lebhaftigkeit und durchaus mit Empndung und Ausdruck, bars 19:
modulating paired doremi schema
263
Autumn 2009
Example 10
Mozart, Piano Sonata in D major, K. 576 (1789), iii, Allegretto, bars 14:
paired doremi schema
Now, the question inevitably arises whether these differences in Schen-
kers analysis and Jonass misreading of Schenkerprompted, as they
are, by structural hearingare simply instances of theoretical predis-
position and bias, or truly representative of a cognitive phenomenon
that is, representative of a way of hearing, of another form of hearing
as in Scruton and Spitzers terms. To answer the question is not a mat-
ter of establishing a direct causal chain of relations between the theory
of structural hearing and modern modes of cognition or vice versa,
but rather whether (theoretical and analytic) descriptions of structural
hearing may be symptomatic of some modern mode of cognition, or
simply of circumstances imposed by a twentieth-century or present-day
situation.
Beethoven, Eroica Symphony, Op. 55 (1803)
Towards that end, perhaps the most compelling evidence for an ar-
chaeology of hearing comes from Beethovens Eroica Symphony (Ex-
ample 11), where the opposition between past and present materializes
BYROS
264
Musica Humana
not simply between individuals, and not only diachronically, but be-
tween entire strains of reception history and therefore also synchronic-
ally (Byros 2009, chap. 1). In 1807, Friedrich Rochlitz describes bars 79
of the opening theme as modulating formally to G minor (frmlich
nach G moll; 1807, 321), in a review for the Leipzig Allgemeine musi-
kalische Zeitung that displays the same localized preoccupations with
the phenomenology of the moment as Webers Versuch and essay on the
Dissonance Quartet:
The symphony begins with an Allegro con brio in three quarter time in
E major. After the tonic triad has been powerfully sounded two times
by the entire orchestra, the violoncello states, softly, but noticeably
enough, the . . . simple principal subject [in bb. 34], which hereafter is
to be set up, turned around, and worked out from all sides. Already in
bar 7, where the diminished seventh appears over C in the bass, and in
bar 9, where the 6/4 chord appears over D, the composer prepares the
listener to be often agreeably deceived in the succession of harmonies.
And even this preludizing deviation (prludirende Abweichung), where
one expects to be led formally (frmlich) to G minor, but in place of the
resolution of the 6/4 chord nds the fourth led upward to a fth, and
so, by means of the 6/5 chord, nds oneself unexpectedly back at home
in E majoreven this is interesting and pleasing. (Rochlitz 1807, 321;
slightly modied translation from Senner et al. 2001, 2:21)
9
As I have demonstrated elsewhere, hearing a modulation to G minor is a
consequence of psychologically contextualizing the opening bars of the
theme against the lesolsol schema as a historically determined men-
tal template (Byros 2008; 2009). In short, the lesolfisol frequently
appears in the context of a key-change that involves a modulation up
a major third: a modulating variation of the schema that I call the le
solfisol inter-key variant (Byros 2009). Example 12 displays one
instance from the second movement of the fourth sonata among six that
Emanuel Bach appended to the Versuch ber die wahre Art das Clavier
zu spielen of 1753: namely, the eleventh of eighteen Probestcke, each
of which serves a musical as well as pedagogical function.
265
Autumn 2009
E
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BYROS
266
Musica Humana
E
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267
Autumn 2009
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BYROS
268
Musica Humana
Bars 2324 show the same schema from Example 5 now prompt-
ing a modulation from D major to F minor, by virtue of a functional
reinterpretation that transforms D major from a tonique to a minor
sus-dominante, or D in the bass from do to le (Example 12). The un-
derlying pedagogical context is especially relevant in this connection:
the Probestck not only demonstrates the schemas use as a means of
modulating up a major third, but as the means of doing so; it not only
appears in a modulating context but it advances the structural modula-
tion of the movement. The Largo maestoso from which Example 12 is
excerpted begins in and returns to D major at bar 15, following modu-
lations to the dominant (bb. 512) and the relative minor (bb. 1314).
But the modulation to F minor at bars 2324 causes the movement to
end in a different key than it begins; the half cadence at bar 24 is sus-
tained via extemporization and ultimately transformed into a perfect
authentic cadence in F minor at bar 26. Much like the Rule of the Oc-
tave summarizes the central tendencies or habits of eighteenth-century
harmonic practice (Christensen 1992; Lester 1992, 4989; Gjerdingen
2005; 2007, 465480; Holtmeier 2007), Bachs Probestck, an equally
musical and music-pedagogical artifact, summarizes or objectifies the
customary means of modulating up by a major third. That is, the modu-
lating inter-key variant is itself schematic (cf. modulating Prinner
in Gjerdingen 2007, 52), and when isolated from the total population of
544 instances of the lesolsol from Figure 4a above, which includes
the nonmodulating intra-key variants, its own subpopulation also
approximates a Gaussian historical distribution, which also peaks in the
1790s, as seen in Figure 8.
For a historical and historically-informed listener, the opening of the
Eroica is but another manifestation of the same phenomenon seen in
Bachs Probestck, as well as the passage excerpted in Example 13,
from Haydns Symphony no. 82 in C major, LOurs (1786), which
shows the inter-key variant at the same pitch-class level of the Eroica.
For a listener who hears a G-minor tonality emerging in bars 69 of the
Eroica, the mind imposes a top-down inuence derived from memories
of passages like the Bach Probestck and Haydn symphony, by posi-
tioning the sound stimulus of bars 19 within a series of what Meyer
called memories of relevant musical experiences (Meyer 1956, 88).
269
Autumn 2009
Figure 8
Historical population distribution of the lesolfisol schema inter-key variant,
17201840 (Byros 2009)
Example 13
Haydn, Symphony no. 82 in C major, Lours (1786), Finale: Vivace, bars 13339:
lesolsol modulating, inter-key variant (Byros 2009)
BYROS
270
Musica Humana
Or, as Weber himself described it, a habit has the effect to make the ear
put this or that accustomed construction upon the different harmonies
that may occur (Weber 183032, 2:12627; Eng. trans. 1851, 1:345).
