"Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems" is an essay by Fred Lerdahl that cites Pierre Boulez's Le Marteau sans maître (1955) as an example of "a huge gap between compositional system and cognized result," though he "could have illustrated just as well with works by Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, or Iannis Xenakis".
"My second aesthetic claim in effect rejects this ["progressivist"] attitude in favor of the older view that music-making should be based on "nature".
The result is to write off not only the Darmstadt avant-garde and minimalism, but also huge swathes of non-Western and popular music.
By subordinating the production and reception of music to theoretically defined criteria of communicative success, it creates a charmed hermeneutic circle that excludes everything from critical musicology to social psychology.
[5] She continued, "Lerdahl's argument that musical language, like spoken language, is generative in structure excludes the possibility of other, non-hierarchical methods of achieving musical coherence... Lerdahl's concentration on the audibility of the row... blinds or deafens him to the simple fact that the use of the row is itself a constraint, not just on the composer, but in the aid of comprehensibility as well".
But if we do not like any of these answers, then we must admit that it is a matter of exposure and acquired understanding after all, in which case we are certainly a far cry from innate psychological universals [...] Vague language and tacit assumptions can be brought into the service of conservatism and aesthetic authoritarianism.
It points to the misguided nature of attempts to turn the question of the dissemination of post-tonal music from an aesthetic, political, and indeed economic issue into a cognitive-scientific one.
In this age when words like "accessibility" and "communication" are used too frequently and with too little understanding, it is of some significance that at least one major attempt to give scientific respectability to the conservative side of the debate fails.