How is it that humans are able to organize seemingly random sounds into the captivating sonic structures we call music? In this volume, Lawrence M. Zbikowski argues that humans' unique ability to correlate sounds with dynamic processes provides the basis for the construction of meaningful musical utterances - that is, a foundation for musical grammar. Building on a framework for grammar developed by cognitive linguists over the past three decades and the pathbreaking research set out in his earlier book, Conceptualizing Music (OUP 2002), Zbikowski explains how the ability to draw analogies between widely differing domains allowing humans to connect sequences of musical sounds with emotion processes, physical gestures, and the steps of dance. He shows how these connections underpin an evocative movement from a cantata by J.S. Bach, guide our understanding of gestural choreographies by Fred Astaire and Charlie Chaplin, and frame connections between movement and music in French courtly dance and the Viennese waltz. Through thorough surveys of research in cognitive science and careful analyses of works by composers ranging from Bach, Brahms, and Schubert to Jerome Kern, Zbikowski explores the unique resources for communication offered by music and examines how these differ from those of language. Foundations of Musical Grammar is sure to be an instant - and enticingly controversial - classic within the evolving literature addressing the many complex intersections of music and language. -- from dust jacket.

This book argues that Carnatic music as it is practiced today can be traced to the musical practices of early/mid eighteenth century. Earlier varieties or 'incarnations' of Indian music elaborately described in many musical treatises are only of historical relevance today as the music described is quite different from current practices. It is argued that earlier varieties may not have survived because they failed to meet the three crucial requirements for a language-like organism to survive i.e., a robust community of practitioners/listeners which the author calls the Carnatic Music Fraternity, a sizeable body of musical texts and a felt communicative need. In fact, the central thesis of the book is that Carnatic music, like language, survived and evolved from early/mid eighteenth century when these three requirements were met for the first time in the history of Indian music. The volume includes a foreword by Paul Kiparsky.

In the first comprehensive study of the relationship between music and language from the standpoint of cognitive neuroscience, Aniruddh D. Patel challenges the widespread belief that music and language are processed independently. Since Plato's time, the relationship between music and language has attracted interest and debate from a wide range of thinkers. Recently, scientific research on this topic has been growing rapidly, as scholars from diverse disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive science, music cognition, and neuroscience are drawn to the music-language interface as one way to explore the extent to which different mental abilities are processed by separate brain mechanisms. Accordingly, the relevant data and theories have been spread across a range of disciplines. This volume provides the first synthesis, arguing that music and language share deep and critical connections, and that comparative research provides a powerful way to study the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying these uniquely human abilities. Winner of the 2008 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award.

Aimed at those who have some knowledge of music but not formal training in composition, this concise introduction to composing starts right in with a brief composition exercise, then proceeds step by step through a series of increasingly complex and challenging problems, gradually expanding the student's musical grammar. "This is a wonderful book for anyone who is developing improvising skills or who would like a fun way to explore music."—Jim Stockford, Co-Evolution Quarterly

This book shows how recent work in cognitive science, especially that developed by cognitive linguists and cognitive psychologists, can be used to explain how we understand music. The book focuses on three cognitive processes--categorization, cross-domain mapping, and the use of conceptual models--and explores the part these play in theories of musical organization. The first part of the book provides a detailed overview of the relevant work in cognitive science, framed around specific musical examples. The second part brings this perspective to bear on a number of issues with which music scholarship has often been occupied, including the emergence of musical syntax and its relationship to musical semiosis, the problem of musical ontology, the relationship between words and music in songs, and conceptions of musical form and musical hierarchy. The book will be of interest to music theorists, musicologists, and ethnomusicologists, as well as those with a professional or avocational interest in the application of work in cognitive science to humanistic principles.

A search for a grammar of music with the aid of generative linguistics. This work, which has become a classic in music theory since its original publication in 1983, models music understanding from the perspective of cognitive science.The point of departure is a search for the grammar of music with the aid of generative linguistics.The theory, which is illustrated with numerous examples from Western classical music, relates the aural surface of a piece to the musical structure unconsciously inferred by the experienced listener. From the viewpoint of traditional music theory, it offers many innovations in notation as well as in the substance of rhythmic and reductional theory.

Novelist and critic Alexander Theroux analyzes the pop song. National Book Award nominee, critic and one of America’s least compromising satirists, Alexander Theroux takes a comprehensive look at the colorful language of pop lyrics and the realm of rock music in general in The Grammar of Rock: silly song titles; maddening instrumentals; shrieking divas; clunker lines; the worst (and best) songs ever written; geniuses of the art; movie stars who should never have raised their voice in song but who were too shameless to refuse a mic; and the excesses of awful Christmas recordings. Praising (and critiquing) the gems of lyricists both highbrow and low, Theroux does due reverence to classic word-masters like Ira Gershwin, Jimmy Van Heusen, Cole Porter, and Sammy Cahn, lyricists as diverse as Hank Williams, Buck Ram, the Moody Blues, and Randy Newman, Dylan and the Beatles, of course, and more outré ones like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Patti Smith, the Fall (even Ghostface Killa), but he considers stupid rhymes, as well ― nonsense lyrics, chop logic, the uses and abuses of irony, country music macho, verbal howlers, how voices sound alike and why, and much more. In a way that no one else has ever done, with his usual encyclopedic insights into the state of the modern lyric, Theroux focuses on the state of language ― the power of words and the nature of syntax ― in The Grammar of Rock. He analyzes its assaults on listeners’ impulses by investigating singers’ styles, pondering illogical lunacies in lyrics, and deconstructing the nature of diction and presentation in the language. This is that rare book of discernment and probing wit (and not exclusively one that is a critical defense of quality) that positively evaluates the very nature of a pop song, and why one over another has an effect on the listener.

A dynamic multimedia introduction to the global connections among peoples and their music