Lawrence Zbikowski has taught music theory and analysis at the University of Chicago since 1993, and will be a visitor at Getty- CASBS research group on Cognition, Brain, and Art during the 2001-2002 academic year.

This book shows how recent work in cognitive science, especially that developed by cognitive linguists and cognitive psychologists, can be used to explain how we understand music. The book focuses on three cognitive processes--categorization, cross-domain mapping, and the use of conceptual models--and explores the part these play in theories of musical organization.

The first part of the book provides a detailed overview of the relevant work in cognitive science, framed around specific musical examples. The second part brings this perspective to bear on a number of issues with which music scholarship has often been occupied, including the emergence of musical syntax and its relationship to musical semiosis, the problem of musical ontology, the relationship between words and music in songs, and conceptions of musical form and musical hierarchy.

The book will be of interest to music theorists, musicologists, and ethnomusicologists, as well as those with a professional or avocational interest in the application of work in cognitive science to humanistic principles.


"It's strengths -and there are many-lie in its explicitness and in the values it brings to the exposition of musicological issues, and in the exemplary breadth and depth of knowledge across the fields of musicology and the cognitive sciences which it embodies...Zbikowski is to be applauded."
Journal of the American Musicological Society