Universality and Innateness
One of the strongest hypotheses,and thus one of the most constraining
for generative theories whether in linguistics or musicology,is that of
innateness of competencies.This hypothesis may easily lose its meaning
as a function of the way it is formulated.One argument in favor of
innateness is that language,like music,is a specifically human activity
that is not found in the animal world.Having said this we have said
nothing about the degree of specification of the corresponding compe-
tencies.In other words,to what degree of generality can we describe uni-
versal competencies? In the field of language,it has been possible,to a
certain extent,to show that,in almost all the studied cases,deep struc-
tures rely on identical production rules and functions.But until today,
the only really serious attempt in music to define the general structures
produced by innate capacities is the theory proposed by Lerdahl and
Jackendoff (1983).As this attempt is presented as a theory of tonal
music,it is scarcely possible to say with precision what its limitations are.
It is quite probable that what is described in the GTTM as grouping
structures can be generalized beyond Western tonal music.But we
cannot say whether these phenomena,in their generality,refer to an
innate cognitive competence since,contrary to the case of language,we
cannot falsify the examples engendered by the model in the same con-
sistent and reliable way we do for language.For example,how can we
define a “good”melodic sequence,or more precisely,how can we falsify
it? Surface modifications to a melody will not lead a subject to judge
the new sequence melodic versus not melodic (in the way that a native
speaker will judge a sentence in his language as being grammatical or
not grammatical),but only more or less melodic,more or less surprising,
more or less well organized.If we could define musical competence in
the same way as linguistic competence,the subject would be able to say,
when listening to an auditory sequence,it is music or it is not music.If
such a judgment can be made,it is only with reference to a cultural and
historically determined context,and not in reference to universally
musical structures or to musical thought in general.
Here we touch on a profound difference between language and music:
musical grammars,whether they be those of Lerdahl and Jackendoff or
those of Schenker’s (1935) theory of Ursatzthat inspired them,proceed
from the surface to a core through successive reductions that still con-
serve something like a skeleton of the sentence,its simplest tonal expres-
sion,that remains correct in the sense of its musical meaning.This
reduced sequence only seems banal,not interesting aesthetically (see the
numerous examples in Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983).On the contrary,451 Innate Competencies in Musical Communication