In this sense, a tonal schema is synonymous with Webers category of
gewohnte Modulation (Customary Progression), one among five of
Webers Habits of the Ear: it is natural also that the ear (das Ge-
hr) should become accustomed to many modes of modulation [i.e.,
harmonic progression] in the most common use, and should become
thereby much inclined to understand an harmonic succession in the cus-
tomary sense (Weber 183032, 2:137; Eng. trans. Weber 1851, 1:355).
Now, in the Eroica, the resolution of the 6/4 at bar 9 never material-
izes: as Rochlitz describes it, in place of the resolution of the 6/4 chord
[one] nds the fourth led upward to a fth, and so, by means of the 6/5
chord [at bar 10], nds oneself unexpectedly back at home in E major
(1807, 321; translation from Senner et al. 2001, 2:21; added emphasis).
But the absence of this single, terminal feature in the schema is inconse-
quential in terms of what operates in the mind upon hearing the sound
stimulus of the opening theme, prior to the disruption of the schema
at bar 10, for the lesolsol has already been activated as a context
for interpretation. One of the central tenets of schema theory stipulates
that, once activating a schema, a listener supplies default values for any
of its missing features (Gjerdingen 1988, 7; Rumelhart 1980); and these
culturally learned schematic expectations are irrepressible (Bharucha
1994, 21517). But the significance of schema theory lies less in the
notion of expectation as such, than in the underlying cognitive process
that gives rise to it. Expectation is simply a byproduct of a synchronic
activation of a cognitive context in the mind, a top-down inuence that
subsequently transforms a given sound stimulusas yet uninter-
preted acoustic signals or informationinto a sound termacoustic
signals interpreted as part of the prevalent style system of the culture
(Meyer 1956, 4547). [T]o understand [Beethovens] theme, as Mi-
chael Spitzer describes the relation of the 17, 43 schema to Mozarts
piano sonata in Example 1, is to compare it with a representation in
271
Autumn 2009
the mind formed by memories of themes like itimposing a learned
conceptual template (Spitzer 2004, 31), which, in the case of the Eroi-
ca, is the lesolsol schema.
But Brian Hyer, having read Rochlitz, deems the G-minor hearing
unpersuasive (Hyer 1996, 81), in a way that mirrors Jonass correc-
tion of Schenkers mistake[n] hearing of op. 90. For Hyer, the bass D
in bar 9 of the Eroica carrying a 6/4 chord is heard, categorically, as a
leading tone to E: I must admit to nding the reviewers hearing of the
6/4 above D [b. 9] unpersuasive: I believe our memories of E are too re-
cent for us to hear D as anything but a leading tone to E (Hyer 1996,
81). Do we accept Rochlitz and Hyers competing responses as evidence
for some inevitable subjectivity about perception, or as symptoms of
their respective cultures and environments, as representations of histori-
cal and modern modes of cognition? The reception history of the Eroica
provides evidence of the latter. Rochlitzs G-minor hearing would rever-
berate for two centuries to form a strain of reception that extends from
1807 to the present, as shown in Figure 9. Hyers E hearing, on the
other hand, has its origins in Schenkers famous Meisterwerk analysis
of the symphony from 1930 (Schenker 1930), and its recurrences are
otherwise limited to responses at the turn of the twenty-first century
(Figure 9).
10
Beyond their modern situation, the actors in the E strain
are alike in their shared inclination to view the G-minor 6/4 chord at
bar 9which Stephen Rumph describes as having settled in G minor
(2004, 90)as an entirely incidental phenomenon: as a functionally
extraneous (Barry 2000, 10910) apparent chord (Klein 2005, 83).
Like Schenkers analysis of the Dissonance Quartet and Jonass (mis-)
reading of op. 90, with the E strain of reception, events of the moment
appear to have been similarly sacrificed to the larger context, to
the recent memory of E major and the tonic that controls the entire
context in Hyers terms (1996, 91). Unlike the preceding case studies
however, Hyer, Barry, and Klein in the E strain of reception display a
similar style of reasoning, but outside the (at least conscious) inuence
of theoretical biasby a natural, or rather, by a theoretically unme-
diated cognitive response to the opening theme.
BYROS
272
Musica Humana
(a)
(b)
Figure 9
Eroica Symphony, two competing strains of reception to bars 69
of the opening theme (from Byros 2009)
(a) Timeline representation; (b) Quantied representation
273
Autumn 2009
The Alloy of History Forged and Dissolved
Dahlhaus might not nd a more ideal body of evidence: the reception
history of the Eroica fulfills both of his paradoxical conditions. The
alloy formed by past and present is both indissoluble in G minor, and
dissoluble in E. The past represented by G minor and the lesolsol
schema giving rise to it extends into the present but is simultaneously
lost. On the one hand, the indissolubility of G minor provides evidence
for some persistent consciousness that has resisted the passing of time,
in the form of what the French philosopher-sociologist Maurice Hal-
bwachs has called a collective memory: a current of continuous
thought . . . [that] retains from the past only what is still living . . . in
the consciousness of the [social] group that maintains it (1997, 131).
History, in this sense, as Peter Burke argues in his reading of Halbwa-
chs, becomes social memory, which is no longer history in the proper
sense of the term: social groups determine what is memorable and
how it will be remembered (Burke 1989, 98), whereas history, prop-
erly speaking, always involves the reconstruction of a distant and lost
past. In Halbwachs argument, collective memory and history are
effectively mutually opposed categories: the latter begins where the for-
mer ends (1997, 131ff.). But the historical resonance of the G-minor
hearing, beginning, as it does, in 1807, only emerges in the face of the
conicting E-major strain of reception, as a necessary, discriminating
component that traces a Foucauldian mutationthe threshold of a
new positivity in the very concept of tonality, graphically represented
in Figure 9.
