Word: bernstein
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Chomsky also believed that features of transformational theory that were found in every language--linguistics universals--would necessarily be innate, biological structures. Again, in the context of contemporary linguistic theory this is an eccentric view, but it is the view Bernstein has grabbed onto--he sees transformational grammar as a "subconscious process," innate and not learned...
...Bernstein wants to suggest that these same processes are at work in music, "transforming" basic musical material into its complex "surface" form. This is an appealing thought. Reiteration and variation of thematic material is certainly a fundamental principle of Western music, and poetry as well. If Bernstein could demonstrate an affinity between the mechanisms of musical variation and of transformation in language, he would be making a real contribution to aesthetic theory...
...THIS IS one rabbit that never gets pulled out of the hat. Bernstein derails himself right at the start with his gross misuse of syntactic terminology. When he applies such transformations as "conjoining," "transposition," "embedding," and even "deletion," to music, he does so without regard to their linguistic meaning. The musical transformations share only the names with their counterparts in language...
...Bernstein is a musician, after all, and when he talks about music without all the linguistic dross he is both entertaining and instructive, as he was during ten years of Young People's Concerts. There is nothing new for musicians in his analysis of Mozart's G minor symphony, Beethoven's Sixth and music of Berlioz and Wagner, but from the point of view of the layman he covers a lot of ground in a palatable...
...WHEN BERNSTEIN'S survey of Western music arrives at the 20th century, his emphasis on innateness and universality suddenly takes on new significance. The 19th century ended "with a life-and-death crisis lurking around the corner." Mahler's Ninth Symphony, a great song of death, is the last, barely tonal expression of a bloated Romanticism dying of its own weight. The new century will have to face the disintegration of tonality, a process which began nearly a hundred years earlier with the Beethoven of the Gross Fuge and the last piano sonatas...