Leonard B. Meyer, Style and Music
Kris Shaffer, Sound and Mind, July 2007

Leonard B. Meyer: Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology
The University of Chicago Press, 1989

I know this is another oldie as far as these things go, but Meyer's Style and Music is an important work which does not hold the pride of place in the scholarship of music and music cognition that I think it should. So I think it is worth saying a few words about this book, in the hopes of turning a few heads in its direction.

This book is Leonard Meyer’s mature presentation of his theory of style analysis. Style and Music lays out how Meyer defines style in terms of compositional and perceptual processes. He then explains his concept of style analysis, followed by an in depth pedagogy of this concept by example, primarily focusing on 19th c. Romantic music composition and criticism. Building on his earlier work on meaning in music (see both Emotion and Meaning in Music and Music, the Arts, and Ideas), Meyer bases his ideas of style and style analysis in syntax and probability systems, centering on the related ideas of implication/realization and information theory. Though in the work of later authors, this book’s contribution to music scholarship is mostly played out in cognitive musicology and the psychology of music, most of this book is focused on analysis, criticism, and aesthetics.

There are two main reason why I think this book has fallen between the cracks of music scholarship. The first is that Meyer's position regarding analysis is inconsistent with the dominant position in music analysis. Those who are most vocal on analysis and analytical methodology in recent decades have been positivists who focus exclusively, or nearly exclusively, on 'the music itself' (i.e., musical elements like melody, harmony, rhythm, form, etc.). Along these lines, then, the dominant analytical methodologies in 1989 were (and still are in many institutions in the US) Schenkerian analysis for tonal music and Fortean set theory for atonal/post-tonal music. Meyer, on the other hand, as we will see in Style and Music, believes that musical analysis should synthesize the purely musical considerations with social/historical, ideological, and psychological considerations. No music analysis was complete without accounting for all of these things. Unfortunately, in 1989 (and years since), the scholars interested in pursuing those lines of thought were different groups of scholars, with little overlap. There is more overlap now than in 1989, but there has never been a strong market demand for a sophisticated analytical methodology which incorporates all of those aspects of musical study.

The second reason why I think Meyer's work of 1989 may have fallen through the cracks is the role of musical meaning in his research. From the very beginning, Meyer's work--whether in what we might call music theory, musicology, or the psychology of music--has been primarily concerned with musical meaning. What does a musical utterance mean? How does that meaning vary from composer to performer to listener(s)? How does music bear meaning? What makes it meaningful? How does meaning relate to aesthetic value or affective response? However, since Meyer's early work, there has been a great deal of specialization amongst music scholars, and thus the psychology of music (what we now call music cognition or cognitive musicology) has either become primarily about the psychology (e.g., Krumhansl, Patel, Huron, etc.) or the music (Zbikowski, Lerdahl, etc.), and few are left in the same place that Meyer has been all along. Thus Meyer's pioneering work on the psychology of musical listening and the statistical/information-theoretical approach to music have been cited far more often than his work on style analysis, but that earlier work is typically cited in support of a more limited approach than Meyer's. For example, David Huron's 2006 Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation is billed as a recasting of Meyer's Emotion and Meaning in Music in light of new emprical data, yet the book is almost exclusively about emotion in music and little about meaning in music. To be fair, cognitive musicology (and even cognitive psychology) is still in its infantile stages, as Meyer admits; thus a number scholars have overstepped the data in attempting to apply it too widely (something Huron avoids fairly well), leading to erroneous theories (Krumhansl's (1990) brief attempt at measuring cognitive distance between keys based on probe tone data in an otherwise solid study or Lerdahl's tautological psychological basis for his Tonal Pitch Space come to mind). However, Meyer's approach to style analysis in Style and Music is not an erroneous application of cognitive theory, but a mature theory which is careful not to overstep the data, and which uses scientific, music-theoretic, and historical/contextual information to keep each other in check and produce a useful basis for hermeneutics. Thus, I would like to present it as a model both for how cognitive musicology and traditional musical analysis can inform each other, and for how traditional music theory/analysis and the socially minded New Musicology can dialogue with each other.

Enough background and polemics, on to the text...

