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# An Overview of Hierarchical Structure in Music

## Details

**Authors** Fred Lerdahl, Ray Jackendoff

**Year** 1983

**Publisher** Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal

**Kind of work** article

**Discipline** Music Theory

**Applied** false

[Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.2307/40285257) 
10.2307/40285257

## In authors' words

### What they set out to do (purpose)

To present an account of the generative theory of tonal music's explanation of the hierarchical structures a listener unconsciously constructs when hearing a piece of tonal music.

### Who or what was studied (sample)

Illustrative analysis of excerpts of Western tonal music (a theoretical overview, not an empirical listener sample).

### How they did it (methods)

Theoretical and formal analysis proposing four hierarchical structural components — grouping structure, metrical structure, time-span reduction, and prolongational reduction — and demonstrating how they combine to represent a piece's musical structure.

### What they found (results)

The authors show that four distinct hierarchical structures are needed to account for a listener's understanding of a tonal piece, with higher levels of each hierarchy representing structural generalizations over their component parts rather than mere concatenations of surface events.

## Commentary

### In short

A musical piece's structure is organized as nested part-whole levels, and the pattern heard at any higher level is not simply the sum of the note-events beneath it.

**Patterns it shows** S

**Added** 2026-09-21

**How to cite this** Fred Lerdahl, Ray Jackendoff (1983). An Overview of Hierarchical Structure in Music. Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal.