Zbikowski 2002-Conceptualizing Music Chapter 7

Q
chapter seven
competing models of music:
theories of musical form
and hierarchy
idway in her jour ney through Wonderland, Lewis Car roll’s Alice takes leave
M of the Cheshire Cat and makes her way toward the house of the March Hare.
There she finds a tea party under way— a mad, perpetual tea party, attended by the
March Hare, the Mad Hatter, and the somnolent Dor mouse. As the party proceeds,
Alice’s patience begins to wear thin, tried by turnabout word play and abrogated
manners, and is stretched to the limit when she finds out that the Hatter’s riddle —
“Why is a raven like a wr iting desk?”— is without solution.
Alice sighed wearily. “I think you might do something better with the time,” she said,
“than wasting it in asking r iddles that have no answers.”
“If you knew Time as well as I do,” answered the Hatter, “you wouldn’t talk about
wasting it. It’s him.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Alice.
“Of course you don’t!” the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. “I dare
say you never even spoke to Time!”
“Perhaps not,” Alice cautiously replied; “but I know I have to beat time when I
learn music.”
“Ah! That accounts for it,” said the Hatter.“He wo’n’t stand beating. Now, if you only
kept on good terms with him, he’d do almost anything you liked with the clock.”1
Exchanges like this are common enough in Wonderland, a place inhabited by

creatures whose logic is often as fantastic as their appearance. Nonetheless, the game
Carroll is playing at here is less a matter of labyrinthine logic and more a matter of
different ways to structure what is putatively the same domain. Alice uses two dif-
ferent cross-domain mappings to reckon with time: time as something to be saved
or wasted (mapping from the domain of commodities or substances onto the
domain of time); and time as a set of regular motions (mapping from the domain
of physiologically defined space onto the domain of time). For the Hatter’s cock-
eyed contr ibution, Carroll exploits a traditional character ization of time as a human
1. Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass,
intro. and with notes by Martin Gardner, illustrated by John Tenniel (New York:W.W. Norton, 2000), 72.
The tea party is the topic of chap. 7 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
287
288 analysis and theory
agent (as in Father Time, or the New Year as a diapered baby), an anthropomor phic
mapping that exploits conceptual blends like those discussed in the latter portion of
chapter 2. The mer ry confusion of mappings that results is part and parcel of the
imaginary world Car roll constructed — indeed, Wonderland is a maze of inter-
filiated conceptual blends. However, the scene at the tea party also throws into relief
a fundamental conflict between Alice’s world and that of Wonderland, which comes
to a head in the final chapter. There, Alice responds to the Queen of Hearts’s
peremptory “Off with her head!” (“Sentence first— verdict afterwards”) by dis-
missing the entire court and courtroom with “Who cares for you? You’re nothing
but a pack of cards!” At this, Wonderland disappears, and Alice wakes to find her-
self lying on the bank of the river, with her head in the lap of her sister.2
A confusion of mappings similar to the one apparent in Alice’s dialogue with the
Hatter often ar ises in music theory. The result, while not quite as entertaining as a
turn in Wonderland, can have some of the same flavor. Theorists appear to be talk-
ing about the same thing, but they structure their understanding of it in very dif-
ferent ways. Two examples are taken up in this chapter. The first involves musical
form, the second musical hierarchy.
During the eighteenth century, the study of musical for m emerged as an impor-
tant basis for discourse about music. Form was regarded as dealing with the very
essence of musical works: how musical mater ials were arranged and cor related over
the course of a piece of music. As the study of form developed and was continued
through the nineteenth century, theorists worked with two basic — and seemingly
opposed — models of musical for m, one static, the other dynamic. Musical for m,
viewed from a static perspective, is reminiscent of architecture (a parallel all the
more ironic, given Friedrich von Schelling’s character ization of architecture as
“frozen music”)3 and typically consists of either a framing structure clad with musi-
cal mater ial or relatively abstract containers filled with musical events. Musical for m
from a dynamic viewpoint is processive and a bit unpredictable: the musical work
emerges over the course of time, and musical mater ials are both the substance of and
raison d’être for this emergence. As a further complication, the cross-domain map-
pings that activated these two models changed dur ing the nineteenth century. Con-
sequently, there are two levels of mapping involved, both of which can breed con-
fusion about just what is meant by musical for m: a gener ic level associated with the
two basic models (one inter preting for m as static, the other as dynamic); and a
specific level associated with the cross-domain mappings that activate the gener ic
models. In the first section that follows, I explore static and dynamic models of
musical for m that emerged in the eighteenth centur y and the way these models
were transfor med by changes in ideology and music education that took place
beginning late in that century.
2. Carroll, The Annotated Alice, 124.

3. “Architecture, as the music of the plastic arts, thus necessar ily follows ar ithmetical relationships.
Since it is music in space, however, in a sense, solidified music, these relationships are simultaneously geo-
metric relationships.” Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Philosophy of Art, ed., trans., and intro.
Douglas W. Stott, with a foreword by David Simpson, Theory and History of Literature, 58 (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 165. See also, on p. 177, the passage that begins “If architecture
is indeed solidified music . . .”
competing mode ls of mu s i c 289
The two models of musical hierarchy I deal with in the second of the two sec-
tions that follow are a somewhat different matter, for these models were first devel-
oped to apply to domains other than music. It was only in the early nineteenth cen-
tury that they were applied to music, and then to two rather different aspects of
musical organization. The first model views hierarchy as a matter of control: each
level in a hierarchy (with the exception of those at the extremes) controls the next-
lower level and is itself controlled by the next-higher level. This model stretches
back at least to the Middle Ages and is most often used to account for tonal orga-
nization. The second model of hierarchy relies on a more componential approach:
the elements of level A of the hierarchy combine to make up individual elements at
the next-higher level (level B of the hierarchy); the elements of level B then com-
bine to make up individual elements at the next higher level (level C of the hier-
archy), and so on, until the account of structure is exhausted. This model emerged
during the seventeenth century and is most often used to explain music’s metr ical
structure.
When confronted by a maze of mapping like those I have just outlined, map-
pings that yield contradictor y accounts of quite basic musical mater ials, our incli-
nation may be to throw up our hands and shout the equivalent of “Who cares for
you? You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” But problems of musical understanding
are rarely so easily dismissed. Instead, we must enter into the mad tea party that is
music theory, where music theor ists from different nations and different histor ical
periods gather around the table to discuss and dispute musical concepts. If we are to
make sense of the conversation there, we need to understand how cross-domain
mapping shapes this discourse— indeed, as I suggested in chapter 2, how it makes
music theory possible.
two models of musical form

There was a certain enviable simplicity to the study of music in the fin de siècle
Anglo-Amer ican musical world, due in no small part to its near-complete subju-
gation to the Ger man musical world.4 Music teachers in Anglo-Amer ican circles
were either Ger man or trained in Ger many, the repertoire studied was almost
entirely German, and the theoretical models — developed exclusively with respect
to German musical practice — had been for mulated by German music theor ists of
the nineteenth century. Thus the beginning Anglo-Amer ican music student of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century learned a tradition of musical study that
was almost entirely Ger man. This is not to say, however, that the tradition they
assimilated was completely unified. Consider, for instance, the account of musical
motives offered by Ebenezer Prout, a prominent music educator in England dur-
ing the late nineteenth century. Having distinguished between phrases (which end
with a cadence) and sections (subphrase units that do not necessar ily end with a
cadence), Prout makes one further subdivision:
Every section contains at least two [metric] accents, and can be separated into smaller
parts, containing only one accent each. Such parts are called motives, and cor respond
4. By “German musical world,” I mean the Ger man-speaking countr ies of Europe.
exactly to the feet in poetry. Here we have what (to bor row a scientific ter m) we may
call the “protoplasm”— the germ out of which all music springs. A thorough knowl-
edge of the nature of the motive is therefore indispensable to anyone who would un-
derstand the fundamental pr inciples of musical for m.5
Important for Prout’s character ization of a motive are the dynamic context pro-
vided by metrical accentuation — he will later define motive as composed of a
strongly accented note preceded by at least one unaccented note6 — and the some-
what more abstract notion of a motive as the seed of a musical organism.
Rather different is the approach to motive taken some ten years later by Percy
Goetschius, born in New Jersey but educated in Stuttgart, where he first taught.
Goetschius situates the motive in an explicitly grammatical context:
The smallest unit in musical composition is the single tone. The smallest cluster of
successive tones (from two to four or five in number) that will convey a definite mu-
sical impression, as miniature musical idea, is called a Figure. Assuming the single tone
to represent the same unit of expression as a letter of the alphabet, the melodic figure
would be defined as the equivalent of a complete (small) word;—pursuing the com-
parison further, a series of figures constitutes the melodic motive, equivalent to the
smallest group of words (a subject with its article and adjective, for example); and two
or three motives make a Phrase, equivalent to the complete, though comparatively
brief, sentence (subject, predicate, and object).7
In contrast with Prout’s dynamic account of musical for m, Goetschius relies on a

highly schematized g rammar of musical elements. So formalized is this g rammar
that it ultimately reduces to a matter of counting measures: “Melodic motives dif-
fer in length from one to four measures; by far the most common extent, however,
is two measures, and the student will do wisely to accept this dimension and analyze
accordingly, unless there is unmistakable evidence to the contrary.”8
What we have in these excer pts, then, are two markedly different approaches to
musical for m, voiced through character izations of motive.9 Prout’s is the more
dynamic: music is likened to some sort of organism, and the motive is the seed from
which it spr ings. Goetschius’s approach, by contrast, is rather more static: music is
but prose in tones, and the motive is simply the smallest intelligible syntactic unit.
5. Ebenezer Prout, Musical Form (London: Augener, 1893), 26.

6. Prout, Musical Form, 31.
7. Percy Goetschius, Lessons in Music Form: A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and
Designs Employed in Musical Composition (Bryn Mawr, Penn.: Oliver Ditson, 1904), 19.
8. Goetschius, Lessons in Music Form, 23.
9. Although I have chosen to highlight the differences between Prout’s and Goetschius’s approaches
to musical for m, Robert Gjerdingen has reminded me that the two theor ists knew each other’s work and
exchanged dedications of their texts. Moreover, not all theor ists within the Anglo-American tradition
agreed on the importance of motive. For instance, Stewart Macpherson, whose book on for m supplanted
that of Prout and who was mightily suspicious of overly thorough analyses, wrote, “As an example of a
too mathematical conception of analysis may be instanced the stress laid by some theor ists upon an arbi-
trary dissection of the music into certain metr ical fragments called motives, a dissection of which usually
conveys little or nothing to which the musical sense can respond.” Macpherson, Form in Music: With Spe-
cial Reference to the Designs of Instrumental Music (London: Joseph Williams, 1908), 39. A footnote makes
clear that in referring to “some other theor ists,” Macpherson actually meant Prout.
However, two related factors complicate these seemingly neat constructions. First,
neither Prout nor Goetschius eschews entirely the approach of the other. Prout is
perfectly capable of rendering a crushingly static account of musical for m, and
Goetschius knows how to enliven his account to make music seem more like an
organism than a dr y recitation. Second, both of these models of form originate in
mappings between language and music (a mapping more obvious in the excer pt
from Goetschius, but evident as well in Prout’s reference to poetic feet). To untan-
gle matters, we need to begin with theor ies of musical for m developed dur ing the
Enlightenment. From there we must proceed to explore how these theor ies were
subsequently reformulated in the first half of the nineteenth centur y under the
influence of political and ideological pressures that transfor med the way music was
taught.
Grammar, Rhetor ic, and Musical Form