Historical Resonance and Historical Distance
Together, all three case studies betray a more common underlying pat-
tern: the historical resonance in the hearings of Weber (K. 465), Schen-
ker (op. 90), and Rochlitz (Eroica) seems to lie in their re-cognition
of these opening themes against a schema as a historically determined
mental template, while the competing modern responses appear as a
consequence of the schematas absence, loss, or suppression by modern
habits, whether mutually informed by structural hearing, or simply as
BYROS
274
Musica Humana
a result of the distance from the original culture. Indeed the loss of his-
torical resonance, owing to historical distance, is the norm, rather than
the exception, in most philosophies of hearing. By way of example, con-
sider Eric Clarkes ecologically oriented argument in Ways of Listening:
Even the most specialized expert listener who has attempted to re-
construct an early nineteenth-century sensibility is in a situation that
is utterly different from a true contemporary of Beethovensif only
because of all the music that has sounded since then. A twenty-rst cen-
tury listener is inevitably not only deaf to some or many of the conven-
tions that the music invokes, but also hears all kinds of later resonances
that a contemporary of Beethovens obviously would not. (Clarke 2005,
17172)
Rose Rosengard Subotnik advances the same argument in a decon-
struction of structural listening, by proposing that a [modern] listener
. . . hear[s] overtones of intervening knowledge and experience which
drown out or erase various responses that could have originally been
intended or anticipated, while adding others (Subotnik 1988; reprinted
in Scott 2000, 172). Or, as Gjerdingen describes it more simply, strong
habits in the present easily mask differences in the past (2007, 4). And
all three case studies would support these statements, including the Ero-
icas E strain of reception.
But all the same, the indissolubility and continuity of the G-minor
strain would indicate that strong habits in the past equally mask or sup-
press differences in the present. Not only do schemata seem to provide
the cognitive mechanism that allows for a historical mode of listening
today in a positive sense, by providing a historically-determined cogni-
tive context for interpretation, but also in the negative sense, by allow-
ing one to forget or erase intervening knowledge, and to drown
out modern associations and inuences. Because a schema, as seen in
its more sophisticated formalization by Rumelhart, Smolensky, et al.
in Figure 1, is not only the mental encoding of a statistical redundancy
in the environment, but also a constraint network: the activation of
a single node within one of the sub-schemata in Figure 1 imposes its
necessary connexion (Hume 1777) with, and the activation of, the

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other nodes in that schema, according to its goodness of t with the
visual stimulus, which is commonly known as a spreading activation
in the langue courante of connectionist researchers, as indicated by lines
and arrows in Figure 1 (Rumelhart, Smolensky, et al. 1986; Rumelhart
1980). But at the same time, the activation of node FLL from Schema
L presupposes a deactivation of, and negative connection with, BLL
in Schema R, and, by extension, the deactivation of all of the nodes in
this rival schema, whose negative pairings with the nodes in Schema L
are represented by dashed lines with dotted endpoints in the illustra-
tion. The Necker Cube schema as a whole therefore contains two larger
sets of activation as well as deactivation. Built into the very concept of
a schema is not only a culture-associative component that forms a cog-
nitive context for interpretation, by activating knowledge relevant to a
given situation, but also a disassociative component that turns off or
deactivates irrelevant or contradictory knowledge. In respect to the Ero-
ica, the inter-key variant of the lesolsol provides a culturally co-
herent context for perception, while also eliminating all other contexts
and knowledge that fall outside the possibilities of the style as a prob-
ability system, to use Leonard Meyers phrase (1956; 1967). By means
of these negative connections, there is something of a cloistering effect
that operates in the mind, whereby the historical system is unaffected
by outside inuencesoutside, that is, the style as a probability system.
For a historically informed listener, once having formed these schemata
in memory, historical distance becomes immaterial, and historical listen-
ing then becomes virtually inevitable. As Donald Norman described it,
once you start developing a particular set of knowledge structures [i.e.,
schemata], youre committed to them for the rest of your life. They will
color your interpretation of everything (in Baars 1986, 386).
Classical Scripts and Romantic Plans
The implications of the schema concept move well beyond the particu-
lars and recognition of the schemata themselves: prolonged exposure
to eighteenth-century music would not only promote the cognitive as-
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similation and development of eighteenth-century schemata, such as the
17, 43 and lesolfisol, by process of statistical learning, but may
also give rise to a more general way of hearing that is consistent with
an eighteenth-century mentalit, and it is precisely in the underlying
generalizability of the situation that one may speak of schema-oriented/
historical versus structural/modern modes of cognition. In 1977, the
psychologists Roger Schank and Robert Abelson distinguished between
different categories of schemata they called scripts and plans. A
script is an extremely detailed knowledge structure that describes
appropriate sequences of events in a particular context. [It is] is made
up of slots and requirements about what can ll those slots. The struc-
ture is an interconnected whole and what is in one slot affects what
can be in another. . . . Thus, a script is a predetermined, stereotyped
sequence of actions that denes a well-known situation (Schank and
Abelson 1977, 41; added emphasis). A plan, on the other hand, is a
more general structure, a repository for general information that will
connect events that cannot be connected by use of an available script or
by standard causal chain expansion, owing to the absence of specic
information about the connectivity of events: i.e., a script . . . is not
available (1977, 70).
In one of Meyers later contributions to schema theory (1989), he
assigned these categories a historical dimension, by arguing that eigh-
teenth-century music is inherently script-oriented, while nineteenth-
century music is increasingly more plan-based in its organization,
notwithstanding the presence of scripts and plans, generally
speaking, in both styles.
