Does "Meaning" Mean Anything Anymore?

I have decided that, regardless of what is actually happening in the world, the Republican Party has decided to declare war on the word “meaning;” and what frightens me is that they may be winning:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/30/rubio-tells-al-jazeera-strait-of-hormuz-will-reopen-one-way-or-another 

Is YouTube a Social Network?

This morning Zoe Kleinman, Technology Editor for the BBC, decided to do the best she could in dealing with the assets and liabilities of social media. I have no idea whether or not she wrote her own headline. As headlines go, it was more than a bit on the long side; but it was still designed to draw attention, at least as far as I was concerned when I encountered it. The full text is as follows:

'A game-changing moment for social media' - what next for big tech after landmark addiction verdict?

The article involves the question of whether software classified as “social networks” does more harm than good. Kleinman wasted no time in citing a recent Los Angeles court decision that came down on the “harm” side in a seriously big way:

The tech giants in this case, Meta and Google, must now pay $6m (£4.5m) in damages to a young woman known as Kaley, the victim at the centre of this case.

She claimed the platforms left her with body dysmorphia, depression and suicidal thoughts.

Both companies intend to appeal, with Meta maintaining a single app cannot be solely responsible for a teen mental health crisis.

Google, meanwhile, says YouTube is not a social network.

At the very least, I think we need to consider the validity of that final sentence.

By way of disclaimer, I am not a particularly heavy user of YouTube; but it is still a major factor involving the writing that I do. Were it not for YouTube, I would not be able to follow those performances by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra that are live-streamed (and, yes, my thoughts about the San Francisco Symphony often involve reflecting on my experiences with similar ensembles). Basically, I watch YouTube content attentively (“live” or otherwise) when I wish to then write about the music being performed; and that is the only thing I do with the site.

Nevertheless, most (if not all) YouTube Web pages allow for comments. That service draws far more attention than attending a concert through cyberspace. Democracy Now! is a global news program that livestreams through YouTube. It is produced by Amy Goodman, who made the “great leap forward” from public radio to cyberspace. Since launching her site, she has accumulated about 3.27 million subscribers; and this morning’s broadcast already has 656 comments. As a student, I learned about how information was shared in the agora in ancient history. The scope of that agora has now grown to accommodate anyone with access to the World Wide Web.

Emma Lazarus (photograph by William Kurtz)

The British comedy group Beyond the Fringe had a joke about the danger of the Statue of Liberty. They singled out this sentence from Emma Lazarus’ poem “The New Colossus”: “Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” The punch line in the joke was the problem that “people did” as a response! Those “people” are now “responding” to invitations to comment on Web pages; and sometimes the enthusiasm to respond runs way ahead of understanding the source for the response.

For better or worse, I have tended to pay more attention to getting my own thoughts in order than worrying about what other people think. Writing is an exercise to keep my cognitive capacities active. If an opinion is questioned, then answering it is just another facet of cognitive exercise. I appreciate the opportunity, even if it turns out that I was mistaken about something. Nevertheless, I am sure that I am in a minority category; but, if it continues to exercise cognition, I do not see any reason to complain.

Is Artificial Intelligence Bad for Your Health?

It was only about half a month ago that I continued to pursue “the distorted semantics of ‘artificial intelligence [AI].’” The fact is that, when I write about science and technology in my feeds managed by The Old Reader, citations of AI tend to be more abundant than ever. As readers may recall, I came to grasp the concept of artificial intelligence through both the writings of its earliest pioneer, Alan Turing, and my advisor for both by undergraduate and doctoral dissertations, Marvin Minsky, who ran the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

I suspect both of them would turn over in their graves if they knew how Google decided to pick up the baton for AI research and development and run with it. Indeed, Google’s approach to AI recalls Lord Ronald, a fictitious character created by humorist Stephen Leacock who “flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.” Google apparently wants AI to summarize complexity, which is a risky undertaking, because it is unclear that Google knows which direction to go.

 

Photograph by Caia Image/Alamy from the Guardian article being cited 

That risk reflects a motto I learned during my time with Minsky: “Every complex question has a simple answer … and it’s wrong!” As Andrew Gregory, Health editor for The Guardian, observed: “People are being put at risk of harm by false and misleading health information in Google’s artificial intelligence summaries.” As a good journalist, Gregory provided Google’s side of the story:

Google said the vast majority of its AI Overviews were factual and helpful, and it continuously made quality improvements. The accuracy rate of AI Overviews was on a par with its other search features like featured snippets, which had existed for more than a decade, it added.

The problem is that, where health is concerned, “on a par” is not good enough. A “matter of life and death” is not resolved through the law of averages!

When I have to make decisions regarding my personal health, I have relied consistently on the University of California at San Francisco for over a decade; and I shall continue to turn to the Internet to satisfy my needs to learn more about music!

Better late than never!

Samsung may like calling this a “smart refrigerator;” but has more to do with sales than with knowledge! (photograph by Ajay Kumar from the CNET article cited below)

Some readers may recall that I took on the distorted semantics of “artificial intelligence” this past August:

https://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2025/08/has-artificial-intelligence-gone.html

Apparently, it took CNET almost half a year to catch up:

https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/so-many-brands-are-calling-their-basic-tech-ai-now-heres-why-im-worried/

Author Tyler Lacoma may have been late for the party, but at least he finally made an appearance! 

A Questionable Birthday Present for Wikipedia

Today the Opinion section of the Al Jazeera Web site ran an article with the primary headline “Learning to trust the internet again” followed by the secondary headline “Wikipedia can serve as a model to combat disinformation and distrust online.” Given the recent beating that the very concept of truth has been taking, not only in the domain of politics but also, more recently, in that of health care, one might think that this article would be a breath of fresh air. Then the reader may proceed below those headlines to discover that the author of the article was Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia twenty years ago. So the article amounts to a “birthday party” for Wikipedia with Wales as the Master of Ceremonies.

Those who read this site regularly know that Wikipedia has been a valuable tool for me. Where music history is concerned, the best resource in English remains what is now The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which is now available through the Oxford Music Online Web site. However, that site is not available without charge for general public access. My own ability to use it comes from the fact that I can get into the site once the San Francisco Public Library Web site has validated the identification code on my library card. As a result, I almost never provide hyperlinks into the Oxford site, since I prefer not to lead my readers into a paywall.

Instead, I provide hyperlinks into Wikipedia. When it comes to nuts-and-bolts data about composer biographies and lists of their compositions, I have rarely been disappointed. Indeed, in accounts of more arcane topics, such as the diversity of tuning systems, I have been just as satisfied; and, where ethnomusicology is concerned, it would not surprise me if Wikipedia was a better source than Oxford. My guess is that these assets of Wikipedia are due to a great abundance of contributors, probably consisting of graduate students and junior faculty members, that have been writing such content for other reasons and then appreciate being able to upload it to a site for the benefit of others. As one reads the Al Jazeera article, one quickly realizes that this is the world that Wales wanted Wikipedia to sustain.

However, it is important to acknowledge what Wales took (and continues to take) to be Wikipedia’s greatest asset:

Anyone can edit Wikipedia, and that means that hundreds of thousands of people are also involved in the integrity of protecting the knowledge that we find on it.

While this may be true of the global community of music scholars, we all know that they amount to a rather small minority of the community of “citizen editors” that sustain Wales’ project. The fact is that, as recently as 2008, Wales’ ideal vision was taking a serious beating.

In February of that year, Mary Spicuzza wrote an article for SF Weekly, which was published in print as “Wikipidiots” and can still be found archived on the SF Weekly Web site under the title “Wikipedia Idiots: The Edit Wars of San Francisco.” By way of endorsement, I wrote an article of my own on this site in which I offered my own take on Wales’ idealization of “citizen editors:”

While it is true that Plato tried to enhance the readability of his dialogs by providing his “characters” with (often contentious) personalities, I doubt that he would have appreciated the extent to which the discussion of entries in a would-be encyclopedia that has become a major Internet resource has assumed all the personality traits of WWE Friday Night Smackdown!