in the Eighteenth Century
Mappings between music and language go back at least to the Middle Ages. For
instance, the ninth-century Musica enchiriadis opens with an analogy that anticipates
Goetschius by over a thousand years: “Just as the elementar y and indivisible con-
stituents of speech (vox articulata) are letters, from which syllables are put together,
and these in tur n make up verbs and nouns, and from them is composed the fabric
of a complete discourse, so the roots of song (vox canora) are phthongi [musical notes],
which are called soni in Latin. The content of all music is ultimately reducible to
them.”10 In the eighteenth centur y, mappings between language and music flour-
ished and — as an almost inevitable consequence — became more manifold and more
complicated. Enlightenment preoccupations with the or igins of language and the
place of music within systems of human communication led to a number of pro-
posals for how language and music did, or did not, relate to one another.11 The
continued growth of print culture made it increasingly common for music and lan-
guage to intersect — as score and text — on the printed page, a phenomenon exploited
by author-pr inters such as Samuel Richardson.12 Finally, a growing middle class
fueled a demand for music instruction books, and, within these books, mappings
between language and music provided a ready frame of reference for the explana-
tion of fundamental musical concepts. During this per iod, two mappings from the
domain of language onto the domain of music became particularly important for
accounts of musical for m: the first mapped from grammar onto music, the second
mapped from rhetor ic onto music.
10. Musica enchiriadis and Scolica enchiriadis, ed. Claude V. Palisca, trans. Raymond Erickson, Music
Theory Translation Ser ies (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 1995), 1.
11. For a discussion centered on eighteenth-century France, see Downing A. Thomas, Music and the
Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment, New Perspectives in Muisic History and Cr it-
icism (Cambr idge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
12. Richardson’s insertion of a musical score into the text of a novel is discussed by Janine Barchas
in “The Engraved Score in Clarissa: An Intersection of Music, Narrative, and Graphic Design,” Eighteenth-
Century Life 20 (1996): 1– 20.
g rammar and music Mappings between grammar and music were based
on the assumption that music was language-like in its organization — that is, it had
structural features analogous to those of language and a nor mative syntax. The map-
ping also relied on a familiar ity with and respect for grammar acquired through the
thorough grounding in the subjects of the Classical tr ivium— rhetoric, grammar,
and logic— that was a common feature of early education in the eighteenth cen-
tury. Just as every verbal construct, whether spoken or wr itten, can be divided up
into clauses, sentences, and paragraphs, the thinking went, so can musical works.
This was the basis of Johann Mattheson’s account of musical grammar, first pro-
posed in his Kern melodischer Wissenschaft of 1737 and subsequently expanded in his
Der vollkommene Capellmeister of 1739.13 Mattheson began his discussion with vocal
music, showing how the grammar of music had to be in rapport with that of the
text: each of the significant divisions in the text had to be supported by analogous
divisions in the music. This led Mattheson to a discussion of what things made for
effective musical divisions (typically, cadence was the main articulative event) and
how such divisions were graded from the barely noticeable to the emphatic.14
In a subsequent chapter of Der vollkommene Capellmeister, Mattheson argued that
knowledge of this sort was even more important for knowing how to wr ite instru-
mental music. He illustrated his discussion with the minuet shown in example 7.1.15
Mattheson analyzes the whole as a parag raph, made up of two per iods (or Sätzen;
mm. 1– 8 and 9 – 16), which are divided into a clause (marked by the colon below
m. 4), a subclause (marked by the semicolon below m. 12), and phrases (marked by
the commas below mm. 2, 6, and 10). Lacking, however, is any explanation for how
these analytical decisions were made — why, for instance, mm. 1– 4 constitute a
clause, while mm. 9– 12 constitute a subclause. The reader is left with a clear sense
of the importance of grammatical structure to musical works — that grammar is, in
fact, a self-evident property of musical works— but with only a few hints as to how
the grammatical divisions in music are deter mined.
A more complete methodology for analyzing musical grammar was provided
some fifteen years later by Joseph Riepel in his Grundregln zur Tonordnung insgemein
of 1755 (the second volume of his Anfangsgründe zur musicalischen Setzkunst). Using
a thoroughly schematic and comparatively systematic approach to musical organi-
zation (wr itten in the dialogue style common in pedagogical treatises of the day),
Riepel made explicit connections between grammatical components and musical
passages, illustrated through hundreds of examples drawn from or applicable to
13. Johann Mattheson, Kern melodischer Wissenchaft (Hamburg: C. Herold, 1737; repr. Hildesheim:
Georg Olms, 1976); idem, Der vollkommene Capellmeister (Hamburg: C. Herold, 1739; repr. Dokumenta
musicologica, 1. Reihe, Druckschr iften-Faksimiles, 5, ed. Margarete Reimann [Kassel: Bärenreiter,
1954]).
14. Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister, 180 – 95; Ernest C Har riss, Johann Mattheson’s Der voll-
kommene Capellmeister: A Revised Translation with Critical Commentary, Studies in Musicology, 21 (Ann
Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1981), 380 – 404.
15. Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister, 223– 25; Harriss, Mattheson’s Der vollkommene
Capellmeister, 451– 53. For a discussion and analysis of this passage, in a slightly different context, see Ian
Bent, ed., Fugue, Form and Style (vol. 1 of Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century), Cambridge Readings
in the Literature of Music (Cambr idge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 5– 6.
example 7.1 Minuet analyzed by Johann Mattheson in Der vollkommene Capellmeister,

part 2, chap. 13
’ :
6
11
’ Fine
’
; ∴
D.C. al fine
instrumental music.16 Riepel based his analysis of the grammatical function of a

musical passage on har monic structure and on the assumption that subdivision of
the phrase into even-numbered units was the nor m in instrumental music.
Although his references to the grammatical structure of speech are explicit, they are
also relatively few in number. Subphrase units (which Riepel called Einschnitte, and
which were usually less than four measures in length) were marked by incomplete
harmonic progressions — that is, they ended inconclusively. In contrast, the phrase
(the Satz or, more frequently, the Absatz) was a four-bar unit that provided a com-
plete har monic progression: it had a conclusive ending. Each Absatz was further
character ized on the basis of whether it ended on tonic, on the dominant, or in
some other key.17 By this means, Riepel was able to give an exhaustive (and at times
exhausting) account of the different sorts of grammatical structures that might be
evinced by music, based on the ways various components could be fit together and
modified.
Riepel’s approach to musical grammar was adopted by Heinr ich Chr istoph
Koch in his Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition (1782 – 1793), but Koch began his
account by returning to the model of speech. After noting the importance of “cer-
tain more or less noticeable resting points of the spir it” to those fine arts that attain
their goal through speech — namely, poetry and rhetor ic— Koch then draws the
connection to music.
Speech . . . breaks down into various sentences [Perioden] through the most noticeable
of these resting points of the spir it; through the less noticeable the sentence, in turn,
16. Joseph Riepel, Grundregln zur Tonordnung insgemein (vol. 2 of Anfangsgründe zur musicalischen Setz-
kunst) (Regensburg: Johann Leopold Montag, 1755), 32– 56; idem, Sämtliche Schriften zur Musiktheorie, ed.
Thomas Emmer ig,Wiener musikwissenschaftliche Beiträge, 20 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1996), 138 – 62.
17. For further discussion of Riepel’s approach, see Justin London, “Riepel and Absatz: Poetic and
Prosaic Aspects of Phrase Structure in 18th-Centur y Theory,” Journal of Musicology 8 (1990): 505 – 19;
Nola Reed Knouse, “Joseph Riepel and the Emerg ing Theory of Form in the Eighteenth Centur y,”
Current Musicology 4 (1986): 46– 62; and John Walter Hill, “The Logic of Phrase Structure in Joseph Rie-
pel’s Anfangsgründe zur musikalischen Setzkunst, Part 2 (1755),” in Festa musicologica: Essays in Honor of
George J. Buelow, ed. Thomas J. Mathiesen and Benito V. Rivera, Festschrift Ser ies, 14 (Stuyvesant, N.Y.:
Pendragon Press, 1995), 467– 87.
breaks down into separate clauses [Sätze] and parts of speech [Redetheile]. Just as in
speech, the melody of a composition can be broken up into per iods by means of anal-
ogous resting points, and these, again, into single phrases [Sätze] and melodic segments
[Theile].18
However, Koch also saw limits to the applicability of mapping from the grammar of
speech onto the grammar of music. After a long and thoughtful passage in which he
pursues the notion that musical phrases are organized around subjects and predicates
as are those of speech, Koch tur ns away from the model. He writes, “I am aban-
doning this compar ison because, as already mentioned, subject and predicate cannot
be differentiated enough in melodic sections. We must content ourselves with
learning how to deter mine, through feeling, the presence or absence of resting
points of the spir it and the nature of sections with regard to their completeness.”19
As did Riepel, Koch assumes subdivision of the phrase into even-numbered units to
be the nor m. He uses har monic structure— specifically, the har mony with which
each phrase ends20— to deter mine the divisions of musical grammar. And he builds
larger musical structures by modifying and concatenating musical phrases.
Mappings between grammar and music of the sort evident in the work of
Mattheson, Riepel, and Koch allowed writers in the eighteenth centur y to give
detailed accounts of musical organization and to indicate how composers manipu-
lated musical mater ials to create unique musical statements that nonetheless con-
formed to certain basic syntactic pr incipals.21 The mapping yields a character ization
that emphasizes the static rather than the dynamic — what Koch came to call the
“mechanical” aspect of music in the introduction to the second volume of his Ver-
such.22 Each unit of musical grammar can be contemplated and discussed separately,
18. Heinrich Chr istoph Koch, Introductory Essay on Composition: The Mechanical Rules of Melody, Sec-
tions 3 and 4, trans. Nancy Kovaleff Baker, Music Theor y Translation Ser ies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1983), 1. The source from which Baker’s translation is drawn is the second volume of
Koch’s Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition (Leipzig: Adam Fr iedrich Böhme, 1787; repr. Hildesheim:
Georg Olms, 1969). I have adapted this and the following quotation to restore Koch’s somewhat
unwieldy locution “resting points of the spir it” (“Ruhepuncte des Geistes”), which preserves the sub-
jective aspect of determining music-grammatical divisions.
19. Koch, Introductory Essay on Composition, 6, translation adapted. In a note to this passage, Koch
explains that he abandoned str ict compar isons between the phrases of speech and melody because his
treatise is intended for beg inning musicians who wish to lear n composition, and “these seldom have
either grammatical knowledge of speech or familiar ity with that part of logic which explains the differ-
ent types of phrases and their closures.”
20. Koch wr ites, “The essential difference between an inter nal phrase and a closing phrase depends
on nothing more than the essential difference of ending for mulas.” Koch, Introductory Essay on Composi-
tion, 7.
21. As noted in chap. 2, it is through mappings such as these that theor ists br ing an integrated sys-
tem of terms and structural relations to bear on particular problems of musical understanding. In chap. 2,
the problems discussed had to do with ways to character ize tonal organization. Here the problems relate
to how musical mater ials should be organized to create meaningful utterances.
22. Nancy Kovaleff Baker and Thomas Chr istensen, eds. and trans., Aesthetics and the Art of Musical
Composition in the German Enlightenment: Selected Writings of Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Christoph
Koch, Cambridge Studies in Music Theor y and Analysis, 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), 140.
and each can be fit together with other such units to create a complete statement
at the level of a paragraph or higher. The perspective, then, is inherently construc-
tivist: mapping grammar onto music isolates the building blocks of music and
describes how they fit together to create coherent structures.
The account of musical for m produced by this mapping is one that tends to
emphasize complete, free-standing structures, as well as a synoptic view of such
structures.23 What is incomplete is ungrammatical; what is ungrammatical is incom-
plete. This is a view of basic mater ials well suited to pedagogy— mappings from
grammar to music are invariably connected with lessons in composition — but one
that has little to say about the process of constructing grammatical statements that
are both complete and compelling.
rhetoric and music One of the principal uses of mappings from