The book is divided into three parts, according to the subtitle: 1) theory, 2) history, 3) ideology. In the section on theory (where I will spend most of my time), Meyer proposes a definition of style and a methodology of style analysis which are derived from his years of research into cognitive psychology, Gestalt psychology, information theory, and of course music theory and history. He defines musical style thusly: 'Style is a replication of patterning, whether in human behavior or in the artifacts produced by human behavior, that results from a series of choices made within some set of constraints’ (p. 3). This definition is based specifically on cognitive psychology's theory of schemata (prototypical representations--patterns--of a class of objects in memory which facilitate recognition and classification, and thus understanding) and the information-theoretical idea that redundancy promotes understanding (redundancy contributes to the ideas of both patterning and constraints).

In music, Meyer claims that 'The constraints of a style are learned by composers and performers, critics and listeners. Usually such learning is largely the result of experience in performing and listening rather than of explicit formal instruction in music theory, history, or composition. In other words, knowledge of a style is usually "tacit." . . . It is the goal of music theorists and style analysts to explain what the composer, performer, and listener know in this tacit way' (p. 10). This is consistent with the premise of Krumhansl, Temperley, Huron, and others that musical knowledge is gained through statistical learning, and with the claims of Deliege and Karpinski that even trained musicians cannot hear 'structurally' (i.e., according to their teaching in music theory) very well, except in exceptional cases or under special instruction.

But Meyer is not so much concerned here with the psychology of perception and cognition as he is with developing a methodology of analysis. But how does one go about this? Meyer is careful to distinguish clearly between what are known to be biological or psychological universals (he limits this to the ability of certain musical parameters to support syntax--i.e. the ability to imply a specific event at a specific time in the future--such as harmony, melody, and rhythm, and those which cannot, such as timbre, volume, etc.), what are stylistic constraints, and what are the strategies of individual composers. From there, an analyst is already equipped with a substantial toolkit for determining both what a composer did and what that composer could have done within their own compositional dialect or their broader musical style. This, from Meyer's information-theoretical perspective, is how one begins to find musical meaning.

Meyer goes into greater detail by laying out the cognitive psychological idea of schemata and their role in musical style (a number of other scholars have also included them in their work on musical style, perhaps most notably Meyer's former student, Robert Gjerdingen). But Meyer's work on style and meaning does not stop with 'the music itself,' that is, the purely musical elements of style, the musical devices of specific composers, and the universal cognitive principles at work in decoding an audio signal. As Meyer states,

It would seem at once the height of folly and the depth of formalism to contend, as far too many scholars have, that works of art provide the bases for their own analysis. One cannot analyze or criticize a piece of music “in its own terms” because such terms do not reside in works of art. Indeed, without prior concepts (adapted from ideology, related disciplines, or existing music theory) about the way the world (including music) works, not only would it be impossible to know what and how to analyze, but the very notions of “style” and “analysis” would not exist’ (64-65).

Thus the remainder--indeed the bulk--of the book is devoted to how historical events and ideology have effected the compositional strategies which have evolved into the constraints of various musical styles and substyles, as well as to the role that knowledge of history and ideology should play in the analysis and interpretation of a musical work. It is only in the intersection of a rigorous knowledge of the choices that composers made, the constraints within which they made those choices, and the biological, psychological, historical, and ideological underpinnings of those constraints and those choices that musical meaning can be found. As Meyer puts it,

There is no such thing as understanding a work of art in its own terms. Indeed, the very notion of work of art is cultural. The choices made by some compositional community can be understood and explained only if relationships can be discerned among the goals set by culture, the nature of human cognitive processes, and the alternatives available given some set of stylistic constraints’ (351).

An in depth look into how exactly Meyer plays this out in the latter parts of his book are perhaps too far removed from the focus of this blog. However, I think it is important for any responsible music scholar to engage the psychological, compositional/theorietical, and social/historical elements of any musical work or theory, not just the compositional or the historical. It is also important to remember that the study of music cognition does not stop with the science, or the basic musical applications of the science. Instead (I think), the goal is to discover what music means . . . to people, and what specifically gives it that meaning. Only then are we really doing music scholarship, and only then are we really learning something about human psychology. Style and Music aren't just about Theory, History, or Ideology. It's all three.