Hopefully, at least some of my readers were able to observe that my hyperlink pointed to a Wikipedia page!

To be fair, things have improved since then; so I have no desire to rain on Wikimania 2021, Wales’ “all-virtual celebration” of the efforts of all those writers and editors that contributed content on a strictly voluntary basis. Nevertheless, it would be fair to say that the current century has emerged as one in which marketing has prevailed over truth in ways that those of my own generation could not have imagined, let alone anticipated. Wales’ ideal is one of “a collaborative movement of knowledge seekers;” but, in the “real world,” the very concept of “informed action” is on life-support and has been for longer that we would like to admit. So, while I can thank Wales with providing me with a tool that has become essential to my current work, I am more than a little skeptical that his ideals will be realized.

Taking Issue with Alex Ross (or Jed Pearl)

Yesterday I finished reading “The Cults of Wagner,” the review that Jed Perl wrote about Alex Ross’ book Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music for The New York Review of Books. Given that the book runs to 769 pages, Perl covered a lot of ground in his article. I would even say that his coverage was thorough enough that I can probably pass of reading the book itself. That said, there is one point where I would like to take issue; and, to be fair, I am not sure whether the issue is with Ross or Perl.

It concerns a single sentence:

What Ross believes, simply put, is that since life is disorderly, then art must be disorderly, too.

Given the argument that Perl develops across the paragraph that concludes with this sentence, I am inclined to believe that he has provided an accurate account of one of Ross’ beliefs. Regardless of the source, however, I am not sure there is much meaning in the premise that “art must be disorderly.” Indeed, I am not sure that there is much sense that can be derived from attempts to hang adjectives and adverbs on the noun “art.” In other words I have my doubts that art is anything and that it would be more appropriate to say that art provides grounds for experience. For those wondering, the answer is that this is not an original idea; rather it is one I picked up from John Dewey, specifically from the book Art as Experience.

What, then, is the “experiencing of art?” I would suggest that it is not that different from any other form of experience. The function of “mind” is basically to provide order to all the disorder that bombards us through stimuli. William James called this the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of sensory signals, which “mind” then tries to register as configurations of objects (often succeeding in unexpected ways that lead to phenomena such as optical illusions). No two minds need necessarily conceive of the same objects; but, at a much higher cognitive level, we have language to negotiate any disagreements. So it is that Ross turns to language to bring order to the disorderly stimuli created during a performance of Richard Wagner’s music and Perl does the same with the disorderly stimuli created while reading Ross’ book.

For some time I have been interested in those processes that enable bringing order to disorder. As I have written in the past, one of my primary sources has been a book by Friedrich Hayek entitled The Sensory Order, which seems to have had a serious impact on two researchers that have influenced me significantly: Marvin Minsky for his work on artificial intelligence and Gerald Edelman for his efforts to model what he called perceptual categorization. My guess is that neither Ross nor Perl have gone down either of these paths. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that the “experiencing of art” has more to do with the biological substrate of experience itself than it does with any properties of “art itself,” philosophical, biological, or otherwise.

This is not an injunction to advocate writing about making music or listening to it in terms of a biological substrate. Nevertheless, to go back to William James, both making music and listening are instances of experience. Unless we can anchor our thoughts to viable (if not necessarily valid) hypotheses about “how we experience,” we might as well just be juggling symbolic structures (such as the sentences we write) the same way we do when we try to solve a crossword puzzle!

Should Berners-Lee Testify Before Congress?

The testimony by Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, and Apple's Tim Cook at the House of Representatives probably made for good television, and there was much to be gained from subsequent analyses, particularly from sites such as BBC News. While I am no fan of those that skew the distribution of wealth to such a radical extreme, I suspect that most of our Congressional representatives may have missed out on a significant elephant in the room and how that elephant got there. While questions about work practices at all levels of the hierarchy are important, just as relevant is how this new generation of “captains of industry” got to be where they now are.

I would like to consider the possibility that all four of these gentlemen constitute the leading edge of a new generation of prospectors. I am more interested in how they came by their wealth than I am with what they are now doing with it. I propose that all four of them succeeded in “mining” a new “field” of resources that turned out to be very precious and thus very valuable. That “field” is the World Wide Web itself and its global impact on information flow.

For about two decades prior to the emergence of the World Wide Web, many research organizations came to appreciate the value of both shared data and shared software for processing data resources. That sharing was realized through the technology of computer networks. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, was one of those organizations. During his time working at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee saw the value of sharing within that organization; but he also realized that researchers could be even more productive if such sharing could take place across organizations. That was the motivating concept from which the World Wide Web would eventually emerge.

One of the original platforms for sharing across organizations was Usenet and the bulletin board system it supported. Simply put, researchers from different organizations were provided with “gateway” technology for both reading bulletin boards and contributing to them. The “gateway” allowed information to cross from one network to another; and the World Wide Web introduced new protocols for communication that did not have to take such gateways explicitly into account.

Fun fact: The very first unsolicited advertising, better known as “spam,” was distributed through Usenet before the World Wide Web had come up to speed. The fact is that dedicated researchers, such as Berners-Lee (and, for that matter, myself), seemed to take it for granted that sharing information could only be for the good. However, by the time the Internet as we know it was enabled, a new generation of those prospectors was beginning to emerge. They were more interested in the growth of capital, rather than the growth of collective knowledge. Four of those prospectors that “struck it rich” in a big (gargantuan?) way were called to account by our Congress yesterday.

One way of viewing this history is through that old guns-don’t-kill-people-people-kill-people cliché. One of the side effects of this new generation of prospecting was a growing myopia where issues of consequences were concerned. The prevailing motto was, “If you build it, they will come.” There was little concern over who “they” were or what they would do after they arrived. This leads me to wonder whether or not that myopia can be traced back to Berners-Lee himself. Nothing would please me more than to see him testifying before a Congressional committee and being confronted with that question of myopia.

Mind you, I suspect that anything Berners-Lee would say today would amount to little more than a historical perspective that is beyond the ken of those that have wealth and power. Nevertheless, the extent to which the very concept of information is now being undermined, simply because no one ever really bothered to view deceptive information (otherwise known as “fake news”) as a problem, amounts to a serious crisis situation. Ironically, I used to write about a book that took on the question of how serious crises should be addressed.

The title of the book was Thinking in Time, written by Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May. It amounts to a collection of case studies concerning Presidential decision-making. When I used to write about this book, I summarized its “punch line” as a recommendation that any crisis situation should be addressed through two fundamental questions:

1. How did we get into this mess?
2. If we take this particular action, what will the consequences be?

In that context, I feel that the Congress might benefit from what Berners-Lee might have to say when it comes to answering the first of those questions!

Is Failed Crisis Management Evil?

Once again I feel a need to comment on an article that just appeared on the Al Jazeera English Web site:

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/coronavirus-banality-evil-200505075710643.html

This article draws upon the concept of the “banality of evil,” a phrase coined by Hanna Arendt in her coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker. The authors of the article, Catherine Rottenberg and Nira Yuval Davis, explain Arendt’s terminology as follows:

She invoked the term to describe how Eichmann, a key bureaucratic functionary of the Nazi party, carried out his technocratic duties without questioning their purpose.

I find it somewhat ironic that this perspective can be traced as least as far back as the Crucifixion, at which one of the last “words” of Jesus was “they know not what they do,” suggesting that those killing him could still deserve forgiveness.

Rottenberg and Davis then try to make the case that the banality of evil can also take place “through the carrying out of bureaucratic tasks in an incompetent and negligent way.” For me this recalled the old joke that, if stupidity were a crime, it would be impossible to build enough prisons for the criminals. Even so, I think that Jesus was a bit too forgiving of those that “know not what they do,” particularly when they have embraced ignorance as a matter of conscious choice. In this case the conscious choice is one of viewing market value as the only relevant social value, relying only on the numerical calculations that determined market value without allowing for any other factors, many (most?) of which are not quantitative, to enter the calculus.