rhetoric to music dur ing the eighteenth century was to descr ibe how to go about
composing music and the laying-out of musical mater ials in particular. Mattheson,
in his Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre of 1713, offers the following analysis: “A [musical]
composition compr ises three things: Inventio (Erfindung), Elaboratio (Ausarbeitung),
[and] Executio (Ausführung or Aufführung), which seem to display a close relation-
ship to oratory or rhetor ic. The last two things can be lear ned; the first has no com-
petent master.”24 Of course, Mattheson is being somewhat disingenuous here, since
the three techniques he mentions — and, for that matter, the very term “composi-
tion”— are all der ived from the teaching of Classical rhetor ic and were only sec-
ondarily applied to music. Twenty-six years later, in Der vollkommene Capellmeister,
Mattheson expanded this plan to include a total of five stages: Inventio (Erfindung),
Dispositio (Einrichtung), Elaboratio (Ausarbeitung), Decoratio (Schmückung or Zierde),
and Executio (Ausführung or Aufführung).25 In this more extensive application of
rhetoric to music, Mattheson also drew on the structural categor ies of rhetor ical
theory to character ize the parts of a musical work (as distinct from the process of
creating the work). These he identified as the Exordium (Eingang), Narratio
(Bericht), Propositio (Antrag), Confirmatio (Bekräfftigung), Confutatio (Wiederlegung),
and Peroratio (Schluß). Mattheson then used these categor ies to analyze the music
of a da capo aria by Benedetto Marcello, but the result was at best a mixed success:
23. As I understand it, this synoptic view of the musical work does not recover what Michel Fou-
cault calls the “simultaneity” of thought: musical works, whether “paragraphs” or “chapters,” must still
unfold in the temporal ser ies specified by their grammar. The synoptic function instead reflects the tax-
onomy of forms basic to grammatical systems. There is an immediacy to such taxonomic units— be they
phrases or parag raphs, books or symphonies — that is independent of the time it takes to traverse the
individual syntactic components they compr ise. On the simultaneity of thought, see Foucault, The Order
of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York:Vintage Books, 1973), 83.
24. “Es gehören sonst zu einen Composition dreyerley: Inventio, (Die Erfindung) Elaboratio, (Die
Ausarbeitung) Executio, (Die Ausführung oder Aufführung) welches eine ziemliche nahe Verwandschafft
mit der Orator ie oder Rhetor ique (Rede-Kunst) an den Tag legt; Die beyden lezten Stücke können
erlernet werden; zum ersten hat sich noch kein tüchtiger Maitre.” Johann Mattheson, Das neu-eröffnete
Orchestre (Hamburg: Printed for the author, 1713; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1993), 104.
25. Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister, 235; Harriss, Mattheson’s Der vollkommene
Capellmeister, 470.
the ar ia simply did not provide an adequate target for mappings from the traditional
structure of oratory.26
Where Mattheson’s mappings between grammar and music pointed to a fruitful
model for character izing musical organization, his proposed mappings between
rhetoric and music never flour ished in the same way. One problem was that the
structural model of an oration used in Classical rhetor ic was simply too r igid for
music— indeed, there was every sign that it was coming to be regarded as too r igid
for speech as well.27 Another problem was that the flexibility of musical semantics
made it difficult to develop hard and fast rules for what counted as a Propositio, a
Confirmatio, or any of the other elements of an oration: it was clear to Mattheson
and other theor ists that music had meaning, but just how this meaning cor re-
sponded with the figures and processes of Classical rhetor ic proved difficult to
specify.28
The account of the process of composition afforded by rhetor ic was given new
promise when it was incor porated into the theor y of aesthetics promulgated by
Johann Georg Sulzer in his Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, first published in
two large volumes in 1771 and 1774. Sulzer drew on Classical rhetor ic to develop
a general character ization of the creative process, reflecting his belief that art shared
with rhetor ic the goal of moral improvement. According to Sulzer, the artist first
discovers the ideas necessary to a work of art through invention. After the ideas have
been discovered, the artist then realizes them through a three-stage process: Anlage
(layout), Ausführung (realization), and Ausarbeitung (elaboration).29 Of these, the lat-
ter two stages are identical with those identified by Mattheson in Das neu-eröffnete
Orchestre. Sulzer’s first stage cor responds with the second stage — Dispositio (Ein-
richtung)— of the expanded plan presented in Der vollkommene Capellmeister. (Of
Sulzer’s treatment of Mattheson’s first stage — Inventio — more presently.)
The approach to composition outlined by Sulzer, while promising, was also very
26. Mattheson’s analysis is in Der vollkommene Capellmeister, 237– 39 (pp. 472– 76 of the Harriss trans-
lation). For discussion, see Mark Evan Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of Oration,
Studies in the History of Music, 4 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 82– 90; and Peter
Hoyt, “Review of Mark Evan Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric,” Journal of Music Theory 38 (1994): 127 – 29.
27. For further discussion of the limitations of rhetorical models, see Hoyt, “Review of Wordless
Rhetoric,” 130 – 33.
28. The problem is, if anything, more intractable at the level of individual rhetor ical figures, as is evi-
dent in the complicated and occasionally redundant system set up by Joachim Bur meister in the early
seventeenth century; see Bur meister, Musical Poetics [1606], trans. Benito Rivera, Music Theory Transla-
tion Series (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 1993). For his part, Mattheson attempts no for-
malization of rhetor ical figures, preferring to descr ibe a few of them, indicate the applicability of many
more, and then move on; see Der vollkommene Capellmeister, 243– 44 (pp. 482– 84 of the Harriss transla-
tion).
Although locating the specifics of rhetor ical structure in musical discourse is challenging, the impor-
tance of rhetor ic for all manner of thought and expression — even beyond the eighteenth centur y—
should not be underestimated. For a discussion of the importance of rhetor ic in scientific discourse, for
instance, see Jeanne Fahnestock’s recent Rhetorical Figures in Science (New York: Oxford University Press,
1999).
29. My summary of Sulzer’s aesthetic theory and translation of the Ger man ter ms for the stages in
the compositional process are taken from Thomas Chr istensen’s introduction to Sulzer’s writings in
Baker and Chr istensen, Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition, 3– 24.
abstract, and it lacked specifics where music was concer ned. These were supplied by
Koch in the second and third volumes of his Versuch, in which he endeavored to
show how Sulzer’s three-stage process could be implemented with musical mater i-
als.30 Where Sulzer was vague, having attempted to give an account of composition
adequate for all the fine arts, Koch was specific, providing a detailed account of just
what was involved at each stage of the compositional process, which he illustrated
with an analysis of an ar ia from Carl Heinr ich Graun’s highly popular cantata Der
Tod Jesu of 1755.31 Making Sulzer’s framework for the compositional process
specific for music also provided a further justification for the technical language of
musical grammar developed by Koch, for Koch believed it was by the conscious
manipulation of this grammar that the beg inning composer could create an aes-
thetically satisfying final work.
Mappings between rhetor ic and music allowed music theor ists like Mattheson
and Koch to descr ibe the compositional process in ter ms of distinct stages, which
made it possible to give specific advice about how the novice composer should pro-
ceed along the way. Inasmuch as this process was construed as analogous to that
undertaken in other art forms, music was placed on a parallel with sister arts to
which it had for merly been but a poor cousin. Mapping from rhetor ic to music also
allowed music — more specifically, untexted music — to be regarded as a medium
with persuasive powers similar to that of orator y. Although the trope of music as
oratory was common at least since the Renaissance, preoccupations with the rela-
tionship between language and music dur ing the Enlightenment revivified the anal-
ogy and put into relief the dynamic aspect of music: here was a type of oratory that
not only unfolded over time but also was conducted in the pure language of
tones — what Mattheson called Klang-Rede (sound-speech).
The view of the compositional process and its product afforded by mapping
from rhetor ic to music also highlighted the essential mystery of musical creation.
This is plainest in the quotation from Mattheson’s Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre —
“invention is the process that knows no competent master”— but it is also evident
in Sulzer’s discussion of invention in the Allgemeine Theorie and in Koch’s adaptation
of that discussion in his Versuch. At first Sulzer maintains that invention is a capac-
ity that can be improved through diligent and careful practice: “The power of
invention, like the power of judgment, is a natural and inbor n faculty that all men
possess in proportion to their own genius. And just as one may turn to reason to aid
one’s power of judgment, so can one’s talent for invention be augmented, in as much
as it might be treated, like logic, as a part of philosophy.”32 Sulzer’s initial suggestion
for accomplishing this augmentation is to tur n to rhetor ic, urging the artist to
exploit the rules and methodology that rhetor icians had developed for the express
30. Koch’s realization of Sulzer’s plan is discussed in Ian Bent, “The ‘Compositional Process’ in Music
Theory 1713 – 1850,” Music Analysis 3 (1984): 29– 55; and by Nancy Kovaleff Baker in her introduction
to Koch’s wr itings in Baker and Chr istensen, Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition, 111– 43. Koch
was apparently unaware of Sulzer’s work when he prepared his first volume, published in 1782.
31. Koch’s analysis of Graun’s ar ia can be found in translation in Baker and Chr istensen, Aesthetics
and the Art of Musical Composition, 163– 76.
32. Baker and Chr istensen, Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition, 56.
purpose of discovering useful ideas. But as attractive as such an orderly process is for
the ever-moralizing Sulzer, he ultimately realizes that it is not the most productive
where invention is concer ned. Better to be constantly occupied with one’s art, for
one will surely stumble upon good ideas this way. As Sulzer ruefully admits,
The most important inventions probably do not ar ise through the first deductive
manner descr ibed above, but rather by the second way: the main subject appears only
dimly at first to the artist; he recognizes its importance and takes time to think about
its contents so it can be set in its proper light. This is how a famous composer told me
he worked. He had more than once saved mater ial that he heard by chance to use as
a theme or subject for a composition. He never could have invented anything as good
had he decided ahead of time to look for something having the identical character of
expression.33
In this Koch agrees, writing, “Theory will never be able to invent a truly effec-
tive means to indicate just how the beg inning composer should contr ive that a
beautiful melody ar ises in his soul.”34 However, once inspiration str ikes and inven-
tion has commenced, the composer must work with haste to capture the whole in
a plan of the sort Koch developed for Graun’s aria. The plan in place, the composer
may then proceed to the more mechanical side of musical composition.
The mystery surrounding invention, together with the focus on purely musical
meaning afforded by mapping the structures of rhetor ic onto music, suggests an
independence for music adumbrated by Koch’s reflections on the value of theory.
Music, now more than simply mater ials to be manipulated, is something that ar ises
in the soul of the composer. Although the full flowering of the idea that music was
an autonomous medium would have to wait until the tur n into the nineteenth cen-
tury, we can see its seeds in eighteenth-centur y mappings from rhetor ic to music.
These provided a view of music as a powerful and highly dynamic medium with
the potential to shape the thought of those who listened to it.35
g rammar, rhetoric, and musical form It has been traditional

and convenient to think of grammar and rhetor ic as separate subdomains of lan-
guage. Of the two, grammar is the simpler and more basic, necessar y for proper
communication but not the stuff to tur n heads. Grammar, reckoned this way, is thus
pure syntax, a careful if static ordering of linguistic units. By compar ison, rhetor ic is
more complex and subtle, persuasive because it has true semantic force. As the
means by which the passions can be moved, it is truly dynamic.36 Nonetheless, the
35. For a discussion of the emergence of the idea that music was an autonomous art form, see Lydia
Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1992), chap. 6; and Bellamy Hosler, Changing Aesthetic Views of Instrumental Music in 18th-Century
Germany, Studies in Musicology, 42 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1981).
36. When Michel Foucault sought to character ize the distinct functions of rhetor ic and grammar,
he seemed rather deliberately to invert this traditional perspective, arguing that rhetor ic is spatial and that
grammar distr ibutes that spatiality in time — that is, rhetor ic is static and grammar is dynamic (Foucault,
The Order of Things, 84). However, “spatial” here refers to the simultaneity of thought — to its essential
and ongoing polyphony. Grammar distr ibutes this spatiality in time only by freezing fragments of it so
distinctions between the two are hardly as clear-cut as this traditional perspective
would have it, and nowhere is this more evident than when they are mapped onto
music.
Returning briefly to Riepel, his classification of cadence types provides a case in
point. In distinguishing between an Absatz that ends with a “garbled cadence” (ver-
stümmelter Schluß ) and one that ends with a “complete cadence” (vollständiger Schluß ),
Riepel uses the rhetor ical ter m “enthymeme” for the first, and “syllogismus” for the
second.37 Descending momentar ily into the labyrinth of rhetorical ter ms, we can
discover that enthymeme refers to an incomplete syllogism, one in which either the
major or minor premise of the syllogism is left implied. A syllogismus, by contrast,
calls on the audience to draw an obvious conclusion, the major and minor premise
having been stated.38 Although the mapping between these two terms and the
musical phenomena to which Riepel would have them apply is less than perfect,
what is important is the implication that each of the grammatical components is
imbued with semantic value — syntax has its semantic function. Indeed, as I argued
in chapter 4, the manipulation of musical syntax is one of the principal means by
which musical semantics is created.
Careful attention to the grain and texture of discourse about music is thus nec-
essary to deter mine which of these metaphor ical mappings is used to structure a
given theory of music. Generally speaking, eighteenth-century writers used gram-
mar to emphasize things that do not change in music — suitably defined, an Ein-
schnitt is always an Einschnitt, an Absatz always an Absatz. The same wr iters used
rhetor ic to emphasize how music functions in time, either in the challenges it pre-
sents a composer attempting to deploy musical mater ials or in the reaction of a lis-
tener persuaded by a musical argument. Grammar gave a view of musical for m that
was static, and rhetor ic gave a view of musical for m that was dynamic. Significant,
however, is the context relative to which these character izations were made. As the
dynamic view offered by rhetor ic began to be more important for those who
thought about music, and as the cultural context for thinking about music changed,
mappings from language began to give way to other possibilities for conceptualiz-
ing music.
Formal Theory in the Nineteenth Century

Over the course of the nineteenth centur y, the two basic models of musical for m
that emerged in the eighteenth century remained in place. Musical works could be
regarded as manufactured things that compr ised discrete — and inherently static —
components, or as instances of quasi-abstract communication that unfolded dynam-
ically in time. However, explicit mappings from language to music faded as they
that they can be ordered, much as musical mater ials, isolated from their becoming, are transfor med into
basic building blocks for the beginning composer.
37. Riepel, Grundregln zur Tonordnung insgemein, 59; idem, Sämtliche Schriften zur Musiktheorie, 153.
38. These definitions are drawn from Gideon Burton’s online Silva Rhetoricæ, at http:/humanities.
byu.edu/rhetor ic/silva.htm.
were absorbed into musical nomenclature or replaced by other mappings that

served a similar pur pose. Instrumental in this process were the context within which
music was taught and the intellectual framework relative to which music was con-
ceptualized. Beginning in the final years of the eighteenth centur y, music instruc-
tion was taken over by institutions concer ned as much with the advancement of the
state as with education. In consequence, the move toward a complete and compre-
hensive curriculum that arose in furtherance of the for mer objective brought with
it the development of integrated courses of study that employed both static and
dynamic accounts of music. At around the same time, music came to be thought of
in organicist ter ms, and, as a result, even the most basic and isolated of musical mate-
rials were imbued with dynamic character istics. Hence, the conceptual metaphors
for musical for m established in the eighteenth century— form as static, or form as
dynamic — remained in place, but they were activated by a number of different lin-
guistic metaphors.
the paris conservatoire and the berlin university Dur-

