The project of the Norton lectures
In “The Unanswered Question” (six lectures at Harvard, 1973) Bernstein tries to describe music with the tools of Noam Chomsky's linguistics.
Phonology
The basic “sound”: the harmonic series as the common material from which the triad, the pentatonic scale and fifth relationships would derive. A suggestive thesis, but criticized by musicologists because not all musical cultures derive from the series.
Syntax
Music as grammar: a deep structure (simple, regular phrases) is transformed into a surface structure through operations such as repetition, sequence, inversion, augmentation, deletion of expected bars. Bernstein shows this on the opening of Mozart's Symphony No. 40.
Semantics
Musical meaning is mostly metaphorical: intrinsic metaphors (the transformations of the musical material itself, a motive that becomes something else) and extrinsic ones (associations with images or emotions, as in Beethoven's “Pastoral”).
A tool for composing
- Treat the motive as a word and the phrase as a sentence.
- Apply grammatical transformations to your hook: in C, the motive C–D–E can become E–D–C (retrograde), C–B–A (diatonic inversion), D–E–F (sequence), C–D–E in double values (augmentation).
- Cut an expected bar (deletion) to create urgency: an 8-bar phrase that becomes 7.
- Work on the “semantics”: decide which image you want to evoke and choose coherent registers, timbres and harmonies.
Real-world example
The opening of Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550, which Bernstein takes apart bar by bar to show how a regular structure is compressed and transformed into a tenser, more expressive surface phrase.