Max Weber saw the problem with such prioritizing. He argued that it would bring about two different kinds of loss: loss of meaning and loss of freedom. The first of these should be clear enough: The very meaning of “value” as been so distorted that we have become a world population for which no other value is realistically conceivable. One may then recognize loss of freedom at least at the level of no longer having the freedom to think for ourselves about what we value. Even deeper is the issue that only those that command significant financial resources are free to make choices about what factors impact the world in which we live, whether that world is suffering a plague or just losing its icecaps.

I prefer not to pass judgment on whether those that have brought about loss of meaning and loss of value are evil. In this sort of a mess, nothing will be gained from finger-pointing. On the other hand, we might do well to recall what was written in our Declaration of Independence after the one sentence that so many of us know by heart:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

It that context, perhaps we should view to prioritization of financial resources as an act of usurpation against those self-evident truths. By all rights, such Government could be overthrown by the electoral processes already in place; but, as we have seen over the last decade, the “meaning” of those processes is yet another manifestation of Weber’s loss-of-meaning syndrome.

That particular loss may well lie at the heart the mess in which we are stuck, and it remains to be seem if there are enough people that still respect valid meaning with the power to get the population as a whole out of that mess.

James Tenney: the Remaining Appendices

The collection of articles by music theorist and composer James Tenney published by the University of Illinois Press under the title From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory includes three appendices. The third of these has already been discussed in an account of the five-year period during which Tenney tried to develop a more “contemporary” theory of harmony. This article will examine the other two appendices and thus conclude the ongoing effort to account for the entire collection.

The first appendix was written in 1959; and, when this book was being planned, it was given the title “Pre—Meta + Hodos.” It amounts to a collection of initial thoughts that would eventually be refined into Tenney’s Master’s thesis, “Meta + Hodos: A Phenomenology of Twentieth-Century Musical Materials and an Approach to the Study of Form.” That means that the “big picture” of “Meta + Hodos” includes these initial preceding thoughts and well as the succeeding thoughts that were eventually published as “META Meta + Hodos.”

(I have to say that I am no stranger to this “evolutionary” approach to writing. Shortly after I began work in Santa Barbara in 1978, I was invited to a party where I got to meet several former graduate students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that arrived after I had received my doctoral degree in 1971. One of them came up to me; and, as soon as I introduced myself, he said, “I have been trying to rewrite your thesis for the last several years!” I replied calmly, “I wish you had gotten in touch. I’ve done that many times already.” In retrospect I realize that I now regret that I did not keep the notebook in which I first set down those thoughts that would eventually become my thesis. Tenney was clearly more conscious about such things that I was!)

“Pre—Meta + Hodos” never mentions phenomenology. Indeed, I hope that Tenney’s spirit would not be disturbed if I described this document as a study in terminology. This effort at “coming to terms” (a phrase I have unabashedly appropriated from the title of a book by the late narrative theorist Seymour Chatman) was motivated by Tenney’s recognition that the vocabulary of music theory was, at the time he was writing this essay, still very much locked into semantics based on “common practice” traditions. Tenney appreciated that those semantics needed to evolve to keep up with how practices of making and listening to music had changed since 1900.

While I admire the project he set for himself, I have found myself wrestling with an alternative point of view that clearly had not yet entered Tenney mindset in 1959. This has to do with the extent to which the common practice lexicon is almost entirely rooted in nouns and noun phrases, thus holding off at considerable distance the extent to which both making and listening to music are actions (probably a combination of physical and mental activities). In other words, if we are to do justice to the “practice” side of “common practice,” we need to explore verb-based approaches to description, perhaps to the extent that we accept the breadth of verb grammar with constructs such as tense and mood.

Then, as a corollary, we must recognize that any verb-based strategy must be based on time-consciousness. I see this as the strategic shift that both Tenney and myself pursued to mine the resources of phenomenology in general and Edmund Husserl’s lectures on time-consciousness in particular. However, awareness of phenomenology is only part of the foundation. We also need to recognize that when we actually set about to write about either making or listening music, we draw upon the “text type” (a term I acquired through reading Chatman) of description.

The problem is that writing descriptions tends to be much more difficult than writing other text types, such as the logic of argumentation, narrative, or even general exposition. Writing a description in which time-consciousness is involved is even more difficult. During one of my past efforts to grasp the nature of verb-based thinking, I wrote the following:

The challenge of providing a textual account of “what is” is already, as has been previously discussed, formidable enough.  Where the performance of music is concerned, however, “what is” is secondary to “what is happening;”  but “what is happening” is already “in the moment.”  We cannot begin to describe it (and mind cannot try to deal with it in terms of categories and instances) until it has elapsed;  and then we have to worry about a “new moment!”  The act of description is not only formidable, it may also be theoretically impossible.  The best we can do is engage in an ongoing process of coming up with approximations;  and the beauty of the performance of music is that there will always be room for yet another approximation, which may or may not be a refinement of a previous one!

I think it would be fair to say that Tenney never really rose to this challenge. The two appendices that precede the one written as part of his theoretical approaches to harmony are solidly noun-based. “Pre—Meta + Hodos” is basically an effort to lay a terminological foundation; and, in that foundation, even time itself is treated as a noun. The second essay then explores “musical parameters,” which amounts to laying out the adjectives that can be summoned to modify the nouns. Both of these essays cover significant distances and can be valued for that; but they do not help us to approach the verb-based side of music. A systematic approach to coming up with useful descriptions of “what is happening” when we make or experience music still eludes us; and, when one considers From Scratch in its entirety, one can see how that approach also eluded Tenney.

James Tenney’s Final Thoughts on Harmony

In the last three of the chapters in the James Tenney anthology From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, the author continues to wrestle with the nature of harmony and the perception of pitch. What is interesting is how each of Tenney’s essays on these matters tries to approach the subject from a different point of view, meaning that, by the end of the collection, one is reminded of the problems that three blind men have in trying to describe an elephant. “The Several Dimensions of Pitch,” written in 1993 and revised in 2003, tried to grab this particular elephant by its physiology, beginning with several informative pages that take a deep dive into what is happening in the inner ear. Of greatest interest is the explanation of the difference between hearing a simultaneity of individual tones and hearing them as a single unified stimulus, suggesting that, from an ontological point of view, a “chord” resides in a different category than a single tone.

In itself this is a rather profound insight. The problem is that Tenney does not quite seem to know where to take it. Part of the problem has to do with the fact that he never really reconciles the difference between the mathematical precision of integer ratio with the “fudge factors” of tolerance that arise when listening to real instruments playing their tones. As a result, I come away from Tenney’s speculations reminded of the old joke that the mathematical constant π, a transcendental irrational number, is equal to the integer 3 for very large values of 3.

The following chapter, “On ‘Crystal Growth’ in Harmonic Space,” also written in 1993 and revised in 2003, is the most problematic in the collection. It serves up an abundance of diagrams that get progressively larger and perhaps may be interpreted as a metaphor for crystal growth. For the life of me, I could not make heads or tails out of how to read those diagrams or what Tenney intended them to signify. It is as if he was in search of yet another metaphor to elaborate his thoughts, but it is almost immediately clear that his knowledge of auditory physiology was on much sounder ground than anything involving crystal growth.

The final chapter discusses Tenney’s composition “Diapason” and can be taken, without too much of a stretch, as a summing-up of the entire volume. The composition was clearly intended to make concrete many of Tenney’s abstract speculations on how the concept of harmony could “evolve” to accommodate new concepts of consonance and dissonance in the atonal repertoire. The “punch line” of those speculations is as follows:

Before harmony can evolve, the role of music itself must evolve. Otherwise we will simply be replaying an earlier scenario with minor, “cosmetic” changes in the details.

My own feeling is that there is too much to music to be crammed into a single context, let alone a “role” associated with that context. For my part, I would prefer to fall back on the “definition” that I think was attributed to Erik Satie by John Cage, which declares simply that music is what happens at concerts. I have now lived long enough to see the nature of the concert evolve in any number of imaginative ways, each with its own sense of context. Has music “evolved” along with the concert experience? From the Satie-Cage point of view, I suppose it has!

