Cognitive Theories of Galant Music at the Margins of Experience

ABSTRACT Leading cognitive studies of galant music treat schematism as both a device and an ethos. The devices – whether called pre‐fabs, tiles or schemata – undergird a mechanistic and passive ethos of inventiveness. In vision and practice, this constellation of approaches directs inquiry away from a musical depth that one contemplates and towards a musical surface that one experiences. A prime philosophical inspiration for this anti‐traditional, revisionist music theory comes from John Dewey, whose aesthetics looks to restore art's native connection to sentience across the animal world. This essay proposes that such studies in fact run at odds with Dewey's conception of experience. Although framed by a critique of the field's scientific and philosophical underpinnings, the body of this essay focuses on analyses of works by Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven. With Haydn, formula and convention are obviously integral to his manner. Yet his schematism ultimately qualifies as ‘weak’ (rather than as ‘strong’, or causal, à la cognitive studies) because he treats such devices as tensions to resolve. In Dewey's wording, Haydn makes the ‘hum‐drum’ sound necessary and original. With the much‐discussed opening of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, meanwhile, local pattern is so entwined in overall design that it resists assimilation as a model for tasteful imitation. Beethoven obviously drew on precedent, but less to imitate pre‐existing material than to emulate his predecessors’ creative freedom. With both composers, an individuating drive to shape and probe their musical worlds comports with Dewey's sense of aesthetic experience but clashes with cognitive musicology's prizing of predictability and replication.