The Dialectic of Good Continuation in Tonal Music

There seems to be a growing interest in addressing the problem of explaining musical behaviour, in particular that which is classified as 'tonal', by means of psychological testing, conducted by psychologists with or without the help of music theorists. One recent example is a collection of articles entitled The Psychology of Music, edited by Diana Deutsch, which may be taken as representative.2 The psychological movement departs from traditional music theory in that it is not, by and large, concerned with the analysis of style, nor the assembling of pieces into historical periods, nor with the technique of examining individual pieces according to any particular model of structural cogency. Instead the goal seems to be to arrive at tests of musical behaviour whose results should tell us something about the thinking that is going on when one is 'acting tonally', and thus in the end to be able to verify certain structures presented in the tests as quintessentially 'tonal'. The nature of the material presented in those tests is, therefore, absolutely critical not to the success of the test but to its meaningfulness. In a review of Deutsch's book, Mary Louise Serafine praises the endeavour and approves of a few contributions, but rather distrusts the entire venture. She holds it to be premature, since we do not have anything like a true psychology of music for psychologists to test: