There is an Anglo-Saxon alternative to Moles’ writings that formulates many similar ideas, but in a far more practical and accessible way: the works of Leonard B. Meyer. In 1956, the American music psychologist wrote a classic work, Emotion and Meaning in Music, in which Gestalt theory and information theory are brought together to form a fruitful new perspective on the question of musical meaning. It is the most frequently cited book on music psychology, and its influence on contemporary music psychology cannot be underestimated.
Meyer takes up the laws of conciseness and good continuation developed by Gestalt theorists. The first states that the perceived structure is always as simple as possible. The second postulates that the human mind assumes that a structure will continue in the same way. The active human mind, which anticipates the structure of musical events, assumes, based on such Gestalt laws, that the structure under development will be completed in the simplest and most rounded way possible. This means that the creative component of the Gestalt principles leads to an expectation of further musical development based on what has already been heard.
Musical meaning arises precisely from this expectation. The meaning of a musical event is nothing other than the continuation it implies. But this also means that musical events that do not arouse any expectations or assumptions in us have no meaning in themselves.
Meyer explicitly formulates his thesis in an article published in 1957 as an information-theoretical approach: he sees the pivotal point in the concept of Markov chains, which is closely related to his theory of fulfilled or unfulfilled expectations. In general, Meyer believes that musical styles are nothing more than internalized probability systems. Theoretical instructions for composition can also be interpreted as such. In a textbook on harmony or counterpoint, rules are usually stated as probabilities: a tonic is usually followed by a dominant, often a subdominant, occasionally followed by a submediant, and so on.
Meyer ultimately characterizes the norms of a style as the probability relationships that constitute a particular musical style, together with the “various modes of mental behavior that play a role in the perception and understanding of the material.”
On this basis, Meyer outlines three types of inner-musical meaning:
Hypothetical meaning: This is inherent in a tone or tone pattern insofar as it raises certain expectations about what will follow in the musical development. It also explains why we are capable of being surprised: we tend to block out developments that are unlikely to occur within our horizon of expectation, which is why they are unexpected when they do occur.
Evident meaning: This is assigned to an event retrospectively – quasi-correctively – when one of the possible events to which it could refer has actually occurred. It corresponds to what systems theorists call “feedback.”
Determined meaning: This refers to the meaning that emerges from the musical whole once it has been fully grasped by the listener.
However, it is not simply expectation that plays a role in the perception of music; the probabilities (or expectations) that a particular musical event will occur depend heavily on what has gone before. When only two or three notes have been played, there is still great uncertainty about how the music will develop (there may even be uncertainty about the style to which what has been heard belongs). However, once a phrase has been heard almost in its entirety, the probabilities of what is to come increase considerably. In other words, the probabilities of an event in music depend on previous events. This is precisely the definition of a Markov process.
Meyer also introduces the concept of redundancy into musical analysis. Redundant structures are necessary, according to the music psychologist, because, as in verbal communication, they contribute to comprehensibility. He believes that this could at least partially explain the audience’s lack of understanding of modern avant-garde music: modern composers keep the redundancy rate in their works so low that the “channel capacity” of their audience is inevitably overwhelmed.
Later (1967), Meyer somewhat relativized the scope of information theory and thus of the statistical principle in music. According to him, not all levels of musical experience are subject to statistical laws. In conflict with the statistical view is above all gestalt perception, which cannot be reduced to a passive counting of events, but retains a strong creative element. Structures created by the human mind itself cannot be equated with statistical patterns.