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Book Review: Pitch Class Constellations: Studies in the Perception of Tonal Centricity

The perception of tonality is a well-established focus for psychological experiments and cognitive musicological theory. Pitch Class Constellations examines the relationship between perceptual strategies that reflect the role of structure and function in tonal music. Historically, there has been a tension between these two views of tonal organisation. The prospect of clarifying their perspectives is desirable both theoretically and methodologically. Overall, this is a text for the reader who is interested in experimental detail and interpretation. The majority of the book comprises detailed descriptions of experimental set up and results. The text is divided into four sections. The first is an introduction to previous models and theories. The next two sections describe and interpret a range of experiments focused on the strategies used to identify tonal centres. These include: interval classes, functional scale use, melodic context, tonal frameworks and modulation. The concluding part comprises a reconsideration of our understanding of tonality in the light of the experiments' results and considers the relationship between how people perceive music and the concepts they may form of that perceptual process. The focus of the text is its detailed discussion of tonality in terms of static context-independent structures and dynamic time-dependent functions. Previous discussions ofstructural and functional accounts have often confined their perspectives to interpretative frameworks that have originated in music theory and analysis. Cognitive musicology has an ambivalent relationship to general theories of memory and its models tend to reflect specific components of music theory. For example, the distinction between tonal and event hierarchies: the static and the dynamic, is in some ways the heart of the book. This distinction arguably reflects the more general relationship between semantic and episodic memory. In as much as tonality is conceived through context-independent schernas that encapsulate relationships between events these Structural abstractions implicate prototypical functions. They involve intrinsic (spectral/harmonic) relationships modified by conventional usage. The distinction of tonal from event hierarchies, static from dynamic, and structure from function implicates a logical separation that in vivo seems to be unlikely. To this reader's knowledge it is unproven. This text does much to explain why. People develop an idea of tonal structure in the context of hearing functional propenies. The introduction confirmed to this reader that the analytic distinction of structure from function is problematic. It is interesting to note that recent theories of memory consolidation have proposed a more complex two-way relationship between episodic (veridical) and semantic (schematic) memory. The bulk of the book comprises the description and discussion of six experiments. There is not enough space in this review to discuss all aspects and conclusions drawn