The Compositionality of Tonal Structures: A Generative Approach to the Notion of Musical Meaning

Abstract

This paper uses the concept of meaning as a basis for examining an important aspect of our understanding of pitch structure in tonal music: compositionality. It is argued that a fundamental requirement of a semantic theory is that the conception of meaning involved must be rich enough to incorporate complex meaning structures. This leads to a general discussion of the phenomenon of compositionality and an investigation of its relevance to tonal structure. Compositionality is a feature of the structure of objects whereby the content of a complex object is a function of the content of its constituent parts and the syntactic principles by which they are combined. It is claimed that tonal music exhibits compositionality with respect to the tonal functions of pitch events and various evidence is presented in support of this claim. Some aspects of tonal structure that are important for establishing compositionality – the context-independence of constituent parts, the relevance of syntactic structure and the rule-governed nature of syntactic combination – are described and illustrated in detail. Following this, some behavioural evidence is examined, specifically, the productivity and systematicity of our cognition of tonal structures. This enables brief comparisons to be made with the cognition of complex objects in other domains. Finally, it is proposed that compositionality has far-reaching consequences for the type of theory required to describe pitch structure in tonal music, an observation that entails a critique of the foundations of current tonal theory.