ing the eighteenth century, music education in the French- and Ger man-speaking
countr ies was car ried out in a diffuse manner. Students typically studied with a local
music master or at a school associated with a church, and there were few if any
efforts at centralized music instruction. As a result of various political upheavals, this
situation began to change in the late eighteenth centur y, and music education,
together with instruction in other topics, began to be more closely controlled by
the state.
The circumstances of music education changed most rapidly in France. After the
1789 revolution, numerous educational reforms were proposed, focused largely on
efforts to create a utilitar ian educational system and to promote deductive reason-
ing for the arts and sciences; some of these were at least partially enacted.39 As a
consequence of the diminishing role of the church after the revolution, the system
of maîtrises — the music schools associated with the major cathedrals — collapsed,
leaving two principal options for music instruction: the School of the National
Guard (a product of the revolution) and the Old Regime’s School of Singing
(founded in 1784 with the intent of providing a reliable supply of singers for the
Académie Royale de Musique, known familiarly as the Opéra). To realize the goal
of conserving a French national music that was free from the influence of Italy and
Germany, the Republic in 1795 consolidated the faculty and power of these two
schools and for med the Conservatoire National de Musique et de Déclamation.
The institution, as or iginally envisioned, was to provide free training for musicians
(especially those destined for militar y service or the Opéra). It was also to serve as
official arbiter of music used for state functions or music that was to be sanctioned
by the state. The Conservatoire also became the source of the first national music
theory, for its or iginal charter included the provision that the texts used therein
would be wr itten by its faculty. Because of the political power that eventually
39. A thorough account of changes in music education after the French revolution is given in Cyn-
thia M. Geselle, “The Institutionalization of Music Theory in France: 1764– 1802” (Ph.D. diss., Prince-
ton University, 1989), 235– 306.
accrued to the Conservatoire, the texts that it adopted became the core of a national
music cur riculum.
The first texts adopted by the Conservatoire were models of practicality, simpli-
fying those notions that were deemed unnecessar ily complex and str iving toward
uniformity of method. As time went on, however, the faculty went beyond the
highly utilitar ian education envisioned by the or iginal reformers and developed a
sophisticated pedagogy that embraced virtually all aspects of musical thought. As an
example, the pedagogy created by Antoine Reicha, who was appointed professor of
counter point at the Conservatoire in 1817, extended from his Traité de mélodie of
1814 through the Cours de composition musicale (?1816 – 18) to the Traité de haute com-
position musicale of 1824 – 26.40 In these texts, Reicha, with the zeal of a geometer
and the passion of an artist, strove to provide a systematic approach that extended
from the most basic aspects of musical structure— expressed through a grammar of
music analogous to that of Koch— to a full account of the largest for ms. Thus was
institutionalized an approach to music that began with isolated components and
culminated in large for ms conceived as dramas enacted in sound.41 Within this
course of study, musical for m was presented as both static and dynamic. In the early
stages of the pedagogical plan, form was static, consisting of various components
that could be assembled to create musical compositions. In the later stages, it
became thoroughly dynamic, as this perspective yielded to one that accommodated,
even if it did not completely sanction, the artistic license necessary to create works
such as Mozart’s Overture for the Marriage of Figaro.42
Changes to the Ger man universities were not as sudden as those that led to the
formation of the Conservatoire, but they were motivated by pragmatic and political
concer ns similar to those that shaped France’s new educational system. There had
developed in Ger many over the course of the eighteenth centur y the perception
that a university education served no useful pur pose. This notion, together with
efficiencies imposed by French rule and the growing financial burden presented by
universities whose traditional sources of financial support had begun to erode, con-
tributed to the disappearance of over half the Ger man universities dur ing the
Napoleonic era.43 As a way of counter ing this general disintegration, a delegation of
professors from the University of Halle, which had been suspended by Napoleon in
1806, approached King Fr iedrich Wilhelm III in the late summer of 1807 and asked
40. Reicha’s Cours de composition musicale ultimately replaced Charles-Simon Catel’s Traité d’harmonie,
which had been approved by the General Assembly of the Conservatoire in 1801 as the Conservatoire’s
main har mony text.
41. For a discussion of affinities between Reicha’s account of the grande coupe binaire (now conven-
tionally called sonata for m) and drama, see Peter Hoyt, “The Concept of Développement in the Early
Nineteenth Centur y,” in Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism, ed. Ian Bent (Cambr idge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), 141– 62.
42. For a discussion of the range of Reicha’s analytical perspective, which included the Overture
from the Marriage of Figaro, see Ian Bent’s commentar y on one of the analyses from Reicha’s Traité de
haute composition musicale, in Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century, 1: 152– 53.
43. Theodore Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and Its Institutions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1990), 228. My account of the history of German universities owes much to chap. 5 of this
book, which is given over to a consideration of the institution of the university dur ing the time of Ger-
man Romanticism.
that their university be reestablished in Berlin. The king was apparently receptive to
the idea and is reported to have responded that “the state must replace through
intellectual powers what it has lost in the way of physical powers.”44 Loosely mod-
eled on the ideals associated with the University of Jena when Fr iedrich Schiller,
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Fr iedrich von Schelling lectured there, the University
of Berlin was conceived as an institution combining faculties in the sciences, med-
icine, and the humanities. It was to be unified by a central faculty of philosophy
professing an “encyclopedic” approach to knowledge. The university for mally
opened in October 1810 with a faculty that included Fichte and Fr iedrich Schleier-
macher.
By the time the composer and music theor ist Adolph Ber nhard Marx was
offered a chair at Berlin in 1830, much of the spirit of the Romantic university had
faded to a memory.45 What remained were a faculty that included Hegel in its ranks
(who began lectur ing at Berlin in 1818) and the notion that the university was an
institution by, of, and for the state. Marx’s encyclopedic approach to music theory
resembled Reicha’s sweeping attempt to provide a complete account of musical
knowledge in his three treatises. In 1837, Marx published his four-volume Die Lehre
von der musikalischen Komposition, praktisch-theoretisch. This comprehensive tract,
which went through six full or partial editions dur ing Marx’s lifetime, presented a
graduated course of study that began with the simplest of musical mater ials and
forms and proceeded to the most complex.46 However, where the pedagogy of
Reicha’s treatises was conceptualized around the models of language and drama,
Marx adopted a different model, one closely associated with the same Romantic
idealism that had shaped the structure of the University of Berlin. This was the
model of organicism.
organicism As has often been noted, organicist models, which map features
from principally vegetative domains onto inorganic or artificial domains, flourished
among early Romantic philosophers and wr iters.47 The model was, however, also in
use dur ing the late eighteenth century. Our friend Sulzer, as part of his more prac-
tical remarks on invention, advises the artist faced with an intractable situation to
put the work to one side for a short while. Gradually, solutions will present them-
selves, until a way is found where none was thought to exist.
44. Ziolkowski, German Romanticism, 287.

45. An account of Marx’s place at the University of Berlin can be had in Scott Bur nham’s intro-
duction to Adolph Ber nhard Marx, Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven: Selected Writings on Theory and
Method, ed. and trans. Scott G. Burnham, Cambridge Studies in Music Theor y and Analysis, 12 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 5– 6.
46. For overviews of the content of Marx’s Die Lehre and discussions of the educational context
within which it was embedded, see Burnham’s introduction to Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven, 7– 11;
and Mark Spitzer, “Marx’s ‘Lehre’ and the Science of Education: Towards the Recuperation of Music
Pedagogy,” Music and Letters 79 (1998): 489 – 526.
47. A thorough account of the role of organicist models in theor ies of invention dur ing the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centur ies (framed in ter ms of the memorable phrase “vegetable genius”) can be
found in Meyer Howard Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 198 – 225.
It is one of many remarkable secrets of psychology that apparently clear thoughts can,
when one tur ns to them for deeper contemplation, refuse to be developed or com-
prehended in a clear way. But when they are left alone they will by themselves grow
in greater clar ity, much as that per iod in which plants ger minate unnoticed and all at
once burst into full bloom. Some concepts will gestate little by little in our mind, so
to speak, and extract themselves from the mass of obscure ideas into the clear light.
Every artist must rely upon such fortunate moments of genius, and if he cannot always
find what he diligently seeks, he must await with patience that moment when his
thoughts r ipen.48
Here the mystery of invention, which Sulzer also connected with rhetor ic, is
explained in ter ms of an organicist model: ideas are seeds, and, given time and a lit-
tle care, they will put forth complete and fully articulated intellectual constructs —
the flowers of invention — that could never be produced by more mechanical
means.
The perspective evident in Sulzer’s account of unconscious psychology had a
profound effect among Ger man thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centur ies. These proponents of “nature philosophy,” including Fichte, Schelling,
Jean Paul Richter, and August Wilhelm Schlegel, embraced the newly emerging
biological sciences, finding in them a source of concepts that could replace those
derived from Cartesian or Newtonian mechanics. It was this model that Marx
absorbed and adapted for the character ization of musical for m.
In the first volume of Die Lehre, after a few preliminar ies, Marx begins the jour-
ney that would culminate in a consideration of the most exalted compositional
forms of his day with a br ief contemplation of the relationship between a major
scale and its tonic. He observes that no note within the scale provides the sense of
repose that the tonic does: pausing on any other note is unsatisfying and demands
further motion. This observation leads Marx to a pr inciple basic to all music, the
main ter ms of which are placed in typographical relief on the page:
In this we have found the opposition that thoroughly per meates all of music:
Rest and Motion
Tonic and Scale.49
Marx extended this opposition to apply to all aspects of musical for m, formulated as
the dynamic impulse rest — motion — rest. For Marx, this basic patter n is truly com-
prehensive: it governs the modest four-measure phrase, as well as the entire expanse
of sonata for m.50
49. “Hierin haben wir einen durch die ganze Tonkunst wirksam hindurchgehende Gegensatz,
Ruhe und Bewegung
Tonika und Tonleiter
gefunden.” Adolph Bernhard Marx, Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, praktisch-theoretisch, 4th
ed. (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1841– 47), 1: 27.
50. This character ization is from Bur nham’s introduction to Marx, Musical Form in the Age of
Beethoven, 9.
It was in locating a source for this impulse that Marx tur ned to an organicist per-
spective that resonated not only with his era but also with the character ization of
invention that had been offered by Sulzer some sixty-five years earlier. However,
where for Sulzer the idea is the seed, for Marx it is the motive: “The motive is the
primal configuration [Urgestalt] of everything musical, just as the ger minal vesicle,
that membranous sac filled with some fluid element (or perhaps with solid bodies),
is the pr imal configuration of everything organic — the true primal plant or pr imal
animal. The motive, this conjunction of two tones or some other unities, simply
is.”51 Marx’s mapping from the organic domain to the musical domain makes pos-
sible an account of form that extends from little more than a pair of notes to entire
symphonies. Evident throughout is an approach to musical for m that is not only
dynamic (through the progression rest — motion — rest ) but also motivated by the
forces latent within the most basic of musical mater ials. According to Marx,
the motive, as the essential organic entity, offers something that can connect with
the composer’s spirit. Should the spir it adopt the motive, the composer’s intellect
will then come into play, shaping the motive to create works of art.52 The organi-
cist perspective that Marx employs thus serves as a way to character ize the dynamic
aspect of musical for m and as a launching point for the pedagogy of composition. It
also fulfills the promise of eighteenth-centur y theor ists who first suggested that
music was an independent domain of meaning and expression: in the organicist per-
spective of the early nineteenth centur y, the fully autonomous work of music is
born.53
As heady as was the intellectual environment associated with the organicist per-
spective basic to his conception of form, Marx’s Die Lehre was, as its full title
announced, both theoretical and practical. In his discussion of the basic elements of
musical for m, Marx notes a certain confusion regarding the notion of a per iod,
which is for med from two fundamental elements (the Gang and the Satz) derived
from the motive: “If, in my compositional method, I associated the per iod with the
fundamental for ms, it was only for reasons of method, in order to keep this impor-
tant and ubiquitously hard-working for m constantly before the student’s eyes from
the very beginning.”54 Marx’s pedagogy, shaped by the practical exigencies of a sys-
tem of education intended to work the will of the state, had its static building
blocks, as well as its dynamic idealism. Although Marx could always trace these
building blocks back to their organic or igins, they nonetheless represented basic
components of a student’s education and, at least for the beg inner, of the musical
work.
51. Marx, Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven, 66. This passage is from Marx’s 1856 essay “Form in
Music.”
52. Marx, Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven, 66– 67.
53. Although my inter pretation of the or igin of the fully autonomous work of music is somewhat
different from that of Lydia Goehr, this is due mostly to the somewhat different focus of my approach.
I am concer ned here not simply with the idea of a fully autonomous work but with the complex of ideas
represented by organicism that allowed music theor ists to articulate the notion of an autonomous work
on both a practical and a theoretical level. Goehr’s interpretation can be found in The Imaginary Museum
of Musical Works, 159– 75.
54. Marx, Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven, 68.
That the high abstraction of Marx’s theory caused problems, at least for some
theorists, is suggested by the approach to motive taken by Hugo Riemann. Rie-
mann, as editor of the ninth edition of Marx’s Die Lehre (which appeared in 1887),
was well acquainted with Marx’s conception of a motive. Nonetheless, in his Musik-
Lexikon of 1882, Riemann began his definition of a motive by mapping from yet
another domain: “Motive means in music, as it does in architecture, the most basic
character istic parts of an artistic structure.”55 Riemann goes on to distinguish
between rhythmic motives, melodic motives, and har monic motives, all conceived
in architectural ter ms. Although the dynamic impulse basic to Marx’s conception of
motive would appear to have vanished, in other of his works it is evident that Rie-
mann has simply transfer red it to metr ic structure, which he construed as having,
as its essence, the impulse upbeat-downbeat.56 This construal gave Riemann a way to
represent the musical dynamism that Marx had developed through an organicist
metaphysics in more concrete ter ms. To the extent that the student or reader under-
stands the basic exper ience of musical rhythm, so will he or she understand the
dynamic impulse basic to music.
models of musical form To all appearances, Ebenezer Prout and

