The Parallelism between Linguistics and Music – Noam Chomsky and Heinrich Schenker

Abstract

The paper aims to compare musical language with verbal language, creating a new perspective on music and natural language. The three categories of linguistics, phonology, syntax, and semantics are analyzed. Bernstein highlights the analogies between the linguistic categories and music, researching the same three components of linguistics in music. The possibility of applying transformational grammar procedures to musical text is studied. In the second part of the paper, the authors investigate the method of analysis based on harmony and counterpoint, differentiating several structural levels conceived by the theoretical musician H. Schenker. Schenkerian analyzes are a relatively recent appearance in the field of musical analysis, which proposes as an innovation in the field of musical analysis the structural vision of musical discourse.