11
By this estimation, not only will a histori-
cal and historically-informed listener be psychologically equipped with
eighteenth-century scripts, that is, the schemata, but also will have cul-
tivated a mode of listening or behavior that continually seeks out those
scripts in the act of listening. In Music in the Galant Style, Gjerdingen
provides both Markov-model and graphic representations of this lis-
tening strategy, which are based on historical descriptions of composi-
tionspecically, Leopold Mozarts account of one dening hallmark
of a master composer: il lo (the thread; Gjerdingen 2007, 369ff.).
Gjerdingen interprets Mozarts metaphor as a matter of [p]lacing
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things in a suitable order[, thereby] creat[ing] the cognitive thread (il
filo) that . . . guides the listener through a musical work (369). The
rst, Markov-model representation of the lo process, shown in Figure
10, gives the probability for some schema A to be followed by another
schema B, based on a small repertory of works, and the stock of sche-
mata discussed in Gjerdingens monograph (2007, 372).
Figure 10
First-order Markov chain of schema probability, from Gjerdingen 2007, 372
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For instance, we see the probability that an Augmented Sixth will
precede a Ponte schema (in brief, a dominant expansion) is extremely
high by comparison with most other transitions. In the second represen-
tation, reproduced in Figure 11, Gjerdingen describes a series of sche-
mata . . . as beads on a mental string or cognitive threadil lo (2007,
375). The thread may consist of a simple succession of schemata,
as in Figure 11a, or of a more complex arrangement involving the
overlapping of schemata as well as the nesting of lower-level with-
in higher-level schemata, as in Figure 11b. Though Gjerdingen never
explicitly describes these threaded representations in terms of scripts
and plans as such, Figure 11 closely represents Meyers original de-
scription in abstract, graphic form:
[C]hanging-note melodies [like the 17, 43], antecedent [and] con-
sequent phrases, full authentic cadences (subdominantdominant
tonic), and sonata-form structures . . . are scriptlike. Thus, once part of
a changing-note pattern is comprehended [e.g., 17], subsequent parts
of the pattern are largely predictable. To the extent that the syntactic
constraints shaping some script are unfamiliar, however, the listener
will tend to understand that script in terms of a more general plan. .
. . While music of the Classic period employs plan-based patternings,
these are almost always coordinated and dominated by scripts. In the
nineteenth century, the situation is more or less reversed: what had been
specific syntactic scripts tend to be subsumed within or transformed
into general plans. (Meyer 1989, 24546)
Figure 11a
Threaded representation of low-level schema successions
(A string of schematail lo), from Gjerdingen 2007, 376
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Autumn 2009
Figure 11b
Threaded representation of schema nesting and overlapping,
from Gjerdingen 2007, 376
Meyer applied the script category to eighteenth-century music in a
way that suggests a more general mentalit or episteme, in Foucaults
terms, that underlies the construction of several if not all of its param-
eters. My own research has also proceeded in this direction, but speci-
cally with regard to tonality (or as eighteenth-century musicians called
it, modulation), to argue that the expression and perception of a
key in music of the long eighteenth century is fundamentally script-
oriented in its design (Byros 2009). Evidence of such a mentalit may be
gleaned from partimenti, the Rule of the Octave, and other eighteenth-
century thoroughbass artifacts (cf. Gjerdingen 2007a; Holtmeier 2007),
such as chord-form tables that illustrate the probability for a given
chord-form succession in a rst-order Markov chain, as seen in Figure
12, from Michel Correttes Prototipes of 1754. Beyond the suggestive
title of Correttes treatise (cf. prototypes to schemata) towards
reconstructing a schema-theoretic conception of eighteenth-century
tonality, Correttes table of chord-form probability is isomorphic with
Gjerdingens schema-sucession probability matrix in Figure 10, in
providing the statistically most probable succession given a particular
chord-form antecedent state. Together, they speak to the same philoso-
phy underlying the concept of a script, by objectifying the appropri-
ate sequences of events in a particular context, and the stereotyped
sequence of actions that dene a well-known situation, in Schank and
Abelsons terms.
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Figure 12
Probability table of chord-form succession, from Michel Corrette,
Prototipes (1754, 1213)
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Figure 12 [continued]
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In addition to thoroughbass artifacts, the script-oriented conception
of tonality is further documented by moment-by-moment analytic de-
scriptions by Vogler (1776; 1778), Koch (178293), Weber, Rochlitz,
and even Mozart himself (1784; see Lester 1992, 86; cf. also Anson-
Cartwright 2000, 177). That both Johann David Heinichen (1728) and
David Kellner (1732) used the term schema to characterize the Rule
of the Octave is perhaps not coincidental (Byros 2009, chap. 2).
Il lo: Navigating the Thread
The orientation of the tonality in both the opening themes of the Eroica
and the Dissonance Quartet are entirely consistent with these histori-
cal artifacts in their progression of low-level scripts. In the Eroica,
as seen in Example 11, the tonal scheme of the entire opening theme,
E majorG minorE major, is articulated by a low-level progression
of schemata analogous to the Mozart-Gjerdingen lo concept in Figure
11b. The progression begins with a Bastien variant of a Tonic-Triad
Arpeggiation, from the overture to Mozarts Singspiel Bastien und
Bastienne (1768). The Bastien schema then elides with the inter-key
variant of the lesolsol at bars 46, which brings the tonality into
G minor and opens up a path for the symphony never fully realized in
its opening theme.
12
In Figure 13, Gjerdingen graphically illustrates this
notion of paths lesser known in a succession of schemata and schema
probability. The path, or the thread, he writes, is the result of choic-
es made at various forks. In Figure 13, paths M, N, O, and P represent
choices not made. The musical import of these choices can vary from
listener to listener. Someone new to the galant style will hardly be aware
of any of the paths not taken. A galant composer [or historically in-
formed listener], by contrast, would have known several alternatives at
each fork and their implications (Gjerdingen 2007, 379). The disrup-
tion of the lesolsol at bar 10, analogous to the divergent paths in
Figure 13, occurs by means of another instance of schema-overlapping:
the absence of resolution of the 6/4 at bar 10 is caused by a retrospec-
tive interpretation of the last two events of the lesolsol as the rst
two events of a Monte, which amounts to a modulating variant of the
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17, 43, whereby an implied but never fully realized 17 in G minor is
answered by a 43 in E major (see Example 11); and as is common for
a modulating 17, 43, the rst stage . . . involves subdominant rather
than tonic harmonies (Gjerdingen 2007, 115)in this case, the C
diminished seventh chord, operating as a chromatic sous-dominante in
bars 78.