Percy Goetschius are a bit like Alice and the Mad Hatter (although I shall not ven-
ture to say which theor ist takes which role), seeming to talk about the same thing
but doing so in very different ter ms. But where Alice and the Hatter are engaged
with the elusive topic of Time, Prout and Goetschius are dealing with the rather
more humble matter of Motive. And where the Hatter is as surely a denizen of
Wonderland as Alice is not, Prout and Goetschius draw their ideas about motive and
form from the same pool of German music scholarship.
As we can now see, Prout’s approach is infor med by the work of Marx and Rie-
mann: he conceives of motive in ter ms of both metr ical accentuation and organi-
cism, although in the end it is the for mer that is foregrounded in his theory while
the latter remains safely in the backg round. Goetschius, in contrast, conceives of
motive in almost exclusively grammatical ter ms. His approach resembles, first and
foremost, that of Reicha (whose three treatises were translated into Ger man by Carl
Czerny and published in a four-volume French-Ger man bilingual edition in 1832).
To a lesser extent, it resembles that of Koch (whose work was not as widely known
in the nineteenth centur y). Thus, Goetschius’s method is shaped not only by a
grammatical approach to musical for m but also by a pedagogy that was thoroughly
pragmatic. Just as Reicha’s theory of form was part of a larger program of complete
instruction in music for a nation intent on building its musical identity, so
Goetschius’s manual was part of a ser ies of texts intended to fulfill the same func-
tion in the New World.
Beyond being able to sort out the lineages of Prout’s and Goetschius’s ideas
55. “Motive nennt man in der Musik wie in der Architektur die letzten charakter istischen Glieder
eines Kunstgebildes.” Hugo Riemann, Musik-Lexikon (Leipzig: Verlag des Bibliographischen Instituts,
1882), 605.
56. Hugo Riemann, System der musikalischen Rhythmik und Metrik (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel,
1903), 13– 18.
about motive and for m, however, we now also have a better grasp on the different
sorts of conceptual work done by the mappings they employ. Mappings that yield
a static account of musical for m put into relief the explicitly conceptual side of
music: they rely on our ability to isolate musical events or ser ies of musical events
and put them into categor ies. Members of the categor ies can then be compared
with one another, as can the categor ies themselves. The view that results is of music
as mater ial that can be shaped and manipulated, whose meaning is neatly contained
in discrete packages. Mappings that yield a dynamic account of musical for m put
into relief the exper iential side of music: music as something to be lived through,
which may move us or not, but which in all cases resists packaging into neat con-
ceptual containers. Here meaning is at best only imperfectly contained and is in
constant danger of overflowing the crude boundar ies of ontological necessity.
As the examples drawn from the ways musicians character ized for m in the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centur ies show, the cross-domain mappings we use in our
theories of music are more than simple cur iosities of language, for these mappings
have everything to do with our understanding of how music is organized, along
with what counts as music in the first place.
two models of musical hierarchy

As I attempted to show in the preceding pages, descriptions of musical for m have
occasioned a number of cross-domain mappings, operating on both the specific and
generic level. The situation with musical hierarchy is somewhat different, in part
because hierarchy was not deemed an attr ibute of musical works as such but was
instead used to character ize the organization of musical mater ials. Consequently,
explicit discussions of hierarchy rarely appear in accounts of works of music but
instead for m the context for those accounts. As an example, let us consider three
contemporary analyses of the same passage: the first eight measures of the theme
from the opening movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A major K. 331. All three
analyses deal with the rhythmic structure of the passage (the score appears in ex. 7.2).
example 7.2 W. A. Mozart, Piano Sonata in A major K. 331, first movement, theme,
mm. 1– 8
Andante grazioso
5
Edward Cone’s analysis of the theme appeared in his Musical Form and Musical
Performance of 1968. The analysis comes just after the introduction of a str iking
metaphor for the melodic and har monic shape of a musical phrase: Cone likens the
shape of a phrase to a game of catch:
If I throw a ball and you catch it, the completed action must consist of three parts: the
throw, the transit, and the catch. There are, so to speak, two fixed points: the initiation
of the energy and the goal toward which it is directed; the time and distance between
them are spanned by the moving ball. In the same way, the typical musical phrase con-
sists of an initial downbeat (/), a period of motion ( ¯ ), and a point of arrival marked
by a cadential downbeat (\).57
This metaphor then provides the framework for his analysis of the rhythm of
Mozart’s theme, a portion of which is given in example 7.3. Cone rejects a simple
alternation of strong and weak measures of the sort posited by Riemann on the basis
of harmony. Cone asserts, rather, that the first and fifth measures of the period should
be considered strong because of the fir m statement of tonic. The fourth and eighth
measures should also be deemed strong because of the emphasis provided by the
cadences. A consideration of the motivic structure of the per iod enables Cone to
refine this analysis. The first phrase consists of two individual sequential measures fol-
lowed by a two-measure unit. The shape of the two-measure unit duplicates the
shape of the phrase in miniature: it consists of two half-measure units followed by a
full measure. As we see in example 7.3, the internal dynamic of the two-measure unit
is the same as that of the complete phrase. The second phrase begins with the same
sequential measures as the first, but in m. 7 the compression that prepares the clos-
ing cadence br ings the r ise from A4 to CS5 into prominence. Cone’s hearing of this
rise as a third member of the sequence prompts him to assign it the same rhythmic
symbol as the second member of the sequence, heard in m. 6.Voice-leading concerns
and the forward energy of the sforzando cause Cone to group the final eighth note of
m. 7 with the cadential mater ial of m. 8; this constitutes the closing downbeat.
Although Leonard Meyer’s analysis of this theme appeared after Cone’s (he pre-
sented it first in one of the Ernest Bloch lectures he gave at the University of Cali-
fornia at Berkeley in 1971), his methodology is essentially the same as that which he
had developed with Grosvenor Cooper over a decade earlier. Cooper and Meyer
understood rhythmic structure to be perceived as “an organic process in which smaller
rhythmic motives, while possessing a shape and structure of their own, also function
as integral parts of a larger rhythmic organization.”58 Rhythmic relationships are ana-
lyzed as patter ns of beats, in which a stable accent and one or more weak beats are
grouped together in different ways; these low-level, foreground patter ns combine
with one another in various ways to for m more extended rhythmic groupings. In this
way the musical surface gives rise to a hierarchy of rhythmic groupings.59
57. Edward T. Cone, Musical Form and Musical Performance (New York:W.W. Norton, 1968), 26– 27.
58. Grosvenor W. Cooper and Leonard B. Meyer, The Rhythmic Structure of Music (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1960), 2.
59. Leonard B. Meyer, Explaining Music: Essays and Explorations (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1973; repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 27– 28. Meyer’s Bloch Lectures of 1971
form the basis for Explaining Music.
example 7.3 Edward Cone’s analysis of the opening theme of Mozart’s Piano Sonata K.
331, mm. 1– 8
I I V
Meyer’s analysis of the opening per iod of Mozart’s theme is given in example
7.4. The first level of the analysis starts at the half-measure level of the music, impor-
tant for Meyer because the Ωdçç- patterns of the first two measures of each phrase do
much to deter mine the grouping and accentual patter n of the complete bar. In
mm. 3 and 4, Meyer’s analysis on level 2 cor responds closely with Cone’s reading:
although the symbols are slightly different (Meyer’s indication for a retrospectively
weak accent replacing Cone’s symbol for an initial downbeat), on this level as well
as the third and fourth, the analyses for the most part agree. The main difference
between the two is that Cone starts his analysis at what for Meyer is the third level
of a rhythmic hierarchy.
In his article “The Theory and Analysis of Tonal Rhythm” (1978), Robert Mor-
gan noted that, although both Cone’s and Meyer’s work reflected the influence of
Schenker’s theory of tonal music, their analyses of Mozart’s theme were still
beholden to certain aspects of metrical dogma. For his part, Morgan proposed con-
sidering the theme from a more consistently Schenkerian viewpoint. Morgan noted
that Schenker’s theory supplied a method for locating points at which structural
motions or iginate and ter minate; his idea was to cor relate these points of structural
origin and ter mination with the points of principal accent through which the larger
rhythm of a passage is regulated. In Morgan’s analysis, the first phrase of the theme
example 7.4 Leonard B. Meyer’s analysis of the opening theme of Mozart’s Piano
Sonata K. 331, mm. 1– 8
antecedent a
m m' n
p p' q
Andante grazioso
1.
2.
3.
4.
consequent a'
m m' n'
5
is governed by the overall motion from CS5 and A3, in m. 1, to B4 and E3 in m. 4

(see ex. 7.5, level 3). This overall motion is articulated on the next level (level 2 of
ex. 7.5) by a motion down to A4 and FS3 in m. 3. Although the A could be seen as
the completion of a third span from CS5, the bass FS3 and the acceleration away
from A4 to B4 on the second beat of m. 3 prevent closure.
Up to this point, Morgan’s analysis agrees, in most respects, with the analyses by
Cone and Meyer. Morgan does not, however, believe the first beat of m. 4 should be
heard as accented relative to the second beat. The acceleration of m. 3 continues
into m. 4, in his view, carrying the music forward to the ar rival of the bass on the
dominant on the second beat. This ar rival, according to Morgan’s analysis, serves as
the rhythmic goal and closing accent of the phrase. From Morgan’s perspective,
then, the rhythm of this phrase is not a matter of strong and weak beats or strong
and weak measures; it is created rather by an articulated tonal process that moves
between the two points defined by the outer-voice frame.60
The acceleration in the first phrase is answered by an even greater acceleration
60. Robert P. Morgan, “The Theor y and Analysis of Tonal Rhythm,” Musical Quarterly 64 (1978):
446.
example 7.5 Robert Morgan’s analysis of the opening theme of Mozart’s Piano Sonata
K. 331, mm. 1– 8
in the second, for the consequent phrase must go through the dominant to ar rive
on the tonic. That ar rival gives a different character to the closing accent of the sec-
ond phrase; for Morgan, it is the difference in character between the two closing
accents, and not some analogy to two large beats, that is responsible for the upbeat-
downbeat effect created by the pair ing of antecedent and consequent. Implicit in
this analysis is the notion that accent refers to a point of emphasis, which also leads
Morgan to reject Cone’s and Meyer’s reading of the rhythm of mm. 3 and 4 as a
diminution of the overall rhythm of mm. 1 through 4. If mm. 3 and 4 supply the
downbeat for mm. 1 and 2, they must represent an ar rival, but in fact the point of
arrival occurs only at the end of the unit. Morgan does not believe m. 3 can simul-
taneously be both an ar rival and a departure.
Although these three analyses converge on a number of points, their divergences
reflect two different models of musical hierarchy. The first model, which gives r ise
to what I call chain-of-being hierarchies, does a good job of capturing the har monic
and scale-degree dependencies typical of the har monic organization of instrumen-
tal music of the late eighteenth centur y. The second model, which gives rise to
what I call atomistic hierarchies, does a good job of capturing the regularity and nest-
ing of accentual patter ns typical of musical meter dur ing the same per iod. Because
both models are associated with what appears to be a common set of structural rela-
tions — called “hierarchy”—we might be misled into thinking that they are simply
variations of each other. Such is not the case, however, for these models developed
at different times in history, and with reference to different domains. These differ-
ences are reflected in the structure of the models and also in the ways they have
been applied to music.
Histor ical Models of Hierarchical Organization
The principal mark of chain-of-being hierarchies is a conception of the universe as