In the final paragraph of this chapter, Tenney turns his attention to the concept of form, which he declares should be treated “simply as another object of perception.” This takes me back to my own frequently-explored turf of the nature of mind as hypothesized by Gerald Edelman based on speculations by Friedrich Hayek. This involves the principle of “perceptual categorization,” which I discussed when writing about the “META Meta + Hodos” chapter in From Scratch. As I see it, what Tenney calls an “object of perception” is basically what Edelman calls a “perceptual category;” and, on the basis of what Edelman has written about the relationship between brain and perceptual categories, I am not yet convinced that the concept of form is one of those perceptual categories.

An Encounter with Thomas Clifton’s Text

Reading James Tenney’s review of Thomas Clifton’s Music as Heard: A Study in Applied Phenomenology, I came away curious about what it would be like to read one of Clifton’s texts. On the basis of Tenney’s account, I decided that I would not try to take on the book he had reviewed without some sense of what sort of a writer Clifton was. As a result, I turned to an article that Tenney had cited entitled “Some Comparisons between Intuitive and Scientific Descriptions of Music.” After all, this site has, for all intents and purposes, served as my “field notes” in exploring how one describes the performance of music; and, every now and then, I turn my attention to how musicians themselves approach the task of description. One of my favorite examples of that latter case has been György Ligeti’s approach to describing Pierre Boulez’ “Structure Ia,” which turned out to be an engaging exercise in the relationship between pure logic and the rhetoric of expression.

Clifton’s paper was published in the Spring, 1975 (Volume 19, Number 1) issue of the Journal of Music Theory. It involved a quest for an approach to description that would serve as a viable alternative to the rigor of scientific description, in which the description itself amounts to an assertion (albeit a large and complex one) whose consistency can be validated through the tools of formal logic. Having once encountered a doctoral thesis that used formal logic to validate compositions by Arnold Schoenberg based on his twelve-tone technique, I could appreciate Clifton’s objective. However, formal logic is basically a tool for analysis of symbol structures; and the only symbol structures in music are the marks on the score pages. I have previously cited Jonathan Biss for observing that the music resides not in the marks on paper but on how those marks are realized through performance.

Unfortunately, reading Clifton turned out of be a rather frustrating experience. This was probably due, in no small part, to his invoking the term “intuitive” as a dialectical opposition to “scientific.” There are probably about as many different ways to interpret what “intuitive” means as there are disciplines that invoke the adjective. As one reads through Clifton’s paper, one realizes that he is weaving his way in and around all of those disciplines; and it is not difficult for the reader to feel that (s)he is getting lost in the midst of all that weaving. Not only is this understandable, but I came away with the distinct impression that Clifton himself had gotten just as lost and had not been able to find his way to a satisfying conclusion at the end of this article.

The good news is that he tries to make his case through musical examples, rather than resorting entirely to prose-based argumentation. Sadly, the insights that emerge from those examples seldom have much impact on the “mission statement” embodied in the paper’s title. The examples amount to Clifton saying, “Here is an imaginative way to describe this particular musical excerpt,” to which I would reply, “I agree that it is imaginative, but what point is it making?” By the time I reached the end of the paper, I felt that Clifton had led me into a dark forest in which I could not figure out which path would lead me back to daylight.

In many respects the concept of “intuition” seems to have led Clifton away from his goal, rather than toward it. Thus, he has the same predicament that Tenney has encountered in his work with computers, in which he had to use programming languages that allowed the evaluation of complex numerical forms but not the manipulation of symbolic structures. Rather than focus on “intuition” and what the many different schools of thought have to say about it, Clifton would have done better to go “back to the basics” of description itself. Specifically, description should be approached as a text type through which individuals can communicate with each other.

There is a discipline in literary theory concerned with the nature of text types. What is relevant in this case is that the text type of argumentation, which is basically the text type behind “scientific” reasoning, is distinctly different from that of description. The other two text types are exposition, found in topic-based essays, and narrative. Note that narrative is the only time-dependent text type, suggesting that discourse about “music as heard” probably requires a synthesis of description and narrative, amounting to the use of narrative for means other than storytelling.

Most likely we are now swimming in waters that were unknown to Clifton when he was working on the paper that would appear in the Journal of Music Theory. Indeed, those waters become known to me only during the final decade of the twentieth century; and I still cannot claim that I have come to terms with them. Nevertheless, I can appreciate that Clifton’s own swimming took him into a considerable amount of turbulence. My own thoughts about these matters are also contending with that turbulence; but I am hoping that, with enough persistence, I shall eventually be able to chart and pursue a more viable course that I can swim!

Thomas Clifton’s Impact on James Tenney

My journey through From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, the University of Illinois Press collection of articles by music theorist and composer James Tenney, has now come to what quickly became the most significant of my encounters with Tenney’s writings. Readers may recall that my last article examined a five-year period of “struggle” (my word choice) to develop a theory of harmony that would apply to contemporary music as effectively as it did to the traditions of the nineteenth and preceding centuries. The year after that period seemed to have marked Tenney’s awakening from “metaphysical slumbers” (paraphrasing the traditional account of David Hume’s impact on Immanuel Kant) by virtue of his reading and reviewing the book Music as Heard: A Study in Applied Phenomenology by Thomas Clifton. Clifton died in 1978, and this book was not published until 1983. Tenney’s review appeared in the Journal of Music Theory in 1985.

In the second paragraph of his review, Tenney described the book as “at times brilliant, insightful, and thought-provoking; at other times irritating, exasperating, even embarrassing.” Nevertheless, Tenney is impressively persistent in seeking out the insights while glossing over the exasperations, reminding me of my favorite admonition from one of the pioneers in studying the relationship between brain and mind, Warren Sturgis McCulloch, “Don’t bite my finger, look where I am pointing.” Tenney clearly wanted his readers to grasp just where Clifton was pointing. Over 30 years later I still feel that he did an admirable job, but returning to that review also left me disconcerted at how little has been done to follow up on Clifton’s phenomenological stance.

Indeed, having presented the reader with both pans of the balance required for reading Clifton’s book, Tenney then makes it clear why he believes the book is so important:

A new kind of music theory is needed that deals with the question of what we actually hear when we listen to a piece of music, as well as how or why we hear as we do. To the extent that music theory involves the development and application of a descriptive language for music, this means that both the things named and the relations between things described by such a language must be much more precisely correlated than they are now with things and relations actually perceived or experienced.

Ever since I created this site, I have struggled with the challenges confronting anyone trying to describe “music as heard.” Those who have followed that struggle known that I have, from time to time, tried to take a phenomenological stance; but, at the end of the day, I feel as if what I have been doing all these years amounts to anthropological field work. There are, of course, anthropologists who respect the insights of phenomenology; and some of them have had a definite impact on my own efforts. Nevertheless, as I know from my interactions with “working musicians,” there is a wide gulf between the thought processes behind making music and those behind listening to it; and neither phenomenology nor anthropology currently goes very far in efforts to narrow that gulf.

As those who know a thing or two about phenomenology may guess, Clifton’s primary influence came from, as Tenney puts it, “the methods, insights, and terminology of Edmund Husserl.” Tenney goes on to name others; but Husserl was the one to get the ball rolling, so to speak, particularly through Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (lectures on the phenomenology of the consciousness of internal time), which was published in 1928, based on Martin Heidegger editing notes taken from Husserl’s lectures. The best source in English is the translation by James S. Churchill in 1964, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, published by Indiana University Press. Tenney’s chapter-by-chapter examination of Clifton’s book suggests that Tenney himself was at least adequately, if not sufficiently, acquainted with both Husserl in general and the question of time-consciousness in particular.

