The perception of a totality is neither immediate nor passive: it is an act of organization that has to be learned within a sociocultural context. The laws of perception are not natural and innate; rather, they are the reflection of cultural patterns, or, as a transactional psychologist would say, they are acquired forms, a system of preferences and habits, convictions and emotions, fostered in us by the natural, social, and historical context we inhabit.38
As an example, Meyer proposes the complex of stimuli constituted by the letters TRLTSEE. There are various, formally satisfactory ways of grouping these letters. TT/RLS/EE, for instance, for the sake of symmetry and to respect the most elementary laws of contiguity. Of course, an English reader might prefer the combination LETTERS as more meaningful and, therefore, «right» from every standpoint.
In this particular case, the letters have been organized according to an acquired experience, a particular linguistic system. The same thing happens with a complex of musical stimuli: the dialectics of crises, expectations, predictions, and satisfactory solutions obeys the laws of a particular cultural and historical context. The auditory culture of the Western world was, at least until the beginning of the twentieth century, tonal. Therefore, it is within the framework of a tonal culture that certain crises can be crises and certain solutions can be solutions; of course, things would be quite different with primitive or oriental music.
On the other hand, Meyer implicitly relies on a Gestalt tradition even when he analyzes different musical cultures to locate different modes of organization: every musical culture establishes its own syntax which, in turn, directs the listener according to specific modes of reaction. Every kind of discourse has its own laws, which are also the laws of its form, the very same laws on which the dynamics of crises and solutions depends.
The average listener tends to find a solution to crisis in rest, to disturbance in peace, to deviation in the return to a polarity defined by the musical habits of a civilization. The crisis is valid only in relation to its solution. The listener aspires to a solution and not to a crisis for the sake of crisis alone. If Meyer has borrowed all his examples from classical music, it is because his argument is, in essence, quite conservative: what he offers us is a psychological and structural interpretation of tonal music.
This point of view remains fundamentally unchanged even when Meyer, in his later work, shifts from a psychological approach to information theory. According to him, the introduction of uncertainty or ambiguity into a probabilistic sequence, such as a musical discourse, will automatically provoke an emotion. A style is a system of probability, and the awareness of probability is latent in the listener, who can therefore afford to make predictions concerning the consequences of a given antecedent.
To attribute an aesthetic meaning to a musical discourse amounts to rendering the uncertainty explicit and experiencing it as highly desirable. Meyer maintains that «musical meaning arises when an antecedent situation, requiring an estimate as to the probable modes of pattern continuation, produces uncertainty as to the temporaltonal nature of the expected consequent . . . They greater the uncertainty, Ethel greater the information . . .
A system which produces a sequence of symbols . . . according to certain probabilities is called a stochastic process, and the special case of a stochastic process in which the probabilities depend on the previous events, is called a Markoff process or a Markoff chain.» 39 If music is a system of tonal attractions, in which the existence of a musical event imposes a certain probability on the occurrence of a subsequent event, then the event that responds to the natural expectations of an ear will pass unnoticed and, as a result, the uncertainty and the emotion—and, of course, the information—it entails will be minor.
Since, in a Markoff chain, the uncertainty decreases as the distance from the starting point increases, in order to heighten the meaning (read: information) of the musical discourse the composer will have to introduce some uncertainty at every step. This is the sort of suspense used to break the tedium of probability in most tonal processes. Music, like most languages, contains a certain amount of redundancy that the composer tries to remove so as to increase the interest of his listeners.
Having reached this point, however, Meyer goes back to reconsider the persistence of acquired experience and reminds his readers that there are two sorts of noise in musical discourse: acoustical noise and cultural noise. The latter type is determined by the difference between our habitual reactions (that is, our assumptions) and those required by a particular musical style. According to Meyer, contemporary music, overly intent on eliminating all redundancy, is nothing more than a kind of noise that prevents the listener from understanding the meaning of a musical discourse.»)
In other words, he sees the oscillation between informative disorder and total unintelligibility, which had already concerned Moles, not as a problem to be solved but as a danger to be avoided. With this distinction between desirable and undesirable uncertainty, Meyer—though he is well aware of the historicity and the capacity for evolution of every system of acquired forms—eliminates the possibility of a real evolution of musical sensibility. For him, musical language is a system of probabilities in which improbability can be introduced only with caution.
At which point we may well fear that the repertory of possible uncertainties will eventually become so normal as to enter the realm of recognized probabilities, until what once was pure information becomes sheer redundancy. This is very clearly what has happened in certain fields of popular music, where it would be vain to look for the slightest surprise or emotion: a piece by Liberate is as predictable as a Hallmark birthday card, concocted according to the most banal of laws and totally devoid of any additional information.
Every human being lives within a determinate cultural pattern and interprets his or her experience according to a set of acquired forms. The stability of this world is what allows us to move rationally amid the constant provocations of the environment and to organize external events into a coherent ensemble of organic experiences. The safeguarding of our assumptions against all incoherent mutations is one of the basic conditions of our existence as rational beings.
But there is a difference between the preservation of a system of assumptions as an organic whole and the refusal of all possible change, since another condition of our survival as thinking beings is precisely our capacity to let our intelligence and our sensibility evolve by integrating new experiences into our system of assumptions. Our world of acquired forms must maintain its organic structure in the sense that it must evolve harmoniously, without shocks and undue deformations; but evolve it must, and in order to evolve it must undergo certain modifications.
After all, what most distinguishes Western man from those who live in «primitive» societies is precisely the dynamic, progressive nature of his cultural patterns. What makes a society «primitive» is its inability to let its cultural patterns evolve, its unwillingness to interpret and exploit the original assumptions of its culture, which thus persist as empty formulas, rites, taboos. We have very few reasons to consider the cultural pattern of the West as universally superior, but one of these reasons is its plasticity, its flexibility, its capacity to respond to circumstantial challenges by constantly interpreting new experiences and elaborating new ways to adjust to them (more or less rapidly, depending on the sensibility of the individual or of the collectivity).
Art, in all its forms, has also evolved in a similar fashion, within a «tradition» that may seem immutable but which, in fact, has never ceased to introduce new forms and new dogmas through innumerable revolutions. Every real artist constantly violates the laws of the system within which he works, in order to create new formal possibilities and stimulate aesthetic desire: when Brahms’s works were first performed, the expectations aroused by one of his symphonies in a listener accustomed to Beethoven were certainly very different, both in quality and range, from the expectations aroused by a Beethoven piece in a listener accustomed to Haydn.
And yet, theorists of contemporary music (and with them, those of contemporary art in general) reproach classical tradition for the fact that all its formal innovations, and the kind of expectations they entailed, would no sooner be introduced than they would become new systems of assumptions aiming at the completion and final satisfaction of expectation. thereby encouraging what Henri Pousseur calls psychic inertia.
Most classical compositions were determined by the polarity characteristic of the tonal system, except for a few brief moments of crisis whose function was to comply with the listener’s inertia by leading it back to the original pole of attraction. According to Pousseur, even the introduction of a new tonality into the development of a particular piece required a device able to overcome this inertia: what is known as modulation. But even modulation violates the hierarchy of the system only so as to introduce a new pole of attraction, a new tonality, a new system of inertia.
There were reasons for all this: both the formal and the psychological requirements of art were a reflection of the religious, political, and cultural demands of a society based on a hierarchical