a precisely ar ranged system of interdependent levels or degrees of existence extend-
ing from a Supreme Being down to the lowliest organism. Although this concept
is part of an incredibly rich collection of ideas — one wr iter has suggested that the
history of chain-of-being hierarchies is, in reality, a history of Occidental thought61
— only a few central aspects need concer n us here.
The ingredients for this complex of ideas came from Plato and Aristotle; Aris-
totle’s connection of “powers of the soul” with levels of being in De anima proved
particularly influential. It was in Neoplatonism, however, that these ideas first
appeared fully organized into a coherent general scheme.62 Crucial to this organi-
zation was Plotinus’s idea that the perfection of the One included a superabundance
which, overflowing, was the source of the Many. According to Plotinus, this gener-
ation of the Many from the One could not come to an end as long as any possible
variety of being in the descending ser ies was left unrealized.
One of the principal ways the Neoplatonic cosmology was transmitted to the
Middle Ages was through Macrobius’s Commentary on the Dream of Scipio (which
dates from the late fourth to early fifth centur ies a.d.). In a passage expanding on
the revelation presented to Scipio that minds are given to man out of the eter nal
and divine fire of the stars, Macrobius wr ites:
Accordingly, since Mind emanates from the Supreme God and Soul from Mind, and
Mind, indeed, forms and suffuses all below with life, and since this is the one splen-
dor lighting up everything and visible in all, like a countenance reflected in many mir-
rors arranged in a row, and since all follow on in continuous succession, degenerating
step by step in their downward course, the close observer will find that from the
Supreme God even to the bottommost dregs of the universe there is one tie, binding
at every link and never broken. This is the golden chain of Homer which, he tells us,
God ordered to hang down from the sky to the earth.63
61. C. A. Patrides, “Hierarchy and Order,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Piv-
otal Ideas, ed. Philip P.Wiener (New York: Charles Scr ibner’s Sons, 1973), 2: 434.
62. Concer ning the complex of ideas associated with the g reat chain of being and Neoplatonism,
see Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1936), 61; concer ning De anima, see p. 58.
63. Ambrosius Aurelius Theodosius Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, ed. and trans.
William Har ris Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 145. It is also in Macrobius (pp.
185– 200 in the Stahl translation) that we find a detailed discussion of the har mony of the spheres, as well
as the legend of Pythagoras and the blacksmith’s shop. The connection between har mony and order
found in Macrobius was an important one, and it may have contr ibuted to the application of a
metaphor ical chain-of-being hierarchy to music. However, it is also str iking that the image of a ladder
is used in both domains. In the Middle Ages, the hierarchical organization summoned by the Great
Chain of Being was commonly represented by Jacob’s Ladder; see Paul G. Kuntz, “A Formal Preface and
an Infor mal Conclusion to The Great Chain of Being: The Universality and Necessity of Hierarchical
Thought,” in Jacob’s Ladder and the Tree of Life: Concepts of Hierarchy and the Great Chain of Being, ed. Mar-
ion Leathers Kuntz and Paul Gr imley Kuntz, American University Studies, Ser.V, Philosophy, 14 (New
York: Peter Lang, 1987), 6. Also, some early mnemonic diagrams show the gamut as notes on a ladder; see
Karol Berger, Musica Ficta: Theories of Accidental Inflection in Vocal Polyphony from Marchetto da Padova to
Gioseffo Zarlino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 9– 10.
The notion of a Great Chain of Being proved a concise and powerful model through
which humans could give order to their universe. It also provided a model through
which the distr ibution of power could be accomplished and justified. The model
is quite evident in ecclesiastical hierarchies: power flows from the top down, in the
same way that being and soul flow from the Godhead down through the various
levels of being, from highest to lowest.
Inherent in the Neoplatonic scheme is a tension between the self-sufficiency of
the One and the multitudinous abundance of creation it gives rise to: it is a paradox
that the One needs nothing else and yet produces everything else. Giordano Bruno,
writing in the sixteenth centur y, reveled in this paradox.64 Yet it was also Bruno
who, by combining the concept of atomism with the comprehensive organization
provided by the Neoplatonic scheme, inspired a way of thinking about hierarchi-
cal organization that would eventually compete with the Great Chain of Being.
For Bruno, atomism was a metaphysical pr inciple that provided the basis for a
demonstration of the underlying unity of all nature.65 This view was especially
influential in England, where Bruno lived from 1583 to 1585 and where two factors
combined to transfor m his vague, metaphysical scheme into a compelling account
of order. The first factor came in the for m of a challenge to the model for the dis-
tribution of power provided by the application of a chain-of-being hierarchy to the
social sphere. In a social chain-of-being hierarchy, the power of any individual is
linked, as an essential property, to the level occupied by that individual within the
system: the higher the level, the greater the power over others. A refutation of this
model can be seen in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan of 1651. Hobbes argued that all
humans were basically equal in the faculties of body and mind: all had approxi-
mately equal power over others. Because of this equality, the natural state of indi-
vidual humans was one of competition. Only by imposing a social order on humans
from without, in the for m of a common power “to keep them all in awe,” was it
possible to overcome the natural state of virtual or actual war.66 Thus the properties
ascribed to each member of a society (which result in equal measures of power for
all members) are different from those according to which societal order should be
established (which result in unequal measures of power): the properties of the indi-
vidual are independent of the properties of the system.
The second factor important in the development of an alter native view of hier-
archical organization was the increased presence of mechanical devices in people’s
lives.67 These machines provided thinkers of the time with practical models of the
organization of nature. Among the most important of these was the mechanical
clock. As Gideon Freudenthal has observed: “In the construction of the mechani-
cal clock it was possible to produce complicated movements by an appropriate dis-
position of gears and a dr iving force. The task of science [in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centur ies] can be inter preted as the attempt to discover in a limited area
64. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 120.

65. Robert H. Kargon, “Atomism in the Seventeenth Centur y,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas:
Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, ed. Philip P.Wiener (New York: Charles Scr ibner’s Sons, 1973), 1: 133.
66. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and
Civill (London: Andrew Crooke, 1651), chap. 13.
67. Kargon, “Atomism in the Seventeenth Century,” 1: 132.
and to a limited extent the pr inciples of construction of the divine clock.”68 The
model of a clock is one that appears consistently in the dispute between Isaac New-
ton and Gottfr ied Wilhelm Leibniz on the ultimate nature of matter. Of particular
interest are the different methodological approaches used by Newton and Leibniz.
Leibniz held to what had become, by the early eighteenth centur y, a traditional
Baconian methodology: scientific inquir y should seek to disassemble the divine
clock, piece by piece, never speculating beyond what could be observed. Although
Newton was in sympathy with this methodology, it was inadequate for a purely
mechanical account of physics, since the ultimate workings of the clock — its
atomic structure— could not be observed. Newton’s solution, given in the final
Query appended to the fourth edition of his Opticks, was a practical one that
divided scientific theor izing into two halves.69 The first half is analysis: “This Analy-
sis consists in making Exper iments and Observations, and in drawing general Con-
clusions from them by Induction, and admitting of no Objections against Conclu-
sions, but such as are taken from Exper iments, or other certain Truths.”70 The
second half is synthesis or composition, in which the various inductive generaliza-
tions produced by analysis are organized into a logical system based on a limited
number of essential pr inciples. In the case of the divine clock, synthesis of neces-
sity played a larger role than analysis (which led Leibniz to accuse Newton of argu-
ing from hypothesis rather than from observation). However, Newton believed this
exception to his overall methodology was justified by the potential results:
To derive two or three general Pr inciples of Motion from Phænomena, and afterwards
to tell us how the Properties and Actions of all cor poreal Things follow from those
manifest Pr inciples, would be a very great step in Philosophy, though the Causes of
those Pr inciples were not yet discover’d: And therefore I scruple not to propose the
Principles of Motion above-mention’d, they being of very general Extent, and leave
their Causes to be found out.71
In other words, the scientist simply had to assume that the general pr inciples pro-
duced by synthesis held, even on levels that could not be directly observed: the
mechanical workings of the divine clock were assumed to be consistent through-
out.
When combined with the independence of elemental and systemic properties
proposed in the social sphere, this approach developed into a new conception of
hierarchical order, which I call an atomistic hierarchy. In contrast to a chain-of-
being hierarchy, an atomistic hierarchy can be built from the bottom up, its organi-
zation governed by a set of general pr inciples that obtain no matter what the
68. Gideon Freudenthal, Atom and Individual in the Age of Newton: On the Genesis of the Mechanistic
World View, trans. Peter McLaughlin, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 88 (Dordrecht: D.
Reidel, 1986), 63. Sulzer also used the analogy of a clock, but to character ize the unity of a work of art;
see Baker and Chr istensen, Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition, 43– 46.
69. R. I. G. Hughes, “Reason and Exper iment in Newton’s Opticks: Comments on Peter Achin-
stein,” in Philosophical Perspectives on Newtonian Science, ed. Phillip Br icker and R. I. G. Hughes (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 177.
70. Isaac Newton, Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light, 4th
ed. (London: W. Innys, 1730; repr. New York: Dover, 1952), 404.
71. Newton, Opticks, 401– 02.
specific attr ibutes of a given level. It is a concise and concrete account of organiza-
tion, and one that, through applications in physics, chemistry, and biology, has had
an enor mous influence on how humans view their world.
Structural Features of Chain-of-Being and

Atomistic Hierarchies
Each of these models of hierarchy offers a different view of how the world is orga-
nized. The fundamental conceit of chain-of-being hierarchies is to regard a domain
as a huge organism pervaded by a force, the or igins of which are mysterious.72
“Being” and “political power” are both examples of such forces. The mysterious
force behind any chain-of-being hierarchy manifests itself as properties instantiated
in varying degrees by the elements of the domain. In a traditional Great Chain of
Being, for instance, a rock has the property of substance, a tree has the properties of
substance and life, and an insect has the properties of substance, life, and mobility. The
domain can be organized into a hierarchy in which any given level is distinguished
by a specific set of properties that embody aspects of being. These properties include
all of the properties that distinguished lower levels, plus properties unique to the
given level: trees include substance and add life; insects include substance and life and
add mobility. Inclusion within the hierarchy is thus of properties, but not elements.
The fundamental conceit of atomistic hierarchies is to regard a domain as an
extended mechanism operating according to a limited set of general pr inciples. The
laws of classical physics are an example of one such set of principles. All of the
actions and properties of elements within the domain, from the smallest to the
largest, and from the most simple to the most complex, follow these general pr in-
ciples. Thus subatomic particles and planets both confor m to the same pr inciples.
Classes of elements may be distinguished according to common confor mance with
the general pr inciples of the system. The actions and properties of electrons, pro-
tons, and neutrons on the atomic level are by no means identical, but they can be
distinguished from the actions and properties of atoms on the molecular level. In
addition, all of the elements within a given class have the shared property of com-
bining into units: electrons, protons, and neutrons combine to for m atoms, and
atoms combine to for m molecules. The domain can be organized into a hierarchy
in which each level is a confor mance class whose elements combine into units that
constitute the elements of the next higher level in the hierarchy. This process con-
tinues recursively until the limits of the system are reached. Inclusion within the
hierarchy is thus of elements, but not properties.
The unique features of each of these models of hierarchy can be character ized in
terms of relationships that are established between the general, abstract property of
“energy” and the container schema. “Energy” takes for m as either the mysterious
72. While the parallels with the ideology of organicism that blossomed in the late eighteenth cen-
tury are intriguing, it should be remembered that the organicism associated with chain-of-being hier-
archies dates back at least to the Middle Ages. Accordingly, the mysterious or igins of the power behind
chain-of-being hierarchies is somewhat different from the mystery associated with Romantic organicism
since the for mer is an essential property of the model where the latter would be better descr ibed as acci-
dental.
force of a chain-of-being hierarchy or the power that dr ives the mechanism of an

atomistic hierarchy. For both models, the container schema provides the basic
internal structure of the levels that make up the hierarchical system.
In a chain-of-being hierarchy, the energy proper to the system (that is, “being”
or “political power”) is distr ibuted unequally throughout the system. Systemic orga-
nization is consequently based on the amount of energy (inter preted as “properties
of being” or “extent of political power”) each element of the system has. The con-
tainers (or hierarchical levels) that articulate this organization g roup elements
according to their amount of energy (or systemic properties). Although chain-of-
being hierarchies often offer vivid and dynamic accounts of organization, hier-
archical structure (based on the contents of the containers that make up the hier-
archy) is, in fact, relatively abstract.
In an atomistic hierarchy, energy is distr ibuted throughout the system according
to a fixed set of general pr inciples. Systemic organization is consequently based on
the way different elements of the system manifest these pr inciples. The containers
(or hierarchical levels) that articulate this organization group elements according to
common confor mance with the general pr inciples. The generality of the organiz-
ing principles of atomistic hierarchies means that the pr inciples can seem somewhat
removed from actual exper ience, although hierarchical structure (based on the con-
tents of the containers that make up the hierarchy) is, in fact, relatively concrete.
Given these structural attr ibutes, each model has a slightly different potential as
a source domain. A chain-of-being hierarchy will map these predicates onto a tar-
get domain:
• The target domain is pervaded by a mysterious force.
• This force manifests itself as properties instantiated to varying degrees by
the elements of the domain.
• The domain can be organized into a hierarchy, in which each level is dis-
tinguished by a unique set of properties.
• Each level of the hierarchy includes all of the properties of the next lower
level and adds new properties unique to that level.
• The higher levels of the hierarchy more completely manifest the mysteri-
ous force (and are thus more perfect) than the lower levels of the hierarchy.
Because chain-of-being hierarchies have often been used to structure natural and
human domains, applying the model to other domains may suggest that elements of
that domain have natural or anthropomorphic aspects, even though these are not
necessary entailments of the mapping.73
An atomistic hierarchy will map these predicates onto a target domain:
• The target domain is analogous to an extended mechanism.
• This mechanism operates according to a limited set of general pr inciples.
• All of the actions and properties of elements within the domain follow
these general pr inciples.
73. As the analyses at the end of chap. 2 suggest, factor ing anthropomorphism into the application
of chain-of-being hierarchies to different domains would quickly lead to a dense and highly intercon-
nected network of correlated domains.
• Classes of elements may be distinguished according to common confor-

mance with the general pr inciples and the shared property of combining
into units.
• The domain can be organized into a hierarchy, in which each level repre-
sents a confor mance class.
• The elements on each level of the hierarchy combine to for m units; these
units constitute the elements of the next higher level in the hierarchy.
• The recursive combination of elements into units continues until the lim-
its of the system are reached.
Because atomistic hierarchies have often been used in scientific explanations, apply-
ing the model to other domains may suggest that a “scientific” approach is being
used, even though this is not a necessary entailment of the mapping.
Given the different structural attr ibutes each model of hierarchy will map onto
a target domain, it follows that each provides a different model for reasoning about
the target domain. Nowhere is this clearer than in the first thoroughgoing applica-
tions of these models to the domain of music dur ing the early nineteenth century.
Mapping Models of Hierarchy onto Music
chain-of-being hierarchies and tonal theory Early in his