Nevertheless, when one gets to the end of Tenney’s review, the major “lesson” is that there are no easy answers to questions about what happens between ears and mind during acts of listening to music. Presumably, Clifton did not live long enough to take the next steps along the path delineated by his book; and, on the basis of the remaining chapters in From Scratch, I would suggest that Tenney was more interested in pursuing the composition of music than in picking up the baton that Clifton had prematurely dropped. Personally, I feel as if I continue to acknowledge the phenomenological stance, even if I do not follow Husserl’s discipline faithfully, whenever I try to account for my own acts of listening to music; and rereading Tenney’s review has given me an encouraging boost to keep at my own efforts, even when they do not (yet?) seem to yield deep insights!

Tenney’s Five-Year Struggle with a Theory of Harmony

If it seems as if it has been a while since I have continued my writing about From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, the University of Illinois Press collection of articles by music theorist and composer James Tenney, it is because I have been deeply occupied with four consecutive chapters (and one appendix), which collectively account for a five-year period during which Tenney tried to develop a theory of harmony that would apply to contemporary music as effectively as it did to the traditions of the nineteenth and preceding centuries. The texts that occupied my attention for so long are the following:

• Chapter 10: Introduction to “Contributions toward a Quantitative Theory of Harmony” (1979)
• Chapter 11: The Structure of Harmonic Series Aggregates (1979)
• Chapter 12: John Cage and the Theory of Harmony (1983)
• Chapter 13: Reflections after Bridge (1984)
• Appendix 3: Excerpt from A History of ‘Consonance’ and ‘Dissonance’ (1988)

As can be seen from the first of these titles, Tenney’s orientation throughout these chapters is primarily quantitative. His methods are grounded in mathematics, but it is a mathematical orientation that reflects his experiences in using computers to manipulate properties that are fundamentally numerical in nature. It is from that foundation that he believed that there can be “a quantitative theory of harmony.” So it is that we encounter this sentence in Chapter 10:

Unless the propositions, deductions, and predictions of the theory are formulated quantitatively, there is no way to verify the theory and thus no basis for comparison with other theoretical propositions.

This is a rather unfortunate attempt to apply the methods of formal logic to quantitative properties. Sadly, it leads to a misunderstanding of what formal logic can and cannot do. While those who work in formal logic will use terms such as “truth value” casually, Tenney seems to have overlooked that such logicians are not constrained by dictionary definitions of the noun “truth.” The “mission” of formal logic is never anything more than a means to establish whether a collection of propositions is consistent; and deductions involving the determination of truth values is the tool for seeking out an inconsistency. (It takes only one inconsistency for the whole collection to dissolve into uselessness.)

In pursuing that mission, whether or not a proposition is “formulated quantitatively” is not relevant. Identifying an inconsistency is a matter of symbol manipulation, the manipulations being the workings of deduction. As I have previously observed, had Tenney enjoyed the benefit of an intellectual community in which “computing” was more concerned with manipulating symbolic structures, rather than evaluating complex numerical forms, he would have realized that the role of numbers in a “theory of harmony” is only part of the story, a story that is more concerned with finding useful symbolic constructs to represent the nature of signals that must be processed when either making or listening to music.

As a result, even after Cage had radically broadened Tenney’s view to accept that a “harmonic structure” may involve any simultaneity of sounds, Tenney continues to be obsessed with the integers that represent the overtone series. This is understandable, but it also distracts from where the real questions reside. Consider, for example, some of the ways that Cage worked with a piano (both with and without “preparation”). Clearly, he understood that composition and performance needed to deal with simultaneities of sounds. However, Cage was willing to deal with a sequence of such simultaneities as if it were a progression no different from the progression of chords in a four-voice hymn setting. In Cage’s case, however, one could not reduce that progression to a sequence of Roman numerals or figured bass integers.

Tenney clearly appreciated this quality of Cage’s music; but, by the end of Chapter 12, one gets the impression that he had not quite figured out what, in his capacity of theorist, he should be doing about it. The good news is that he was aware that there are actually (at least) two different kinds of simultaneity. In one case, such as in those hymn settings, one is aware of both the individual notes and the chords that they form. In another case, such as one of Henry Cowell’s tone clusters, the individual notes “fuse” into a single “sonorous object,” whose “signal” is an integrated whole, rather than a superposition of recognizable parts.

The good news is that, by the time Tenney wraps up Chapter 12, he is beginning to appreciate that time-consciousness is more relevant to perception than “score reading,” associating correlations between auditory constructs and symbols on staff paper. Once again, however, I need to be fair to Tenney. He was writing at a time when few were focusing on issues of time-consciousness raised by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and even fewer were trying to relate their focus to the cognitive foundations behind listening to music. Those who read From Scratch today are better equipped to consider going down roads not taken by Tenney; and, if Tenney’s efforts did not lead very far, they may yet provoke a new generation of readers to seek out new paths.

Tenney’s Effort to Move from Theory to Practice

The ninth chapter of From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, the University of Illinois Press collection of articles by music theorist and composer James Tenney, seems to be the second-longest in the book: “Hierarchical Temporal Gestalt Perception in Music: A Metric Space Model (with Larry Polansky).” This was written in 1978 and was subsequently published by the Journal of Music Theory in 1980. It basically involves first distilling a hypothesis out of the theoretical speculations that first emerged in Tenney’s “Meta + Hodos” Master’s thesis and then testing the hypothesis by implementing its content in a computer analysis program, which was written by Polansky and executed on input from three scores of twentieth-century music compositions.

Before discussing the model, the hypothesis behind the model, and the testing of the hypothesis, however, I want to call attention to a published review of “Meta + Hodos.” This took place after “Meta + Hodos” itself was published as a monograph by the Inter-American Institute for Musical Research in 1964. The Spring 1966 issue of the Journal of Music Theory published a review of the monograph by A. Wayne Slawson, which was pretty devastating.

Slawson provided the reader with a paragraph explaining the the “birth” of Gestalt psychology as a result of observations made by Max Wertheimer in 1912. However, Slawson then accused Wertheimer and his colleagues of oversimplifying the theory they developed, concluding that “the Gestalt movement failed to go beyond a particularly apt and persuasive presentation of new questions.” This was the stick he used to subject “Meta + Hodos” to a rather merciless beating.

Thus Tenney’s effort to develop a model that could then be realized through software-based testing amounts to a response to Slawson’s review. The fact is that this was a time when painfully little was known about the “wetware” of a brain embedded in the larger complex system of the human body. Thus, even a precept as straightforward as Donald O. Hebb’s famous postulate that “neurons that fire together wire together” could not be tested in the absence of technology for observing the “wiring.” One of the reason’s that I have been citing the work of Gerald Edelman is that he recognized that his own theory of perceptual categorization could not be tested through direct observation; so, as an alternative, his team developed a computer-based simulation model of Hebb’s “wiring” process. Tenney’s model, on the other hand, was based on an attempt to turn the theoretical speculations of “Meta + Hodos” (a product of the theoretical speculations of Gestalt psychology) into practice.

At this point I feel it is important to note that the term “metric space” that appears in the title is never explicitly invoked in the article’s text. Nevertheless, there is an implicit sense of “distance” that Tenney seeks to apply to his “temporal gestalt-units” (TGs), focusing primarily on those constructs captured by the terms “element,” “clang,” and “sequence.” The model requires a quantitative representation of the amount of difference that distinguishes two TGs. A metric space is a topological construct that defines the concept of distance in terms of four criteria:

1. The distance from a point to itself is zero.
2. The distance between two distinct points is a positive number.
3. The distance from point A to point B is the same as the distance from point B to point A.
4. For any point C, the distance from A to B is less than or equal to the sum of the distance from A to C plus the distance from C to B.

(That last criterion is sometimes called the “triangle rule” because the length of the hypotenuse is always shorter than the sum of the lengths of the other two sides of a triangle.)

As we liked to say as freshmen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, these properties were “intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.” However, those of us who went on to major in mathematics discovered that the most interesting insights were those involving counterexamples to the constraints of those criteria. Every math major knew about the book Counterexamples in Analysis by Bernard R. Gelbaum and John M. H. Olmsted and the critical role it played when trying to solve homework problems. So, in the interest of seeking out counterexamples, it is important to determine whether or not the concept of distance can actually be applied to comparing two TGs.

