Meyer, Leonard B. (1989). Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Leonard Meyer, professor emeritus (music) at the University of Pennsylvania, has an academic background in music, philosophy, and history of culture. Meyer is known for joining principles of cognitive psychology with those of music history and theory in his research on emotion and meaning, expectancy theory, and stylistic change. Some earlier major works include Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, 1956), Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture (Chicago, 1967, 2/1994), and Explaining Music: Essays and Explorations (Berkeley, 1973). (from Grove online)
Meyer's Thesis in Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology, Meyer links musical parameters with cultural beliefs to support his theory that musical style is a result of ideological choices.
The first section of the book describes the nature of style and style analysis. The definitions and concepts below are used to explain history, musical choices, and the connection to ideology later in the book.
Style: a replication of patterns chosen from within a set of constraints (p. 3) Choice: human intentional actions, either conscious or unconscious Parameters: areas of human activity (p. 9); Parameters external to music influence theory, history, practice Constraints: limits on behavior, including physical/biological limits and psychological/cultural limits. Hierarchy of Constraints: Laws, Rules and Strategies Laws -- "universal" (p.13) constraints which hold across cultures, including perceptual/cognitive constraints. Primary parameters are syntax-based discrete relational categories (pitch, duration); secondary parameters include tempo, dynamics, timbre, etc. Rules—cultural constraints. Strategies---"compositional choices within the rules of the style" (p.20). Individual composer strategies can lead to new rules. Style Analysis: the description of patterns, rules and strategies and the explanation of how those traits are related within a set of constraints. Style analysis beings with classification, or the grouping of related traits. A sketch-analysis of Wagnerian traits shows how inter-related traits occur in groups similar to "coadapted gene complexes" in biology (p.44)
Schema: stable patterns of classification. (Ex: "Adeste Fidelis"). Useful in comparison.
Transformation: a paraphrase or borrowing perhaps leading to stylistic change Statistics: numerically systematic method for analyzing traits. The influence of sample size and researcher/theoretical bias are addressed.
History is presented as an interpretation, not as a fixed set of true or false versions of events. Since history, including music history, is chronological, hypotheses in musical style change must address changes over time. Past events may imply future events without directly causing them. Implicative probability exists in music because other choices could have been made. External (i.e. cultural) parameters and constraints may influence composer choices, and therefore, music history.
Innovation is devising new strategies, possibly due to the internal constraints of an individual composer (temperament) The cultural climate can either encourage or discourage innovation. Incongruities between cultural conditions and human behaviors lead to tension, instability, and change. Specific musical conditions leading to innovation might include technology, physical space, etc. External parameters, such as changes in the political or scientific climate, can lead to strategic novelty (ex: metaphoric mimicry, tone colors, visual or natural representation).
Choices are the combined result of composer temperament, cognitive constraints, and cultural conditions. Replication of choices is based on generality (reflecting some general principle, not entirely idiosyncratic), versatility (able to function in various musical situations), and redundancy ("inter-relational reinforcement" (p.141) to withstand the demands of transmission). Systematic redundancy occurs when group of traits reinforce each other— "strategy sets" (p. 142) seen in the earlier Wagner example. Covert causalism is the trend to see earlier conditions as causal agents, but influence includes a choice made from among potential options whereas causation does not. For an external parameter to influence a composer translation (p. 147) takes place. (ex political concepts to musical concepts) p 146 Style constraints and cultural circumstance leading to ideologies are important for composer choices.
These last three chapters explain how the ideology of Romanticism was translated into musical choices by 19th composers. The concepts of individual genius, egalitarianism, acontextualism, and naturalism correspond to musical examples. Wagner's Ring cycle symbolizes a new order based on nature The 19th century theories of Helmholtz are based on natural laws. Wagner claims Lohengrin was the result of one scene's organic growth out of another; and Wagner's Tristan demonstrates the Romantic idea or growth and gradual unfolding. Program music is attributed to the change in audience from the elite to the common.
Hiding musical conventions has its parallel in the Romantic idea of the concealed truth. Emergence and divergence are two musical techniques used to disguise musical conventions or musical schemata. Emergence is exemplified through the non-decisive closures in Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. Divergence is demonstrated with the changing note schema across a range of musical examples from the 18th and 19th centuries. Gap fill, stretching, and use of secondary parameters from Romantic examples are other types of disguises of conventions. The subdominant became important for disrupting, at least on the surface, perceived syntax and unity of Romantic compositions.
Meyer presents his position as a hypothesis and foresees future tests and refinements to his ideas that cultural conditions and composer choice lead to both style and stylistic change.