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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