Cours complet d’harmonie et de composition of 1806, Jérôme-Joseph de Momigny pre-
sents a C major scale ar ranged as two symmetr ical tetrachords:
G a b C
C d e F
Momigny reminds his readers that the three main notes of the scale are G, C, and
F. He goes on to stress the centrality of tonic, providing a telling image in the
process: “The tonic tr iumphs over all the other notes. It is [tonic] who plays the pre-
mier role in le Ton. It is the center of gravity, the purpose of all purposes, the end
of all ends; in a word, it is to [tonic] that the scepter of the musical empire is
entrusted.”74 At the beginning of the chapter in which this passage occurs,
Momigny linked his concept of Ton to that of hierarchy;75 with his image of tonic
holding the scepter, he leaves no doubt as to what sort of hierarchy he has in mind.
74. The complete passage is as follows: “J’ai déjà dit que ce sont là les trois Notes pr incipales du Ton.
La tonique l’emporte sur toutes les Notes. C’est elle qui joue le premier rôle dans le Ton. Elle est le cen-
tre de gravité, le but de tous le buts, la fin de toutes les fins; en un mot, c’est à elle que le sceptre de
l’empire musical est confié.” Jérôme-Joseph de Momigny, Cours complet d’harmonie et de composition,
d’après une théorie neuve et générale de la musique (Paris: Chez l’auteur, 1806), 1: 47. The image is used again
on p. 81 of the same volume.
Although the early nineteenth-century notion of Ton can be considered to be approximately equiva-
lent to the modern notion of “key,” there are also differences between the two concepts; specifically, Ton has
a dynamic quality lacking in “key.” For this reason, I shall not use the latter as a translation of the former.
75. “Ton is the hierarchy, the order established between the notes of a genus and a mode.” [“Le Ton
est la hiérarchie, l’ordre établi entre les Notes d’un genre et d’un mode.”] Momigny, Cours complet
d’harmonie et de composition, 1: 47.
A similar, if less colorful, image may be found in the fuller explanation of order in
music that he offered twelve years later in the second music volume of the Ency-
clopédie méthodique. This order, which Momigny claims is purely metaphysical, con-
sists in a natural hierarchy of seven notes that are arranged according to the author-
ity of the one called tonic.76 As Renate Groth has noted, this is essentially the same
definition of order given over two decades later by François-Joseph Fétis; the most
important difference is that Fétis assigned it the name tonalité.77
By mapping a chain-of-being hierarchy onto the domain of music, Momigny
creates a very specific notion of Ton. The origin of Ton is mysterious — Momigny
never gets more specific than claiming that it is “metaphysical.”78 The notes orga-
nized by Ton occupy different levels, according to their directive force; Momigny
establishes these levels through various musical propositions. Perhaps most impor-
tant, notes are regarded as agents with powers proportional to their status within the
hierarchy: the properties character istic of Ton increase as one ascends toward tonic.
Thus, even though Momigny identifies dominant as the generator of the scale
(based on the presence of a minor seventh in the overtone ser ies), he argues that
it must be regarded as subservient to tonic, for the author ity of tonic cannot be
challenged.79
The conception of tonal organization produced by mapping a chain-of-being
hierarchy onto music was a powerful one.We see it not only in Momigny’s early
formulation of the concept of Ton but also in the persuasive account of tonal orga-
nization presented in the first and third volumes of Heinrich Schenker’s Neue
musikalische Theorien und Phantasien. As presented in Schenker’s Harmonielehre of
1906, the mysterious force that pervades the domain of music is that of nature, man-
ifested through the overtone ser ies. Earlier, in chapter 3, in a discussion of concep-
tual models as the basis for theor ies, I quoted a central passage from the Har-
monielehre on Schenker’s organicist approach to the overtone ser ies and pursued its
application to his approach to musical analysis. The same passage and related dis-
cussion is directly relevant to our present concer ns, and we turn to them again here.
In Schenker’s conception, every tone within the musical domain is possessed of the
urge to produce endless overtones, much as living beings have procreative urges.80
Beginning with a single tone, Schenker creates a community of tones ar ranged in
76. Jérôme-Joseph de Momigny, “Musique,” in Musique, Series 36 of Encyclopédie méthodique, ou par

ordre de matières, ed. Nicolas Étienne Framéry, Pierre Louis Ginguené, and Jérôme-Joseph de Momigny
(Paris: Chez Madame veuve Agasse, 1818), 2: 179.
77. Renate Groth, Die französische Kompositionlehre des 19. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner,
1983), 58.
78. On this use of “metaphysical” (which can also be seen in the work of Fétis), see Thomas Chr is-
tensen, “Fétis and Emerging Tonal Consciousness,” in Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism, ed. Ian Bent
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press, 1996), 37– 56.
79. Momigny, Cours complet d’harmonie et de composition, 1: 49– 51, 47– 48.
80. “It is self-evident that the urge to produce unending generations of overtones belongs to every
tone in equal measure. One might also compare this urge to that of animals, for it appears in fact to be
in no way infer ior to the procreative urge of a living being.” [“Es ist selbstverständlich, daß den Trieb,
Generationen von Obertönen ins Unendliche zu zeugen, jeder Ton in gleichem Maße besitzt. Man darf,
wenn man will, auch diesen Trieb einem Animalischen vergleichen, denn er scheint in der Tat dem
Fortpflanzungstr ieb eines Lebewesens durchaus nicht nachzustehen.”] Heinr ich Schenker, Harmonielehre,
Neue musikalische Theor ien und Phantasien, 1 (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’sche, 1906), §14, p. 42.
hierarchical order, with the notes closest to the source-pitch having priority over
those more remote.81 The tonal system that results is a manifestation of the desire of
the source tone to rule over others and to extend this rule as far as possible.82
In Der freie Satz, from 1935, Schenker retained this conception of tonal organi-
zation and, by emphasizing the organicism latent in this conception, built from it an
account of the coherence of entire works of music. He did this by proposing that
the transfor mation of the musical source (now the Naturklang, or chord of nature)
proceeded through discrete levels from background to foreground. The background
represented an abstract, initial working-out of the tendencies of the chord of nature
through the Ursatz, or fundamental structure; the foreground represented the musi-
cal work as we conventionally think of it.83 Schenker makes clear that this fore-
ground emanates from and is controlled by the background.84 Thus the hierarchi-
cal organization of music is not restricted to the ordering of single tones into a
scalar system, but manifests itself as a ser ies of transfor mations that steadily enr ich
musical content. In Schenker’s vision of the relationship between structural levels,
a version of the Neoplatonic cosmogony central to the or iginal Great Chain of
Being continues to echo: “Between fundamental structure and foreground there is
manifested a rapport much like that ever-present, interactional rapport which con-
nects God to creation and creation to God. Fundamental structure and foreground
represent, in terms of this rapport, the celestial and the ter restrial in music.”85
81. Schenker, Harmonielehre, §§17 – 18, pp. 54– 55.

82. “But now, what does ‘relationship’ mean in the life of the tone and what in this context would
be implied by the intensity of living life to the fullest? The relationships of a tone are its system. Once
the egoism of the tone manifests itself in such a way that the tone (rather like a human) might rule over
its fellow-tones rather than be ruled by them, then these very systems provide the means for satisfaction
of this egoistic love of power. A tone rules over others when it subjugates them to the relationships out-
lined in the systems above.” [“Nun aber, was soll denn Beziehung heißen im Leben des Tons und was
soll hier wohl Intensität des Sichauslebens bedeuten? Beziehungen des Tones sind seine Systeme. Äußert
sich der Egoismus des Tones dar in, daß er, hierin einem Menschen ähnlich, lieber über seine Mittöne
herrscht, als daß er von ihnen beher rscht wird, so sind ihm zur Befr iedigung dieser egoistischen
Herrschsucht eben in den Systemen die Mittel zur Her rschaft geboten. Ein Ton her rscht über die
andern, wenn er sich dieselben nach den in den Systemen geschilderten Verhältnisse unterwirft.”]
Schenker, Harmonielehre, §38, pp. 106– 07.
83. Robert Snarrenberg has recently pointed out what I would character ize as competing conceptual
models in the usual translations of Schenker’s terms (e.g., “fundamental structure” for “Ursatz”); see Snar-
renberg, “Competing Myths: The Amer ican Abandonment of Schenker’s Organicism,” in Theory, Analy-
sis and Meaning in Music, ed. Anthony Pople (Cambr idge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 45– 52.
84. “All the foreground diminutions, including the apparent ‘keys’ arising out of the voice-leading
transfor mations, ultimately emanate from the diatony in the background.” Heinrich Schenker, Free Com-
position (Der Freie Satz), ed. and trans. Ernst Oster, New Musical Theor ies and Fantasies, 3 (New York:
Schirmer Books, 1979), §4, p. 11. [“Ist doch alle Vordergrund-Diminution, einschließlich der scheinbaren
Tonarten aus den Stimmführungsvervandlungen, zuletzt eben aus der Diatonie im Hinterg rund
erflossen.”] Heinr ich Schenker, Der freie Satz, Neue musikalische Theor ien und Phantasien, 3 (Vienna:
Universal-Edition A. G., 1935), §4, p. 32.
85. Schenker, Free Composition, 160 (Passage E). “Aehnlich wie von Gott zum Geschöpf zu Gott eine
Fühlungnahme waltet, stets ineinanderlaufend, stets gegenwärtig, wirkt sich eine Fühlungnahme auch
zwischen Ursatz und Vordergrund aus als gleichsam einem Jenseits und Diesseits in der Musik.”
Schenker, Der freie Satz, 18.
atomistic hierarchies and metrical theory A rather differ-

ent view of musical order is presented by Gottfr ied Weber in his Versuch einer geord-
neten Theorie der Tonkunst, which appeared in a number of editions in the early
nineteenth century. In the course of introducing this particular view,Weber focused
not on the organization of pitches but on the organization of musical rhythm. For
Weber, rhythm depends on regularity, and the mechanical nature of this regularity
is revealed in his breathless definition:
If . . . a symmetrical measured division of the times is found in a piece of music, i.e. the
time is distr ibuted into exactly equal general divisions, and these are again divided into
equal parts, and the latter are farther separated into equal smaller quotas or propor-
tional parts, &c. and the duration of the tones in relation to one another is exactly
measured according to such divisions of time, so that a general division always appears
as a symmetr ically ar ranged group of several smaller portions of time, and these taken
together as a smaller subordinate group of yet smaller parts, and the accent is also sym-
metr ically apportioned amongst all these divisions of time— then the music is meas-
ured and rhythmical.86
This mechanical notion of rhythm is accompanied by a mechanical notion of time-

keeping: Weber emphasizes the importance of inventions like the metronome and
devotes a lengthy footnote to instructions for constructing a pendulum that will
accomplish the same thing.87
Weber follows his digression into the mechanics of time-keeping with a detailed
account of the rules by which musical measures are constructed, first dividing the
measure into its constituent parts and then building measures according to sym-
metrical patter ns of accent. He then proceeds to further levels of rhythmic organi-
zation:
But there is still a higher symmetry than this. That is to say, as parts of times taken to-
gether for m small groups, so also can several groups taken together be presented as
parts of a larger group, of a greater or a higher rhythm, of a rhythm of a higher order.
We may go still farther, and to such a greater rhythm we may annex moreover a sec-
ond and a third, so that these two or three together constitute again a still higher rhythm.
Thus, e.g. in the following passage, two measures taken together constitute a small
rhythm, two of these, taken together, constitute again a rhythm of a higher species, and
again two of the latter taken together, constitute a capital or pr incipal rhythm.88
The construction of the members of the larger rhythms is a symmetry proceeding

more by the great; it is perfectly similar to that involved in the structure of measures,
except that it is simply on a larger scale. As a measure consists of two or three parts,
86. Gottfr ied Weber, Theory of Musical Composition, Treated with a View to a Naturally Consecutive
Arrangement of Topics, ed. John Bishop, trans. James F.Warner (London: Robert Cocks, 1851), 1: 62 [§47].
87. Weber, Theory of Musical Composition, 1: 68– 71 [§51].
88. Weber, Theory of Musical Composition, 1: 85 [§68].
so two or three measures form the parts of a greater rhythm, and several such rhythms
are again parts of a still higher group.
Hence the measures are distinguished from one another in such higher rhythms, in
respect to their g reater or less inter nal weight or accentuation, in the same way the
parts of the measure are distinguished among themselves; i.e. the heavy or accented
measures assume a prominence above the lighter, as do the heavier parts of the measure
above the lighter.89
What Weber has descr ibed, of course, is an atomistic hierarchy of metrical groups:
beats combine into measures, measures combine into groups of measures, and so on
up through a ser ies of hierarchical levels.
Mapping an atomistic hierarchy onto the domain of musical rhythm emphasizes
the regularity of accentual patter n often associated with the concept of meter. By
turning rhythm into a machine,Weber can descr ibe its organization with three basic
principles: (1) all units of rhythm are either accented or unaccented; (2) these units
are grouped into cyclic patter ns of accent that for m symmetr ical groups; (3) the
groups of one level constitute the units of the next higher level. All of the objects
within this domain must confor m to these pr inciples, but not necessar ily in exactly
the same way. Although accent or nonaccent applies to both beats and g roups of
measures, with beats, the property lasts for but an instant, whereas with groups of
measures, the property lasts for the duration of the group. No limit is specified for
the hierarchy that results, although Weber does not develop levels beyond those
shown in his example.
The approach to musical rhythm proposed by Weber became standard during
the nineteenth century, although subsequent theor ists often added interesting com-
plications. Moritz Hauptmann, for instance, imposed a Hegelian inter pretation on
metrical groupings, which per mitted him to frame the basics of meter and har mony
in the same ter ms.90 By the time of Riemann’s System der musikalischen Rhythmik
und Metrik, the hierarchical structure represented by Weber’s “capital or pr incipal
rhythm” was presented as the nor mative framework (normatives Grundschema) of
rhythmic organization: beats for med measures, which in tur n formed duple groups,
which combined into two half-phrases of four measures each, which joined to cre-
ate the eight-measure phrase.91
Reasoning about Music through Chain-of-Being

and Atomistic Hierarchies
Chain-of-being and atomistic hierarchies developed at different points in the his-
tory of Western thought to explain two different domains of human exper ience.
These differences are reflected in the basic structure of each type of hierarchy, and
they result in two distinct models for reasoning about the world.When these mod-
89. Weber, Theory of Musical Composition, 1: 87 [§69].