13

The VkI progression in E major at bars 1011 of the Eroica constitutes
the second stage of the schema. The rst stage elided with the lesol
sol, however, remains incomplete, because of an elision that results in
the absence of resolution of the 6/4 chord at bar 9. But even this modu-
lating 17, 43 / Monte schema which returns the tonality to E major
paradoxically supplies a mental resolution of the 6/4 chord in bar 9 to
a G-minor dominant, in order to satisfy (retrospectively) the parallelism
constraint between the two stages of the schema. The bass parallelism
of CD, DE would, under normal circumstances, be coupled with a
GF, AG parallelism in the top voice, as shown in the hypothetical
recomposition of the opening theme in Example 14, where the second
stage of the modulating 17, 43 is rhythmically compressed, as well as
in the abstract representation of the schema in Figure 14.
Figure 13
Alternative schema paths, from Gjerdingen 2007, 379
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Musica Humana
Example 14
Hypothetical realization of implicit modulating 17, 43 /
Monte schema underlying bars 610 of the Eroica Symphony
Figure 14
Modulating 17, 43 / Monte schema: abstract mental representation
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In the Eroica, this parallelism between stages in the Monte / modulat-
ing 17, 43 is further elaborated by the analogous suspension of A in
the rst violins at bar 11, corresponding to the suspension of G in bar
9, which recalls the paradigmatic statement-response attribute of
the 17, 43 (Example 11). By Gjerdingens characterization, the outer
voices of a schema form a musical pas de deux: if one adapts the
metaphor to bars 711, the danseuse of the melody falls out of step
with the danseur of the bass in bars 910, by never resolving its G to
an F as a proper 43 suspension within the larger context of a cadential
6/4, as does occur in bar 10 with AG (Gjerdingen 2007, 142).
14
The
remainder of the theme, then, consists of a cadenza compostaa perfect
authentic cadence with a cadential 6/4whose fa scale-degree is elabo-
rated by means of an Indugio (see Gjerdingen 2007, 141, and Clau-
sulae, 13976, in general). The compositional make-up of the sym-
phonys opening theme is therefore entirely consistent with moment-by-
moment strategies of listening and compositional devices documented
in eighteenth-century analyses and thoroughbass artifacts.
The same process of a low-level script-progression regulates the
succession of tonalities in the opening of the Dissonance Quartet
(Example 4). Following the repetition of the lesolfisol top-voice
variant and Fenaroli pair from bars 14 in bars 58which takes the
tonality from C minor, through G minor and B minor, into F minor
bars 610 return the tonality to C minor, through E major, by means
of a Fonte. As a low-level schema, the Fonte, also first introduced by
Riepel (175268), is the inverse of a Monte, containing two stages with
two events, each stage resolving a dissonant 6/3, 6/5, or 7/5/3 chord to a
consonant triad; but the relation between stages in the Fonte is descend-
ing, frequently by step from a minor to a major key (e.g., D minor to C
major; see Figure 15). Oftentimes, the dissonant seventh chord will be in
the form of a 6/4/2 (which results from ipping the top voice and bass)
that resolves to a more consonant 6/3 triad, as occurs in bars 910 and
1011 of the Dissonance Quartet (Example 4).
15
Like the Monte, the
Fonte is often varied (in chromatic environments) to result in an interval
of displacement of a third between the two stages of the schema over a
stepwise bass, as occurs in bars 912 of the quartet. The tido progres-
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Musica Humana
sion normally found in the bass, and normally coupled with a fami
(or me), appears here in the second violin; and as occurs with much of
the preceding material in the quartets opening, scale degree 7 in each
stage of the schema is metrically displaced, whereby D and B appear in
bars 10 and 11 as implied suspensions from bars 9 and 10, but actually
sound as appoggiaturas and incomplete neighbor tones, coupled with
the suspended F and D in bars 910 and 1011, respectively.
Figure 15
Fonte schema, from Gjerdingen 2007, 456
Noteworthy is the emergence of a more plan-like structure from
this low-level succession of scripts: namely, a descending chromatic bass
from bars 110, broken by the second stage of the Fonte in bars 1112.
The chromatic bass and parallel-sixths progression in Mozarts Disso-
nance Quartet, as objectied in Schenkers analysis (Example 8), illus-
trate a paradigmatic instance of Meyers argument that, where higher-
level plans do arise in the Classical style, they are byproducts of or
coordinated and dominated by scripts. But, whereas to an eighteenth-
century mentalit the chromatic bass plan is a higher-level schema
resulting from the low-level progression of scripts, in Schenkers analy-
sis it becomes the rationalizing mechanism for interpretation, to which
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the historically oriented scripts-progression and, more importantly, the
succession of tonalities, is entirely lost. The stylistically more neutral or
general categories of the chromatic bass and the fauxbourdon progres-
sion suggest a striking parallel with Schank and Abelsons description
of a plan: In listening to discourse, people use plans to make sense of
seemingly disconnected sentences. . . . For any two conceptualizations
that are related by their occurrence in a story, we must be able to trace
a path between them. The path must be based on general information
(1977, 70). Likewise, when listening to [music], people use plans to
make sense of seemingly disconnected [tonalities]. . . . For any two
[chords or keys] that are related by their occurrence in a [musical pas-
sage or work], we must be able to trace a path [cf. chromatic scale] be-
tween them.
