John A. Sloboda

Skimmed some, gave too little attention to rate.
Lerdahl's "Cognitive constraints on compositional systems" is the only one that truly caught my eye. He strikes me as a thinker that recognizes the dialectic in life.
"Vast numbers of nonredundant events fly by, but the effect is of a smooth sheen of pretty sounds. The listener's processing capacities..are not overwhelmed."
Buts forward the ideas of a compositional and a listening grammar: the former is what generates the music, and the latter generates the representations of the music. (So the piece in the quote above was generated by complex rules...specifically an artificial/conscious grammar but lead to non-detailed representation. A mark of divorcing method from intuition.)
So he argues understanding 'listening grammar' by understanding how we cognitively process music will enable us to create better compositional grammars.

The final research finds the interesting but sort of obvious conclusion that skill at performance and composition are two different skills.… (más)