Schenkerian analysis deals with different layers of musical structure, from surface to the deepest, reductive ones. Reti and others developed motivic analysis, seeing motif, especially underlying motives, being elaborated in many different ways, as the prevailing force of a piece of tonal music. These two both find the underlying, unconscious structures and patterns in music.
This idea of finding unconscious patterns links to the Chomskian linguistics very strongly. Syntactic theory, for instance, generative grammar, the most well-known Chomskian methodology, is based on this idea. Needless to compare them now technically, I wonder if this could serve as the basic common ground for the similarities and differences in music and language, mostly syntactically.
Two authors I read before actually come to my mind when I encountered Schenker and Reti. L-Jackendoff developed the Generative Grammar of Tonal Music in the 1980s, while that idea comes from linguistics, its application to music cannot avoid catching my attention that it is similar in many ways to Schenker.
The second author is Dr. Rulan Chao Pian of Harvard University, who studied 26 samples of Xipi Animated arias in Peking Opera in a paper that I read last year. Dr. Yung speaks highly of this paper, and it is indeed a sophisticated study. Pian identified several motives that predominantly appear throughout all the musical materials.Again, while her methodology, overtly stated, came from linguistics, one cannot help but notice the similarity to the motivic analysis of Reti and alike, despite the fact that they work in different music idioms and cultures.
It seems that this idea is worth pursuing and many scholars in different areas have actually done their studies on this idea. But first I need to make clear how do they relate and whether do they relate to each others, or they work totally independently. Either way it should speaks of the resemblance on some level between music and language.
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