The same phenomenon of privileging a larger-scale plan over a
series of low-level scripts is common to every one of the preceding
case studiesthe Dissonance Quartet, op. 90, and the Eroicaand
each involves a difference in the perception of key, which suggests that
a plan-oriented mechanism for key-perception may have developed
since the later nineteenth century, and that elements of structural hear-
ing are perhaps an inexorable fallout of these stylistic developments. It
stands to reason that music containing low, or lower, levels of statistical
and perceptual redundancy (Meyer 1967) will desensitize moment-by-
moment strategies of listening encouraged by highly perceptually-redun-
dant styles, where the phenomenon of probability is placed center-stage:
the moment-by-moment attuning to a key, by Mozart, Koch, Vogler,
Rochlitz, Weber, and others, is a consequence of the script nature of
music in the long eighteenth century, and the commensurate listening
strategies it promotes.
Theoretical Fallout: Towards an Archaeological Principle
Script and plans may therefore provide a more formal perspective
on the notion that historical and modern modes of cognition differ spe-
cically in the presence and absence of schemata. Schank and Abelson
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argued that script-based processing is a much more top-down opera-
tion [and therefore] . . . a process which takes precedence over plan-
based processing when an appropriate script is [cognitively] available
(1977, 99; added emphasis; see also Meyer 1989, 345ff., and Gjerdin-
gen 1988, 89). To return, once more, to the Eroica problem, the dif-
ference between Rochlitzs and Hyers perceptions of key may lie not
simply in the presence and absence of the lesolsol, but in the more
general difference between script- and plan-based strategies of listen-
ing or key-perception. In this way, the modern hearings differ less in the
absence of a schema per se, than in the unavailability of a script schema,
and the consequent employment of a more general, less probability-ori-
ented plan-strategy for negotiating the tonality. Implicit in Schank and
Abelsons denition of a plan is that less information from the sound
stimulus is influenced by schema-based memory, which results in a
disproportionate distribution of schema-based memoryoperating as a
top-down inuenceacross the acoustic substrate or sound stimulus.
Previous studies in visual perception indicate that schemas control the
amount of attention that is given to various aspects of a situation (J.
Mandler 1984, 109), an interpretation that appears to be consistent
with cognitive formulations of structural hearing by generative music
theory (Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983; Lerdahl 2001):
[T]he specic content of an event degrades and generalizes into mem-
ory, depending on the framework in which it is experienced. Conse-
quently, at any prolongational level, only what is needed in that context
is retained through a transformational operation. . . . The transforma-
tions in question are deletion. (Lerdahl 2001, 3536)
The theoretical predisposition of sacrificing phenomena of the mo-
ment to the larger picture finds a cognitive correlate in this notion of
transformational deletion. But ironically, these structural or hierar-
chical modes of listening, often associated with top-down concepts
because the surrounding hierarchy in the musical context is said to
impose a top-down inuence on the events of the momentare actually
more bottom-up and data driven: Bottom-up or data-driven processes
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are hard-wired, do not depend on learning or context, and rely on struc-
tural perceptual features of stimuli [added emphasis], not the stimulis
meaning. Prior learning, context, and meaning presumably make their
contribution through top-down or conceptually-driven processing
(Johnson and Hirst 1993, 260). The underlying operation of a bottom-
up and top-down strategy can be seen rather transparently in Hyers and
Rochlitzs descriptions, respectively. For Hyer, the bass note D in bar 9
of the Eroica carrying a 6/4 chord is heard as anything but a leading
tone, because of our too recent memories of E from bars 16 in
the symphony. Rochlitz, on the other hand, describes a G-minor modu-
lation as the result of some culturally determined rule implicit in the
qualifying term frmlichman frmlich nach G moll glaubt geleitet
zu werden (one expects to be led formally to G minor). Whereas the
E hearing documented in Hyers essay appears to be a consequence of
a bottom-up strategy, of rely[ing] on structural perceptual features of
stimulithe emphasis on and memories of E from the beginning of
the symphonyRochlitzs G-minor hearing is a consequence of a rather
different form of memory: the memory of the lesolsol schema op-
erating as a top-down inuence. Plans subverting scripts amounts to
probability giving way to structural salience. Lerdahl himself suggests
that listeners perceive tonal tension retrospectively and therefore hier-
archically, unless schematic intuitions are strong (Lerdahl and Krum-
hansl 2007, 342, 358; added emphasis).
The Archaeology of Scripts and Plans
The scripts versus plans dichotomy returns the problem once more
to archaeology in Foucaults sense, whereby each category may sub-
stitute for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epistemes or spaces of
musical knowledge. Meyers Classical-scripts-versus-Romantic-plans
interpretation of style change resonates with Foucaults articulation
of a historical disconnect between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
modes of thought (Foucault 1994, xxiixxiv). In Meyers view, the
transition from an eighteenth- to a nineteenth-century European style
involves a commensurate development from more culture-specific to
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more natural, innate, or Gestalt-based musical structures (1989),
which corresponds with broadly dened characterizations of the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries as the Age of Empiricism and the
Age of Romanticism, respectively. Spitzer interprets Meyers evo-
lution as a gradual shift from culture to nature, from a classical style
that is rule-governed, learned, and conventional (1989, 209) to a
repudiation of convention (164) in romantic music (2004, 46). The
preceding evidence surrounding the three case studies would indicate a
commensurate, albeit likely unconscious, repudiation of convention
in a cognitive sense for some modern listenerswhether in the form
of transformational deletion or by resorting to a plan strategy, or
bothand a predilection for rule-governed, learned, and convention-
al modes of listening for historical and historically-informed listeners.
It may be without coincidence that Lerdahl ties the hierarchical orien-
tation of the generative music theory program to a nativist argument,
and likens it to a natural propensity of the musical mind (Lerdahl
2001, 4).
