Ep. 198 | Robert O. Gjerdingen on Schemas, AI, Language, and the Future of Music Education

🎥 Recorded using Ecamm Live — my favorite all-in-one Mac app for podcasting, recording, and live streaming. 👉 Try it here (affiliate link): https://bit.ly/4osrvBk In this New Year’s special, Professor Robert O. Gjerdingen (author of Music in the Galant Style and creator of partimenti.org) returns to the HMA Podcast for an expansive, thought-provoking conversation that bridges music theory, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and pedagogy. We discuss: • The historic Partimento Conference in Vienna • How schemas revolutionized our understanding of 18th-century composition • Parallels between language acquisition and musical fluency • Neural-network experiments in the 1980s and today’s AI and ChatGPT • Late-Romantic and 19th-century Paris Conservatory harmony training • Reflections on Riemann, rhythm, modulation, and improvisation • The evolution of musical originality, from Mozart to Liszt to Gershwin A deep, engaging exploration of how humans think musically — past, present, and future. Chapters: 0:00 – Restoring the 1887 attic & opening chat 2:00 – Partimento Conference in Vienna: “Critical Mass Achieved” 5:00 – How the schema concept arose from cognitive psychology 10:00 – Analyzing 18th-century manuscripts and recurring patterns 14:30 – Early neural networks, similarity, and AI in music theory 20:00 – Language learning, collocations, and musical schemas 26:00 – Musical fluency vs linguistic fluency — shared cognition 32:00 – Favorite chords, Rachmaninoff, and 1960s pop inspirations 36:00 – Paris Conservatory harmony, Italian roots, and Lavignac examples 46:00 – Advice for young composers & programs in Europe 50:00 – China trip, global spread of schema pedagogy 58:00 – Rhythm, Riemann, and 18th-century metric thought 1:06:00 – Interdisciplinary research and how to “be a sponge” 1:18:00 – Seventeenth-century “no-longer-but-not-yet” harmony 1:26:00 – Updating Partimenti.org & open-source scholarship 1:33:00 – Originality vs pattern in great composers 1:42:00 – Liszt, the Transcendental Études, and Romantic schemas 1:43:30 – Modernism, serialism, and 20th-century “brilliant lemmings” 1:47:00 – Gershwin, Stravinsky, the Beatles & today’s music 1:49:00 – Gjerdingen’s Pascal Medal announcement & closing