<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><blockquote type="cite">Typical syntactic units of language are sentences, typically 10 to 25 words long. Typical synctactic units of music are movements, at times 10 to 25 minutes long. This difference, which indeed is dramatic, may suffice in itself to indicate a much higher capacity for long term syntactic relations (including recursion) in music than in language.</blockquote><div><br></div><div>Well, let's be careful here, as there's a danger of assuming what we're trying to prove. Novels can be very long, but this doesn't tell us anything, since recursive structure occurs only at the sentence level. It is possible that the same holds for music -- perhaps recursion exists only at the level of the phrase, with larger-scale structures being organized rather like the paragraphs in a novel. </div><div><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: -1; "> Recursion needs not be perceived to exist: our capacity to perceive it may vary a lot, and some large scale recursions may not be perceptible at all in normal conditions. This does not permit to conclude that they do not exist.</span></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Agreed; we need to distinguish composer's and listener's perspective. It's certainly possible that composers proceed according to some sort of recursive procedure, but that this is not perceptible to listeners. (In fact, if I wanted to defend Schenkerianism, this would probably be the path I took.) On the other hand, it's also reasonable to feel that nonperceptible structure is less important aesthetically. </div><br><blockquote type="cite">Some very large scale-Schenkerian Ursätze may have become perceptible for Schenker himself, but for many of us remain inaccessible through mere auditory perception and must be discovered through analysis. Once more, that does not mean that they don't exist.</blockquote><div><br></div><div>Agreed; it's possible that the ability to perceive recursive structures varies from individual to individual; this too is something to be investigated. In language, this doesn't seem to be the case. Almost everyone has difficulty with even small levels of center embedding, as in "people dogs cats like hate suck."</div><br><blockquote type="cite">I wouldn't recommend applying for a Nobel prize on such premises, and I don't think the evolution of the species (or its survival) is much concerned. To claim that large scale recursion cannot exist in music because cognitivists were unable to evidence it seems to me ... hum, let's remain polite ... to put excessive confidence in cognitive science.</blockquote><div><br></div><div>I'm interested in exploring connections between music and other fields. Some of the issues we deal with are strikingly close to problems that arise elsewhere. Sometimes we have things to teach people in other disciplines; sometimes they have things to teach us. I think that everyone will benefit if we try to integrate music theory into the broader scholarly community.</div><div><br></div><div>DT</div><div><br></div></div><div> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div>Dmitri Tymoczko</div><div>Associate<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Professor of Music</div><div>310 Woolworth Center</div><div>Princeton, NJ 08544-1007</div><div>(609) 258-4255 (ph), (609) 258-6793 (fax)</div><div><a href="http://music.princeton.edu/~dmitri">http://music.princeton.edu/~dmitri</a></div><div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> </div><br></body></html>