16
In the absence of a learned, culture-driven script-schema,
the mind potentially makes recourse to more innate, hard-wired,
bottom-up, Gestalt-driven, or plan-based strategies for negotiat-
ing the ux of musical experience. It is precisely in this hypothesis that
a modern mode of listening may be synonymous or consistent with a
structural, hierarchical, or more plan-based orientation, and histori-
cal modes of listening commensurate with a schema-driven, script-
based conception. Historical and cultural distance leads to schema loss
or absence, which causes a more weighted activation of bottom-up
primitivesinterpret[ing] events with respect to events already heard
in a work (Lerdahl and Krumhansl 2007, 358)in the stead of top-
down schemata:
17
the absence of a schema requires the comprehender
to seek an organizing framework; whether sucessful or not, the situa-
tion involves more data-driven processing than when a schema is easily
and rapidly activated (J. Mandler 1984, 106; added emphasis). There
are, furthermore, strong sociohistorical factors that may explain such
a transition from schema-driven/top-down/probability-oriented to
structural/bottom-up/hierarchy-oriented strategies of listening: name-
ly, in the transformation of eighteenth-century European music from a
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productive and consumptive to a purely consumptive commodity. There
no longer exists a social necessity to engage the music on its own terms
and by the dictates of its own time, whereas the livelihood of musicians
and composers in the eighteenth century, whether for employment at
court (Gjerdingen 2007) or for the sheer accessibility of their music to
a diversity of audiences, including Kenner und Liebhaber (Bonds 2008;
Mirka and Agawu 2008), was entirely dependent on their being flu-
ent with the international language of eighteenth-century musical style
(Heartz 1995; 2003; 2009; see also Kivy 2007).
Endgame
To the extent one may generalize from these, here admittedly briefly
explored, cases,
18
it would be precisely this difference between schema-
driven/historical versus hierarchical/modern modes of listening that
further archaeological inquiry of cognition would pursue as its basic
principle, at least insofar as the tonality of eighteenth-century Europe
is concerned. But I would not pretend to have arrived by these observa-
tions at any definitive conclusion to what remains a most vexing and
formidable problem surrounding the influence of history on cogni-
tion, despite having sketched some compelling evidence on the drafting
board, as it were. Instead, a more appropriate caesura, given the nature
of the problem, would be to submit the preceding to one nal observa-
tion and reection: Beethovens Eroica Symphony, composed in 1803,
begins with a novel application of a schema whose population peaks
strongly in the decade immediately precedingnamely the 1790s, as
seen in Figure 4a. More specically, positioning the inter-key variant
of the lesolfisol at the beginning of a symphony is a paradigmatic
instance of what Meyer called positional migration, one means of ef-
fecting (and consequently tracing) style change (1989, 124). In another
sense, however, positional migration is also a common eighteenth-
century compositional device: as Meyer has argued in respect to
Haydns Symphony no. 97 in C major and Military Symphony no.
100 in G major (second movement), the opening phrase is a musical
analogue of the idiom . . . and they lived happily ever after (Meyer
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1973, 212, 214; 1989, 124). In the same way, beginning a symphony
with the inter-key variant of the lesolsol is like beginning an ora-
tion or novel in medias res,
19
which constitutes one of the principal at-
tributes of positional migration: when a schema normally associated
with dynamic situations or with a processive passage is used as the
beginning of a stable melody, as in the theme that begins the last move-
ment of Beethovens Fourth Symphony (Meyer 1989, 124). The same
phenomenon transpires in the Vivace assai of the first movement to
Haydns Surprise Symphony, no. 94, in G major (1791), which begins
with a Fonte, as a processive device often encountered after a double
bar, and therefore following a structural formal division, frequently
midway through a movement (cf. Gjerdingen 2007, 6171).
Now, are the historical circumstances of the novel application of the
lesolsol in the Eroicathat is, its positional migration occurring
immediately after the schema peaked in the 1790sa matter of sheer
coincidence? Perhaps. But a more constructive interpretation might
understand the evidence as concretizing Adornos argument, only pre-
sented in the abstract, that composers are subject and respond to the
historical forces and sociology of musical material (Adorno 2004). By
pursuing this line of thought further, listeners whose environment is
shaped by the corpus of late eighteenth-century music and its affor-
dances would respond by the will of these same historical forces. Re-
search in developmental cognitive psychology (e.g., Piaget 1947; Piaget
and Inhelder 1968) suggests that experiences are serially organized
(Bartlett 1932), that is, according to the particular prior experiences of
an individual. Mental structures are consequently adaptive to the en-
vironment (Piaget 1980; Gibson 1966; 1979), resulting in a structural
modication in the mind that is caused by the experiences themselves
(Byros 2009). Inasmuch as eighteenth-century music may become such
an environment for present-day listeners, they too will already have or
will develop the same historically-contingent mental structures, and
their commensurate probability-oriented strategy of listening. In the
end, we might fully agree with Dahlhaus after allworks do bring their
own time along with them; and insofar as eighteenth-century musical
consciousness is accessible today, if at all, the means of its transmission
appear to be schemata.
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Notes
I am sincerely honored to contribute this essay in Leonard Meyers
memory, whose inuences on my thinking about music and matters of
philosophy and cognition are deep-seated. I should like to thank Robert
Gjerdingen for his comments and suggestions, and several people who
commented on earlier versions of this paper presented at the CarMAC
2008 conference (Society for Music Analysis, September 2008, Cardiff
University) and at Indiana University (March 2009), including: William
Drabkin; Roman Ivanovitch; Blair Johnston; Marianne C. Kielan-Gil-
bert; Danuta Mirka; Frank Samarotto; Michael Spitzer; Julian Hook;
and Julian Horton.
1. For a critical history of the schema concept in Western empirical philoso-
phy, cognitive psychology, and music theory, see Byros 2009, chaps. 45.
2. Les degrs de la gamme se dsignent par des noms dont quelques-uns
indiquent le caractre mlodique ou harmonique des sons qui la compo-
sent.
