Review of Dmitri Tymoczko, A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice (Oxford University Press, 2011)

Abstract

[2] The observer's description of football is not wrong: the players on the field do arrange themselves in statistically predictable ways as described. Clearly, though, this explanation misses the point of football in important ways. The statistical phenomena it details are nothing more than incidental byproducts of the things that football is really about: the objectives, the rules, and the strategies of the game, about all of which our observer remains blissfully clueless. In Searle's terms, the observer has noted some superficial brute facts, but has failed to account for the deeper institutional facts, which create constraints that shape the brute facts in essential ways.