Let’s start with something simple. Imagine music as it is printed on score pages. Imagine, then, that you take a pencil and draw circles around groups of notes that you wish to identify as TGs. You can then take a ruler and measure distances between TGs on the score page. Even if those distances are somewhat rough (since a TG is not a simple point on the page), it is easy to see how the four distance criteria are satisfied.

However, as we all know, the marks on the score pages do not constitute the music. The music only exists through the experience of listening to a performance, even if that performance involves playing a recording. I would now suggest that the time-consciousness required for such listening involves awareness of differences that do not necessarily satisfy the distance criteria.

To make my point, I need to appeal to the reader’s imagination. Think of a flowing stream. Now, imagine that every point along that stream can be established as a fixed position (through a very precise measurement of latitude and longitude, for example). Suppose, now, that “distance” is not measured by difference in latitude and longitude but in the amount of time it takes a reference object, such as a fish, to swim from one point to another. By virtue of the flow of the river, the third property of a distance metric is violated because swimming “downstream” takes less time than swimming “upstream,” even though the beginning and ending points are fixed! I would argue that the passing of time is like the flowing of that stream and that Tenney’s model, while it looks good on paper (such as score pages), does not adequately capture the phenomenology of difference in a situation requiring the dynamic nature of time-consciousness.

After I first performed this exercise, I realized that I had been about as merciless in approaching Tenney’s work as Slawson had been. The reason is that the model that provided Tenney’s point of departure was required a quantitative foundation based on the topological properties of distance. Even the hypothesis being tested in his article, involving relationships among elements, clangs, and sequences, had been undermined in the absence of how those relationships could be represented quantitatively; and, if the hypothesis was no longer sound, then testing it was out of the question.

Once again I find myself thinking about the problems with Tenney being ahead of his time in terms of the tools available for his efforts. This particular paper predates the earliest efforts that would eventually lead to MIDI. For all of its shortcomings, MIDI provided a symbol representation that could capture not only marks on score pages but also the time-dependent factors inherent in any performance involving the interpretation of those marks. As a result of MIDI representations, it has been possible to investigate structural questions that go beyond music notation and enter the realm of time-dependent interpretations of the notation. It is in those interpretations that we need to seek out patterns and make sense of both what they are and why they are, and it is a pity that Tenney did not have such tools at his disposal when he first set off down his phenomenological path of inquiry.

“Meta + Hodos” After a Decade

In working my way through the writings of music theorist and composer James Tenney collected in From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, some of my more extended efforts went into situating Tenney’s Master’s thesis, “Meta + Hodos: A Phenomenology of Twentieth-Century Musical Materials and an Approach to the Study of Form” in the context of how issues of phenomenology in general and time-consciousness in particular have evolved since that thesis was completed in 1961. Tenney himself took his own retrospective view of his thesis but only after over ten years of experiences and cogitations had ensued. The result was his follow-up essay “META Meta + Hodos,” written in 1975 but not published until 1992, when Frog Peak Music coupled it for publication with the original “Meta + Hodos” document.

The preface to the retrospective document begins as follows:

“META Meta + Hodos” represented an attempt to organize certain ideas first presented in Meta + Hodos in 1961, incorporating insights and revision that have emerged since then. The writing was initially motivated by the desire to provide an outline of my ideas and terminology for use by students in a class in formal perception and analysis at the California Institute of the Arts.

The result is not quite the sort of systematic outline that many of us learned to create in secondary school. However, it amounts to a reasonably well-organized collection of propositions, whose contents are elaborated through systematic definitions. Both propositions and definitions are then further elaborated by comments. For most readers this is hardly a page-turner; but Tenney’s attempt to be systematic facilitates homing in on the ways in which more recent insights reflect on the ideas brewing both in 1961 and subsequently in 1975.

One of my key conclusions about “Meta + Hodos” was that Tenney would probably have altered the path he was following had he been aware of Friedrich Hayek’s book The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology. This book was first published in 1952; and, while it did not cross my path until around 2005, I quickly discovered that it had influenced two of the most perceptive thinkers concerned with the nature of mind that I had been fortunate enough to encounter. One of them was my doctoral thesis advisor Marvin Minsky, a pioneer of artificial intelligence back in the days when understanding the nature of mind was more important than hacking together software that could fool enough people about its inherent “wisdom.” The other was Gerald Edelman, who was inspired to seek out biological processes that might validate what for Hayek was never anything more than mere speculation.

The very first Proposition in “META Meta + Hodos” involves the hierarchical organization of temporal gestalt-units. However, this is quickly qualified with a comment that suggests that the organization does not necessarily follow the strict “tree formation” of a hierarchy. (In abstract mathematics we would call the structure Tenney had in mind as a “partially-ordered set.”) The absence of such strict hierarchies is a significant issue in the biological model that Edelman developed based on a principle he called “perceptual categorization.” Put simply, perceptual categories are not neatly nested, nor, for that matter, are they stable. Indeed, those who have been following these “commentary” articles should know by now that the Necker cube is one of the easiest observed instances of unstable category definition.

Where things start to get a bit dicey, however, is when, in spite of the fluidity of the underlying nature of perceived categories, Tenney succumbs to the influences of his background in working with computers and ventures into a domain he calls “Musical Parameters.” Unfortunately, there is a slippery slope here. The very idea of there being parameters presumes that sound (and, therefore, music) is produced by what in computer-speak we would call a functional module, which has one or more control inputs. “Parameters” are neither more nor less than the quantities passed through those inputs.

Of course, those parameters can be applied to do a variety of things, meaning that they do not all “look alike,” so to speak. Thus, computer science recognizes that parameter values need to be classified, so that they can be distinguished as involving different categories. Those categories are usually called data types. (For the record, in 1975 I was teaching this sort of stuff to both undergraduates and graduate students!)

With such terminology at our disposal, it is easy to appreciate one of Tenney’s Comments:

There is not, in general, a one-to-one correspondence between musical and acoustical parameters.

This can only be appreciated if it is generalized to the above terminology. Given any two data types, does a relationship exist that defines one in terms of the other? From a computational point of view, that relationship needs to be expressed as a function. However, in the language of mathematics, that function may be injective (different inputs mean different outputs), surjective (different outputs mean different inputs), or bijective (both injective and surjective). (A bijective function is also known as an isomorphism.) Until we tease out the mathematics behind it all, any “correspondence between musical and acoustical parameters” can be little more than vague speculation.

Tenney then moves on to a domain that he calls “On Formal Perception and Description.” This is where he probably would have benefitted from a previous encounter with Hayek. As might be expected, The Sensory Order has a good deal to say about “forms” and how they “are formed,” so to speak. Hayek even distinguishes “simple” and “complex” “forms of classification,” the latter having the sort of dynamic qualities we associate with the Necker cube. In that context it seems to be fair to ask whether form, as such, as actually perceived or whether it is essentially a framework for expected perceptions. The latter seems more consistent with Edelman’s model of perceptual categorization, which, in turn, has little to do with Tenney trying to identify state, shape, and structure as “aspects of form.”

To those who may be chafing from my invocation of terminology from mathematics and computer science, I apologize. For better or worse, if we are trying to explain something, it always helps to have a vocabulary that facilitates the process of explanation. Readers may recall my earlier citation of the programming language LISP. An early pioneer of computer science Edsger W. Dijkstra, once praised the language for its ability to allow us to think previously unthinkable thoughts. Decades later a natural language researcher observed, in the middle of a talk he was giving, that it is often easier to explain what you are doing with a LISP program, rather than in text. The bottom line is that you cannot undertake explanation without terminology, and I have tried my best to evoke terminology that is appropriate without being dangerously confusing.

