An assessment of the validity of Bernstein’s linguistics in the ‘Unanswered Question’ (1973) and the boundaries of his ‘quasi-scientific’ approach

In his Norton Lectures (1973), Bernstein presents a self-styled ‘quasi-scientific’ exposition on an intuitively felt and – purportedly – rationally established ‘musicolinguistics’. By asserting the significance of the harmonic scale as a foundation for an innate musical competence, Bernstein creates a theory of musical grammar ostensibly akin to the transformational generative grammar expounded by Chomsky (see e.g. Language and Mind 1968); and, in so doing, appears to validate an underlying theory of musical universality, by which all musical ideas, owing to their shared ‘substantive universal’ phonemic subunits, may be similarly perceived by all listeners. This Critical Project will assess the methodological viability and aesthetic fruitfulness of the asserted search for valid analogies between music and linguistic analysis. In order to do this, the generative linguistics of Chomsky, as an attack on the inadequacies of structural linguistics, will first be considered; then Bernstein’s claims to and supposed evidence for a successful application of Chomsky’s analytic apparatus to the perception of music will be assessed; next, a critique of Bernstein’s approach by Keiler (1978) will be put forward, with due attention paid to further criticism of Keiler’s work by Jackendoff and Lerdahl, and to Keiler’s own response in his defence; and finally a re-evaluation in support of Bernstein’s intuitions, in spite of