On Music Theory Expertise: A Cognitive Framework and Galant Schema Theory Case Study

Gates, Sarah Lindsay

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-gcmz-p132

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On Music Theory Expertise: A Cognitive Framework and Galant Schema Theory Case Study

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Every music theorist has their own personal reasons for engaging in the craft of theorizing about music. Many discover that there is something special about a theoretic disposition which differs from other sorts of interactions with music. It is often this special something that draws musicians into the discipline: specifically, that some form of active reflection about music—its components, its structure, and/or its meaning—greatly expands not only our conceptual understanding of music, but our experience of it. In pedagogical circles, this is referred to as the inseparable bond between thinking and listening, which functions as an iterative feedback loop whereby one activity both gains from and informs the other (Rogers 2008). In this way, active reflection about music changes how we hear, and how we hear changes our process of active reflection. In this dissertation, I create a cognitive account of this iterative feedback loop between thinking and listening, using Galant schema theory (Gjerdingen 2007) in the context of Sonata Form analysis (Hepokoski and Darcy 2011) as a test domain. I propose that iterative analytical interactions with music are performed to foster the development of memory skill (long-term working memory, Ericsson & Kintsch 1995; Ericsson 2018), defined as expertise in situated conceptualization or simulation (Barsalou 2003a,b)—essentially, a form of expertise in the development and use of music categories. In the first chapter, I discuss music theoretic literature on music theory expertise. Here, I reinterpret the discourse on the thinking—listening dichotomy as one that centers imagery and verbalization, and their interaction, as central to developing music theoretic expertise. I situate the project within prior music cognition scholarship and outline the primary research questions and goals. In the second chapter, I create a cognitive framework for understanding expert music concept representation and categorization by integrating Allan Paivio’s Dual-Coding Theory (1986; 2007) with Barsalou’s Dynamic Interpretation in Perceptual Symbols System (2003a,b). In the third chapter, I apply this framework to create an account of embodied Galant schema representation. Here I argue that experts’ schema representations differ from those of nonexperts. Schema concepts acquired by music theorists are formed through repetitive interactions using various music theoretic concepts to deliberately encode a schema’s multiple features and their relationships. This results in representational pools (simulators) that are modally distributed, highly structured, and multi-coded (across language and sensory systems), facilitating control over attention during online cognition. In the fourth chapter, I provide a hypothetical developmental trajectory for Galant schema acquisition by integrating historical and modern pedagogical practices with a memory expertise framework (Gates 2021). The final chapter presents results from a qualitative survey which provides a concrete demonstration of expert music-theoretic memory skill, the formation and modification of an interpretation in perception, in the context of musical ambiguous figure perception. I conclude by recontextualizing claims from chapter 1 using the framework developed through the course of the dissertation and discuss avenues for future research.

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