90. Moritz Hauptmann, The Nature of Harmony and Metre, trans. W. E. Heathcote, 2nd ed. (London:
Sonnenschein, 1893; repr. with a new forward by Sigmund Levarie, New York: Da Capo Press, 1991),
189– 91.
91. Riemann, System der musikalischen Rhythmik und Metrik, 196– 98.
els are mapped onto music they yield different inferences about how musical mate-
rials are organized, which lead to different ways to analyze music. If our reasoning is
guided by a chain-of-being hierarchy, we infer that each musical work constitutes
a domain pervaded by a mysterious force. Musical analysis consists in explicating the
way different musical elements embody this mysterious force. By this means, the
proper place of these elements in the musical hierarchy can be deter mined and an
account of musical structure can be produced. If our reasoning is guided by an
atomistic hierarchy, we infer that each musical work operates like an extended
mechanism. Musical analysis consists in identifying the basic components of this
mechanism and explicating the pr inciples according to which it works. The view of
musical structure that results is of a hierarchy of distinct yet inter related substruc-
tures that, combined, constitute the musical work.
With these two models for reasoning in mind, let us now return to the three
analyses of the rhythmic organization of Mozart’s little theme discussed at the open-
ing of this section and consider in more detail how these two models of hierarchy
condition and constrain musical analysis.
Conceptual Models and Music Theory

According to the Schenkerian paradigm Robert Morgan adopts, tonality is charac-
terized by the property of control: within a tonal composition, every pitch controls
or is controlled by other pitches. Pitches located at the foreground have only the
property of being controlled. Pitches located at middleground levels control pitches
at lower levels and are themselves controlled by pitches at higher levels. Pitches
located at the backg round level are governed only by restrictions placed on the
Ursatz by the chord of nature.
Morgan’s cor relation of rhythmic organization with this account of tonal orga-
nization has two important entailments for the conception of musical rhythm. First,
rhythm becomes a matter of motion between structurally significant events. The
initiation and completion of each rhythmic motion is marked by the appearance of
the pitches that control a given span; the character of the rhythmic motion will
reflect relationships between these controlling pitches. Thus the first rhythmic
motion of Mozart’s theme begins with the Kopfton in m. 1 and ends with the
appearance of 2 in m. 4; the motion has the character of an antecedent because a
complete motion from 3 to 1 has not yet been achieved (see ex. 7.5). Second, the
type of accent assigned a g iven musical moment will tend to be unequivocal.
Emphasis, as an articulation of rhythmic motion, follows from hierarchical structure:
emphasized pitches will be those located at higher levels of the tonal hierarchy.
Because the location of a given pitch within the hierarchy is not equivocal, the
emphasis it receives will not be equivocal. Thus m. 3 cannot have both an upbeat
accent and a downbeat accent at the same time but must be given a rhythmic read-
ing that matches the overall tonal structure.
Although Leonard Meyer’s treatment of Mozart’s theme certainly takes account
of tonal structure, his rhythmic analysis begins, as noted, at the musical surface. The
accentual g roups of the first (surface) level of the hierarchy become the elements
of the second level of the hierarchy, the accentual g roups of the second level
become the elements of the third level, and so on up through four levels of hierar-
chical organization (see ex. 7.4).92 From Meyer’s perspective, rhythmic organization,
insofar as it is metr ical, is independent of tonal organization, since the elemental
patter ns of metrical accent can be specified in the absence of pitch. The overall
rhythmic character of a passage results from an interaction between tonal organi-
zation and patter ns of metrical accent occur ring on a number of hierarchical lev-
els. The emphasis accorded a given musical event can only be reckoned in context.
On level 2 of Meyer’s hierarchy, m. 3 is (as a whole) accentually weak; on level 3, it
is one component of a strong accent; and on level 4, it is a subcomponent of a weak
accent. The property of accent is consequently different on each hierarchical level,
since the accent proper to each level pertains to different spans of musical events.
The differences between these two accounts of the rhythmic structure of
Mozart’s theme follow in part from the way each model of hierarchy constrains rea-
soning about music. From the perspective of a chain-of-being hierarchy, the musi-
cal surface is the least important of all levels. Given the way musical events are
assigned to hierarchical levels, any polysemous reading of such events is little more
than analytical dither ing. From the perspective of an atomistic hierarchy, there can
be no grand plan of musical organization that does not or iginate with the simplest
and most readily apprehended of musical mater ials. Nonetheless, there is a bit more
to the story. The constraint these models impose on our reasoning goes beyond the
inferential possibilities provided by their relational structure and penetrates to the
very core of what counts as relevant phenomena for theor izing and analysis. Indi-
rect evidence for this constraint is supplied by the way each model of hierarchy is
mapped onto music. Chain-of-being hierarchies have been mapped almost exclu-
sively onto the domain of musical pitch — they have generally not been mapped
onto the domain of musical meter. Atomistic hierarchies, on the other hand, have
been most often mapped onto the domain of musical meter — mapping them onto
the domain of pitch has not met with wide acceptance.93
Explaining how this constraint works requires that we briefly revisit the proce-
dures of cross-domain mapping discussed in chapter 2, with particular attention to
the Invariance Pr inciple. According to this pr inciple, for those portions of the
source and target domains involved in a cross-domain mapping, the mapping pre-
serves the image-schematic structure of the target domain, and it imports as much
of the image-schematic structure from the source domain as is consistent with this
preservation. Mapping a model of hierarchy onto music will preserve aspects of our
musical exper ience and structure these by importing the relationships between
92. In the complete analysis Meyer actually adds two additional levels of hierarchy, although the
sixth and final level is somewhat speculative; see Meyer, Explaining Music, 39.
93. Eugene Nar mour’s recent attempts to map an atomistic hierarchy onto pitch have met with only
limited success, and the application has not been widely adopted. See the in-depth treatment of the issue
in Nar mour, “Some Major Theoretical Problems Concer ning the Concept of Hierarchy in the Analy-
sis of Tonal Music,” Music Perception 1/2 (1983 – 84): 129– 99; Narmour discusses mm. 1– 8 of the first
movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A, K. 331, on pp. 160 – 98. In some recent analyses, Narmour
reads musical structure as only quasi-hierarchical and thus better dealt with in ter ms of networks. See
Narmour, The Analysis and Cognition of Basic Melodic Structures: The Implication-Realization Model (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
“energy” and the container schema embodied by this model. When we take a
chain-of-being hierarchy as the source domain, we preserve our sense that some
aspects of music are more important than others, and we import a model of sys-
temic organization in which energy is distr ibuted unequally and hierarchical levels
group elements according to their amount of energy. This mapping works well for
the asymmetr ical pitch relations typical of tonal music but less well for the measured
domain of metrical rhythm. When we take an atomistic hierarchy as the source
domain, we preserve our sense that some aspects of music are regular and recurring,
and we import a model of systemic organization in which energy is distr ibuted
equally and hierarchical levels group elements according to common confor mance
with general pr inciples. This mapping works well for the measured domain of met-
rical rhythm but less well for the asymmetr ical pitch relations typical of tonal music.
Thus the image schemata that g round our conceptual models also facilitate map-
ping these models onto novel domains, subject to the limitations of the image-
schematic structure of both domains.
Additional evidence for the part played by image schemata in conceptual mod-
els and cross-domain mapping is suggested by Edward Cone’s analysis of Mozart’s
theme, which combines aspects of the approaches demonstrated by Morgan’s and
Meyer’s analyses. For Cone, as for Morgan, musical rhythm involves motion
between points of tonal stability. The first and fifth measures of the theme should be
strong because of the fir m statement of tonic; the fourth and eighth measures
should also be strong because of the emphasis provided by arrivals on important
harmonies. However, Cone, like Meyer, is also interested in the contr ibution of the
musical surface to our understanding of musical rhythm as a whole. Cone’s overall
interpretation of the rhythmic structure of the opening eight measures is thus
shaped by meter, motivic structure, and surface accents. What guides Cone’s analy-
sis is his concept of musical energy — it was this that prompted his compar ison of
a musical phrase to a game of catch. The path of energy that marks the transit of the
ball in the game of catch is the analogue for the path of musical energy constituted
by a given passage in a work of music. Starting with the concept of energy rather
than with a model of hierarchy allows Cone to tap into both models of hierarchy
and draw from each what he needs. By this means, he can forge a single account of
musical rhythm that recognizes both hierarchic paradigms but which is restricted to
neither. Thus, Cone’s analysis demonstrates a conceptual blend, the gener ic space of
which focuses on the notion of energy common to both models of hierarchy.
According to the approach I have developed here, the discrepancies between
these three analyses of Mozart’s theme reflect the role of conceptual models in the-
ories of music. At work are two different models of hierarchical organization. One
maps a chain-of-being hierarchy onto music and highlights one set of aspects of the
musical domain. The other maps an atomistic hierarchy onto music and highlights
a different set of musical aspects. Two of the analyses — those by Robert Morgan
and Leonard Meyer— rely on relatively straightforward mappings, one from each
model of hierarchy.Where the structure of the models of hierarchy diverge, there
the musical analyses based on these models will also diverge. The third analysis, by
Edward Cone, blends the two mappings by focusing on commonalities between
their image-schematic structure. By focusing on these commonalities, Cone puts
some distance between his inter pretation and notions about hierarchical organiza-
tion and produces yet a third analysis of Mozart’s theme. The discrepancies between
the three analyses are thus not the result of different opinions about what constitutes
the theme of the first movement of Mozart’s sonata, nor are they a consequence of
analytical inconsistencies. Rather, they follow from the structure of these two con-
ceptual models and the way they are employed in accounts of music.
competing models of musical form

and hierarchy
The foregoing represents an attempt to sort out why musicians — reasonable, highly
experienced musicians — disagree about such things as musical for m and musical
hierarchy. As I have endeavored to show, such disagreements can be traced to com-
peting models of musical structure. Much as Alice and the Hatter have different
ideas about what time is, so music theor ists have different ideas about the properties
of musical for m and the structure of hierarchical relationships. The analyses I offer
should help explain why this is so. If one is thinking about musical for m in ter ms of
grammar or building blocks, it may not be immediately evident how music achieves
its rhetor ical effects or seems to g row from within. If one is thinking about musi-
cal relationships in ter ms of dominance and control, musical meter may appear to
be something of a cipher, for meter provides only weak demonstrations of these
properties.
More interesting, however, is the way these models reflect back on the theor ists
who employ them, much as Alice’s models of time reflect the world of a seven-year-
old girl in Victorian England, while the Hatter’s model of time reflects the world of
Wonderland. Theorists who focus on a static model of musical for m are almost
invariably occupied with a very basic level of music pedagogy. Dynamic models
only start to make real sense once a level of artistry has been achieved— that is, once
the student can speak and understand the language of music with some fluency. Not
surprisingly, then, the two models begin to overlap and intertwine in confusing and
interesting ways in the early nineteenth century, for the institutionalization of music
education required a bit of both perspectives. Nation building required the mech-
anisms of rationalized instruction and of artistic exegesis, the first to guarantee a
future, the second to celebrate a past. Similarly, theorists who focus on atomistic
hierarchies are convinced that we enter music from its surface and only later can
penetrate to its depths by understanding the general laws that connect them both.
Theorists who make recourse to chain-of-being hierarchies, on the other hand, are
convinced that surfaces are illusions — the real truth of music lies hidden in myste-
rious powers that guide compositional creation like an unseen hand. These sum-
maries are too reductive, of course, but they make in br ief the point toward which
this chapter has argued at length: the models we choose for our character izations
of music tell us at least as much about ourselves as they do about music.

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competing models of music:

theories of musical form

Exchanges like this are common enough in Wonderland, a place inhabited by

288 analysis and theory

2. Carroll, The Annotated Alice, 124.

two models of musical form

In contrast with Prout’s dynamic account of musical for m, Goetschius relies on a

5. Ebenezer Prout, Musical Form (London: Augener, 1893), 26.

Grammar, Rhetor ic, and Musical Form

example 7.1 Minuet analyzed by Johann Mattheson in Der vollkommene Capellmeister,

instrumental music.16 Riepel based his analysis of the grammatical function of a

rhetoric and music One of the principal uses of mappings from

g rammar, rhetoric, and musical form It has been traditional

Formal Theory in the Nineteenth Century

were absorbed into musical nomenclature or replaced by other mappings that

the paris conservatoire and the berlin university Dur-

44. Ziolkowski, German Romanticism, 287.

models of musical form To all appearances, Ebenezer Prout and

two models of musical hierarchy

is governed by the overall motion from CS5 and A3, in m. 1, to B4 and E3 in m. 4

Histor ical Models of Hierarchical Organization

The principal mark of chain-of-being hierarchies is a conception of the universe as

64. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 120.

Structural Features of Chain-of-Being and

force of a chain-of-being hierarchy or the power that dr ives the mechanism of an

• Classes of elements may be distinguished according to common confor-

Mapping Models of Hierarchy onto Music

chain-of-being hierarchies and tonal theory Early in his

76. Jérôme-Joseph de Momigny, “Musique,” in Musique, Series 36 of Encyclopédie méthodique, ou par

81. Schenker, Harmonielehre, §§17 – 18, pp. 54– 55.

atomistic hierarchies and metrical theory A rather differ-

This mechanical notion of rhythm is accompanied by a mechanical notion of time-

The construction of the members of the larger rhythms is a symmetry proceeding

Reasoning about Music through Chain-of-Being

89. Weber, Theory of Musical Composition, 1: 87 [§69].

Conceptual Models and Music Theory

competing models of musical form

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