3. Chaque son dune gamme, ayant un caractre particulier et remplissant
une fonction spciale dans la musique, est accompagn dune harmonie
analogue ce caractre et cette fonction. La collection des harmonies
propres chaque degr de la gamme dtermine la tonalit.
4. In truth, as a mental representation each chord would be a composite of
smaller memory nodes or simpler ideas in Lockes terms (1706). See,
e.g., Bharucha 1991.
5. I should like to thank Allen Ferris of Indiana University, Bloomington,
for the suggestion of the mosaic metaphor in this context.
6. The Mozart analysis was originally placed at the end of volume 3 of
the original German, but properly belongs to the end of 225, the last
in Webers chapter entitled Modulation and the Attunement of the
Ear to a Key in volume 2, where the discussion of the Habits of the
Ear appears. At the end of said paragraph, Weber references the es-
say as one among several Examples for a Practical Application of the
Foregoing Principles, but defers its placement to volume 3 owing to
size constraints. References to the quartet are also scattered throughout
the treatise, and some of these have been incorporated into the English
translation of the essay in Bent 1994.
BYROS
294
Musica Humana
7. This and other variants discussed thoroughly in Byros 2009 are not in-
cluded in the historical distribution statistics of Figure 4a.
8. Alternative top-voice pairings include mire, domire, or midoti.
9. The review is actually anonymous, but several Beethoven scholars have
attributed the essay to the editor of the journal, Friedrich Rochlitz (Geck
and Schleuning 1989, 211; Sipe 1998, 57). Wallaces translation in
Senner et al. 2001 translates frmlich as predictably.
10. This exposition of the reception history to the opening theme of the
Eroica is necessarily synoptic and incomplete. The subject is treated ex-
tensively in Byros 2009, chap. 1, passim.
11. But Meyer only came to know Schank and Abelsons research on
scripts and plans through Gjerdingen 1984. See Meyer 1989, 245,
n. 59.
12. Important G-minor music is widespread in the symphony; see Lock-
wood 1991; 1982; Byros 2009, chap. 1.
13. For paradigmatic examples of a modulating 17, 43, see the develop-
ment of Mozarts Piano Sonata in A minor, K. 310 (1778), second move-
ment, bars 3741. Incidentally, the two instances of the modulating 17,
43 in Mozarts Sonatawhich modulate from C minor to G minor, and
G minor to D minor, respectivelyare followed by a top-voice variant
of the lesolsol.
14. The mode of the stable 5/3 sonority often cannot be predicted in a
Monte (Gjerdingen 2007, 458).
15. For paradigmatic examples, see the development of Mozarts Piano
Sonata in C major, K. 279, first movement (1774), bars 4043, and
Gjerdingen 2007, 66, 68.
16. But it should be noted that Lerdahl views hierarchical modes of listen-
ing as being characteristic of experienced listeners (Lerdahl 2001, 43;
Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983, 1). Discussing the discrepancy lies beyond
the compass of this study. See Byros 2009 for a more detailed discussion.
17. The alternative possibility is that modern listeners apply more recently-
developed and recently-acquired rival schemata, perhaps under the inu-
ence of other musical cultures. In respect to the Eroica Symphony, such
a rival schema does exist within the time period of 17201840, but one
295
Autumn 2009
that would inuence a D minor, not an E, hearing. Among the several
variants of the schema is a tonic variant whose last event consists
not of a major dominant triad, but of a minor and therefore tonic triad,
resulting in a last-minute modulation up a fth (Byros 2009). In the ab-
sence of empirical data for the years following 1840, the possibility for
a rival schema inevitably exists. But considering the nature of the larger,
more general argument regarding scripts and plans, it is unlikely
that an analogous script-level rival schema would have developed. To
the extent nineteenth-century music is more plan-based, any existing
rival schema would most likely be a plan-like structure, and therefore
would only return the problem to the scripts versus plans dichoto-
my. One might go so far to say that the opening of the Eroica constitutes
a prototypical category in itself, but this would constitute a category
error insofar as memory is concerned. Generic knowledge is stored
in schematic memory, whereas particular things, like events and actual
compositions, are stored and remembered differently in terms of what
Bharucha calls veridical memory (see Bharucha 1987; 1994). Outside
music, veridical memory may involve the memory of a specic historical
event, a motion picture, and so on. But schematic memory general-
izes such specics into an abstracted schema. The opening theme of the
Eroica, in itself, cannot be a schema.
18. The Eroica case study forms the basis of Byros 2009, and the Disso-
nance Quartet and Beethovens op. 90 also gure into the argument.
19. I should like to acknowledge and thank Edward Venn of Lancaster Uni-
versity for the characterization of the opening of the symphony as begin-
ning in medias res, upon hearing my Memorizing Tonality paper at
the University of Cambridge (Byros 2008).
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Abstract
This article investigates the problem of historical modes of listening
through the lens of recent research in schema theory and historically-in-
BYROS
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formed music cognition (Gjerdingen 1988; 2007; Byros 2009). Substan-
tial empirical evidence now exists surrounding two particular late eigh-
teenth-century schemata: the 17, 43 (Gjerdingen 1988; Meyer 1980)
and the lesolsol (Byros 2009). The population distributions derived
from extensive corpus study for both schemata approximate a Gaussian
distribution that bells in 17501760 and 18101820, with population
peaks in the 1770s and 1790s, respectively. The statistics demonstrate
that late eighteenth-century schemata are highly perceptually redundant
(Meyer 1964) while historically limited, by following a life cycle. By
extension, the evidence implies that schema-driven listening would by
nature be historical through and through (Adorno 2004). Occasions
of such historicized modes of listening are examined with three case
studies (Mozarts Dissonance Quartet, Beethovens Eroica Symphony
and Piano Sonata in E minor), which indicate that, where eighteenth-
century tonality is concerned, historical and modern modes of cognition
differ respectively in the cognitive presence and absence of schemata.

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