successive rewritings in Chomskian grammar reach basic structures that
are not sentences and that imply sentence-production procedures on the
surface.
Two difficulties appear to define the scope of innateness in the case of
musical competence:musical competence seems to be reducible to the
capacity to produce variations on prototypical schemas without possible
limitations or recurrences;and the innateness of musical competence is
knowable only through induction in terms of the universality of these
prototypical schemas,thus suggesting that production processes are not
as primary as they are in language where the sentence is generated
according to syntagmatic functions.Here we find the third postulate of
gestalt theory,the one that,under a different form,was expressed by
Rameau:“Music is natural to us;we owe the sentiment that it makes us
feel to pure instinct;this same instinct acts in us with many other objects
which can very well be related to music”(1754:1).We thus see that the
problems of innateness and universality are closely related in psycho-
logical theories of music more than in language theories,since the defi-
nition of musical competence is itself much more blurred.
Let us try to specify this point.One of the essential epistemological
postulates of cognitive theory today is that we can study human behav-
ior only by distinguishing carefully between subject variables and object
variables,the first acting on the second,or actually,entirely determining
the second.This position is contrary not only to classical behaviorism but
to the whole idea of active interaction between subject and physical or
social environment.In classical behaviorism,the subject’s response to
a stimulus is a reaction determined by the nature of stimulus;in post-
Chomskian cognitivism,the response is not a reaction to the stimulus,
but the triggering of an adapted program,a response to an internal per-
turbation of a competence system that is provoked by information in a
format that does not conform to the system.The program’s effect is to
render the object consistent with its own characteristics and to modify
atypical variables:thus,it is not the traits of the object that provoke the
subject’s response,but rather the mere fact that it is not consistent with
the competence system.Creation of new adapted programs is one fun-
damental characteristic of human competence systems.
This theoretical necessity,formalized through artificial intelligence
models,is assumed by the GTTM,even if the authors sometimes deny
it.But it is so only because the GTTM models the Western classical
tonal music system,perhaps the only system that allows definition of a
grammar in terms of functions beyond grouping structures.This means
that the GTTM gives the illusion that musical competence operates in
the same way as all other human cognitive competencies;that is,it is of
the same nature,being universal and biologically determined.The fact is452 Michel Imberty