I make this point because, towards the end of the “META” article, Tenney begins to abandon it. There is an entire section of the text based on the mathematical property of ergodicity. However, he does not explain that term; nor does he interpret it the same way that any well-educated mathematician would. (To be fair to Tenney, Milton Babbitt had a tendency to play similar games in applying the terminology of abstract mathematics to his arguments about serial music. Several mathematicians I know have looked at his paragraphs and dismissed them as mere bunk.) The good news is that Tenney enlists such terminology to elaborate on those properties of state, shape, and structure; and the really good news is that those who follow in the footsteps of Hayek and Edelman need not worry about the specifics of those properties. The same can be said about the final section of the “META” article devoted to entropy, which seems to have originated from misconceptions that Tenney probably picked up from Lejaren Hiller at the University of Illinois.

James Tenney’s Formal Thoughts about Form

In “Form in Twentieth-Century Music,” written between 1969 and 1970 and the sixth essay in From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, James Tenney returns to matters of phenomenology after accounting for his computer-based research activities that took place between 1961 and 1966. This is a relatively short essay that, more than anything else, reminded me of a caustic remark made by Arnold Schoenberg in a letter to René Leibowitz:

I do not compose principles, but music.

The good news is that Tenney avoids making Leibowitz’ mistakes. He is fully aware that the prize on which he must keep his eyes is that of music (as opposed to, for example, music theory).

Mind you, he resorts to philosophy-speak to establish this point:

Actually, the “thing-in-itself” doesn’t even exist in music apart from our perception of it. All that may be said to “exist” are various partial manifestations or symbolic representations of it, and even these must be mediated by perception.

However, we are on a slippery slope here. There is, of course, the problem that “thing” is a notoriously vague weasel-word (Does “Ding an sich” sound classier just because that is what Immanuel Kant wrote?); but, even more problematic is that fact that it is a noun.

The wording of Tenney’s next sentence seems to recognize the distinction between nouns and verbs:

So it is really the form of the musical experience that must be dealt with.

Nevertheless, as the essay proceeds, one finds that Tenney’s argument is linked to the fact that “experience” is also a noun, suggesting the premise that the attribute of form only applies to noun-based constructs. That slippery slope seems to be pulling us into a pit in which terms that we use comfortably, such as “perfect cadence” or “recapitulation” have more to do with “forms” perceived on score pages than with the experience of listening to the “music-in-itself,” an experience that must, of necessity be verb-based.

To the best of my knowledge, the earliest studies of perception dealt with the “processing” of visual stimuli. That processing involved how the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of sensory signals registered by the retina (as William James put it) are ultimately registered by mind as configurations of objects. However, the operative phrase in that last sentence is “registered by mind.” Perception is in the mind of the perceiver, so to speak; and mind is always in the midst of processing, whether or not the stimulus is static.

The best example of such ongoing processing may be found in the response to the stimuli of the Necker cube. This is a line drawing of a cube in which it is possible to interpret two different squares as the front face of the cube. The Wikipedia page for this optical illusion illustrates that ambiguity of interpretation as follows:

What is important is that the ambiguity is dynamic. Mind can flip back and forth between those two interpretations, even though the stimuli themselves never change.

When we shift from visual to auditory stimuli, the dynamic nature of perception is further confounded. We are no longer trying to reduce the process of vision to a “scene analysis” consisting of a configuration of static objects. Rather, the sensemaking that emerges over the course of listening involves ongoing dynamic interpretations of stimuli that are, themselves, dynamic. To push that theatrical metaphor, one is not only occupied with the “scene” but also with the “actions (physical and verbal) of the “actors performing” in that “scene.” Mind is no more occupied with trying interpret musical stimuli in terms of static marks on score pages than it is with trying to reconstruct the text of the script while experiencing the play being performed on the stage.

To be fair, the very nature of the noun “form” carries connotations of a static object. The significance of the Necker cube, however, is that, even when the stimuli are static, mind is never anything less than an ongoing dynamic process that terminates only with death. To be fair, when Tenney wrote this essay, there were not very many cognitive scientists dealing with the dynamics of brain that enable what we call “mind;” and, on the philosophical side of the coin, very little had been documented to go beyond Edmund Husserl’s lectures on time-consciousness other than Martin Heidegger’s proposition that “being” was a verb-based phenomenon, rather than a noun-based one.

As we learn more about brain dynamics, we are less inclined to reduce listening to the noun-based foundations of scene analysis. Nevertheless, the infrastructure of listening to music remains elusive. Those actually making the music probably have some advantage, since they experience the in-the-moment nature of relating what they are doing to what they are hearing. However, when it comes to describing those experiences, they are probably no better at it than those of us trying to account for the “audience perspective” of those same experiences.

I often refer to this site as my “laboratory notebook” for my efforts to understand better just what such description entails. (I also frequently call going to concerts my “field work.”) Whether or not I have yet learned anything of significant value from the pages of that notebook remains to be seen!

Tenney’s First Venture into Phenomenology

The largest single essay in From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, the University of Illinois Press collection of the writings of music theorist and composer James Tenney, is “Meta + Hodos: A Phenomenology of Twentieth-Century Musical Materials and an Approach to the Study of Form.” This was originally written as Tenney’s Master’s thesis at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, which he completed in 1961. It received relatively little circulation until it was published (along with the follow-up essay “META Meta + Hodos”) by Frog Peak Music in 1992. For its current publication Larry Polansky, one of the four editors of From Scratch, incorporated Tenney’s own corrections and revisions to the Frog Peak publication.

To call Tenney’s thesis groundbreaking would be a bit of an understatement. In 1961 only a few of the writings of Edmund Husserl, one of the major sources for phenomenological study, had been translated from German into English. Because any act of listening, including listening to music, is time-dependent, the most important Husserl source is probably Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (lectures on the phenomenology of the consciousness of internal time), which was published in 1928, based on Martin Heidegger editing notes taken from those lectures. This would be translated into English as the book On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917) (whose title provides the dates of Husserl’s lectures). The translator was J. B. Brough, and his book was first published in 1928. Here in the United States Indiana University Press published a new translation by James S. Churchill in 1964, and that now tends to be the source most readily available.

While Tenney never loses sight of the fact that sound is a time-dependent construct, he tends to avoid the extent to which listening must, of necessity, be a time-dependent action. Thus, while his essay postulates the need for “sounds and sound-configurations” (his italics) to serve as his “primary units” of study, he tends to avoid the issue of how perceiving those units requires time-consciousness. Indeed, the deeper he gets into his study, the more he seems inclined to seek out foundations in the symbolic constructs used to notate music than in any effort to account for (to paraphrase the title from a famous study about the physiology of vision) “what the listener’s ear tells the listener’s brain” (see below for citation).

As a result, a curious reader today (who would probably have already stoked his/her curiosity by reading David Lewin’s “Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception”) will probably be disappointed that a “verb-based” behavior like listening is overlooked in favor of acts of interpreting configurations of static symbols (as in marks on pieces of paper that are then interpreted by performers). An apologist might suggest that Tenney had the misfortune of hanging out with the wrong crowd at the University of Illinois; but, on the basis of my own educational experiences, I would suggest that, in those years prior to 1960, it is unclear that one would be able to find “the right crowd” at any American university (and, perhaps, any university where English is the primary language).

These days I tend to suggest that those more interested in listening than in notations would do well to consult The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology by Friedrich Hayek. Yes, this is the same Hayek whose approach to economics has won the hearts and minds of conservatives around the world; and, to be fair, he was very up-front about calling The Sensory Order a speculative book. Nevertheless, his speculation led him to try to think about perception as a process, rather than some kind of mathematical mapping that would correlate the firing of a configuration of neurons with some “concept of an object.”

There are any number of places in Tenney’s text in which he seems to be dipping his big toe in the waters of process. He even admits that his own construct for a “unit” of listening, his clang, must (in his words) “include both a ‘dynamic’ and a ‘static’ aspect.” However, he never lets the “waters of the dynamic” get more than ankle-deep, perhaps because he could not conceive of a useful symbolic representation of a dynamic phenomenon.

