Leonard Meyer’s Theory of Musical Style, from Pragmatism to Information Theory
Resonance, 2 (4):
475-502 (December 2021)DOI: 10.1525/res.2021.2.4.475
Abstract
Despite its ubiquity in both academic and popular discourses on music, the concept of musical style last received in-depth scholarly treatment three decades ago, in music theorist Leonard Meyer’s final book, Style and Music of 1989. Meyer’s text remains widely cited today, but its date obscures the even earlier origins of its central concerns in Meyer’s work of the 1950s and ’60s. Indeed, Meyer developed his most enduring ideas amidst an array of momentous intellectual changes, not least of which were the rise (and fall) of information theory and cybernetics, and the transition from behaviorist to cognitive psychology, both of which impacted his work and legacy in lasting ways.While Meyer’s general understanding of musical style remained largely consistent across his career, this essay examines a series of subtle shifts in the details of his conception as his intellectual focus shifted from pragmatist philosophy to a wholesale engagement with information theory to, eventually, cognitive psychology. Meyer’s most important early influences were American pragmatists like John Dewey and Morris R. Cohen, but already by 1957 he argued for a continuity between the mathematical structure of Markov chains and the pragmatist theories of meaning and emotional response on which his famous Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956) was based. While explicit mention of information theory soon dropped out of his writings, I show how information and computation continue to resonate throughout his later works and, thus, how they live on in current music-theoretical notions of style.