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1. Musical Phonology
What we're trying for is a high overview of musical development in terms of a vocabulary constantly being enriched by more and more remote and chromatic overtones. It's as if we could see the whole of music developing from prehistory to the present, in two minutes.
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2. Musical Syntax
Of course my musical repeats were made in the name of symmetry. But symmetry is not necessarily balance: that's a precept we all learned long ago, and it's worth saying again. What Mozart has done—as any great master does—is to make the leap from prosy symmetry into poetic balance, that is, into art.
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4. The Delights and Dangers of Ambiguity
Similarly, in our second lecture on syntax, we found new ambiguities in Mozart's G-minor Symphony, if you recall, arising from violated symmetry, deep-structure symmetries which were converted by linguistic transformational procedures into beautifully ambiguous surface structures.
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5. The Twentieth Century Crisis
Schoenberg, foreseeing this point of no return, and taking his cue from the Expressionist movement in the other arts, initiated a clean, total break with tonality altogether, as well as with syntactic structures based on symmetry. It's interesting to note that Schoenberg was also a talented painter.
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