In other words it will be fair to say that anyone who has “gotten the message” of The Sensory Order is likely to read “Meta + Hodos” with a very skeptical eye. On the other hand I, for one, believe that one should read everything with a very skeptical eye. That is how we “learn things” (in the immortal words of Dwayne “King” Cassius Pride). Following the wisdom of Warren S. McCulloch (one of the author’s of the pioneering essay “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain”), I am less inclined to bite Tenney’s finger than I am to see how the “finger” of “Meta + Hodos” may point to Tenney’s subsequent writings.

Naive and Sentimental Musical Sensemaking

Readers who have followed this site for some time know that I have a tendency to fall back on the noun “sensemaking” when talking about the nature of listening to music. While this word is not in the Oxford English Dictionary (although the hyphenated version “sense-making” is), it had been adopted by several of my former research colleagues to address the rising problem of being able to extract “useful meaning” from very large bodies of data. The Oxford definition of the hyphenated version does little more than echo the two component words; but, if we look back about half a century, we find that Friedrich Hayek was dealing with the same issue when addressing sensory data, rather than databases. The term he introduced was “sensory order,” the biological drive to find order in what William James called the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of sensory signals.

from the Amazon.com Web page for Comparing Notes

With that as context, I found it hard to resist reading the book Comparing Notes: How We Make Sense of Music by Adam Ockelford. Ockelford is Professor of Music at Roehampton University (in England). He also directs the university’s Applied Music Research Centre. He occasionally makes reference to his doctoral studies in music, suggesting that he got his advanced degree in music. However, much of his research has involved the acquisition of musical skills among young people with sensory or cognitive disadvantages. His practices thus keep one foot in music and the other in psychology.

That sort of background should, by all rights, have made this book both fascinating and valuable reading. For my part, however, I was profoundly dissatisfied; and that dissatisfaction can be traced back to the second word of Ockelford’s title. At the end of the day, he has little to say about anything other than those marks on paper that all practicing musicians are expected to be able to decode. What that as his foundation, he dwells on that tiresome question of what music actually is, how it “works” (whatever that means), and, ultimately, how we “make sense” when it comes to either performing the music or listening to it. Only at the beginning of his final chapter does he cite sociomusicologist Christopher Small’s contention that music is not some kind of “thing” but, rather, “an activity, something that people do.”

My decision to devote personal time to writing about music owes much to my ability to spend a fair amount of time hanging out at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), which is only about half a dozen blocks from where I was living. Through my own experiences in higher education, I have come to a naive but probably useful conclusion about where who learns what. In universities we learn about theories about music; in conservatories we learn about how music is practiced.

Universities occupy their curricula with things, to such an extent that one might almost say that education can be reduced to a knapsack of noun phrases. Ockelford’s noun phrases come from a wide variety of sources, almost all of which have to do with academic publications that may or may not signify to anyone beyond other academics. The grammatical infrastructure of the conservatory education, on the other hand, is build on verb phrases. One emerges (hopefully) with refined skills for doing, often without necessarily verbalizing (or, for that matter thinking about) what one is doing.

In his academic context it is understandable that Ockelford cannot get his head out of all those notes on staff paper. He has some clever ideas (which he calls his “zygonic conjecture”) about a foundation based on replications and transformations of patterns; but these are just familiar concepts dressed up in a new notation. As a doctoral student I was taking the same sort of approach to music in my thesis, except that my patterns were modules of computer code and the transformations resulted from parameters passed to those modules.

As a result of observing master classes at SFCM, I came to appreciate just how limited my perspective had been. Apparently, Ockelford has yet to encounter that revelation. Nevertheless, to be fair, shifting attention from nouns to verbs is no easy matter. Even the very idea of how one describes grammar for verbs has major qualitative differences from the almost computer-like formality of noun grammar. However, Ockelford never seems to accept that sensemaking cannot be anything other than an ongoing process. Like sound itself, if you try to freeze it in a single moment of time, it all vanishes.

When I read Ockelford’s title, I approached his book in the hope that someone had finally come up with, if not an underlying theory, at least a usable roadmap for negotiating the complexities of verb-based thinking. Instead, I encountered that very noun-based song-and-dance that I have been trying to escape for at least a decade. My guess is that those music-makers who really “get” the verb-based activity of their work are too occupied with the work itself to waste any time theorizing about it.

A Critique of Judging New Opera

I found it interesting to review Damian Fowler’s book American Impresario: David Gockley’s Life in Opera almost exactly one year after Matthew Shilvock took up the torch from Gockley as General Director of the San Francisco Opera. While there was much to enjoy in this book (including the sumptuous photographs), I have to say that it was Gockley’s own words, compiled in a “Finale” section entitled “Gockley on the Future of American Opera,” that set my own “little grey cells” buzzing. I enjoyed the extent to which these “text clips” could be frank and open without giving the sense that they were deliberately trying to provoke.

However, even if we set aside provocation, there are some passages that deserve to be held open to question. My guess is that different readers will feel different ways about which passages these are. For my part, I would like to dwell on just one of them:

And we must remember that critics have too often misjudged a work at its premiere, witness A Quiet Place and Nixon in China.

Now, without trying to speak for or against any of my colleagues, I feel it necessary to point out that, in many ways, a fully-staged opera is a bit like the elephant in that old joke about three blind men trying to describe it. Given my own predispositions, I almost always begin by grabbing that elephant by the music, trying the best I can to sort out how much of my listening has to do with the composer and how much has to do with how the music is being performed. Others prefer to grab the elephant by the libretto, approaching the music in the role it plays in telling the story. Then, of course, there are those who grab the elephant by the stage director, who sometimes has his/her own priorities in how to approach that story or the music through which the story is told.

However, what those of us who write try to do goes far beyond description. As Gockley rightfully observed, we need to draw upon description in the service of judgment. This is no easy matter.

Those whose knowledge of Immanuel Kant goes beyond any handy “bluffer’s guide” probably know that he wrote three major works that he called “critiques.” The last of these is the Critique of the Power of Judgment, and it was preceded by the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. These, of course, parallel the so-called “transcendentals” of the beautiful (judgment), the true (pure reason), and the good (practical reason). Furthermore, each is situated in what Jürgen Habermas chose to call a separate “world,” truth in the objective world, beauty in the subjective world, and goodness in the social world. Lest this all feel like an unnecessary sideshow, I should observe that I was first drawn to read the Critique of the Power of Judgment when I found out that the first half of the book was devoted entirely to aesthetics.

This is what takes us back to the Gockley sentence quoted above. Whether or not we admit it, those of us who exercise that “power of judgment” in our writing will probably agree that judgment is context-dependent; and we will probably agree with Kant that our own subjectivity is part of that context. Where things get tricky, however, is that, even if we know that there is a context, we are not always positioned to specify just what the context is. One reason for this paradox is that, for better or worse, each of us engaged in the act of writing cannot avoid bringing our own personal history into that context.

This is not meant to serve as an excuse when someone (such as Gockley) accuses one of us of “misjudgment.” Rather, the very complexity upon which judgment is contingent should affirm that, at least where aesthetic matters are concerned, there is no “misjudgment.” There is the exercise of judgment, and there is the possibility for argumentation when different conclusions of judgment disagree. However, because we are doing what we do in the subjective world, there is no exercise of “pure reason” that will unfailingly resolve the argumentation one way or the other. All there is is the inevitable premise that each of us has a point of view and some of us are better at appreciating another point of view than others are.

None of these thoughts are likely to be of much use in the real world. The general director of a performing arts organization has to reconcile fiscal solvency with the fact that the audience side of any performance space is going to be filled with a wide diversity of “powers of judgment.” At the end of the day it all comes down to donations and subscriptions; and, now that the Internet has created a culture in which we expect everything to be free, the game that the general director must play is getting harder and harder to win.

These days I am thankful simply for having capacities to both have and express opinions. However, those opinions are cultivated in a field of experiences, so to speak. Given prevailing economic and social conditions, I have no idea how long that field will remain fertile. All I can do is hope for the best!