The Excitement Factor (previously August, 2008)

In reviewing Larry McMurtry's Books: A Memoir for The New York Review, Michael Dirda chose to dwell on the fact that McMurtry's first reading experiences were with "a box of cheap adventure fiction from the 1930s." Dirda reacted as follows:

In truth, what could have better suited a dreamy boy than just such wonderful trash? After all, real readers always read for excitement; only the nature of that excitement changes through life.

This line of reasoning is similar to that I had heard in a lecture by Harlan Ellison to the effect that reading comic books (regardless of whether or not they were "good" ones by whatever criteria one might have for "good") is better for kids than reading nothing at all. Excitement can be delivered in a variety of packages. The source of the excitement is less important than the skill we acquire in focusing our attention on that source.

Dirda's comment also reminded me of David Denby's book, Great Books. Given the benefit of a sabbatical from his work at The New York Times, Denby decided to exercise it by taking freshman courses at Columbia, basically reading the same "core" of "great books" that he had read in his own freshman year. He then wrote his book about how much more interesting the reading had been the second time. This is key to Dirda's point: Denby's life experiences had changed the nature of his excitement. To choose a personal example (which also happens to be part of the Great Books of the Western World collection), there was little about Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War that excited me during my freshman year, while these ancient insights into the tight coupling of politics and warfare now seem all too relevant in the context of our current Administration's military adventurism (which may be one reason why contemporary generals have been writing about Thucydides with such insight lately).

An important point that arises from such reasoning is that reading for excitement does not imply reading only "trash" (whatever that may mean and however wonderful it may be). Perhaps reading is a matter of choosing what one reads on the basis of that need for excitement, then supplemented by a faculty for finding excitement in what one happens to be reading. Thus, I found myself reading George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss because a variety of other reading sources (which happened to include both philosophy and anthropology) had cited this novel; and my curiosity over why such a diverse collection of writers should see so much value in this book tipped the balance of my "excitement scale." Once I made the commitment to start reading, new sources of excitement started leaping out of the pages of the book, until I found myself pushing ahead at a pace as maddening as the one that carried me through the final pages of One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (one of the authors who appears to have been a source of excitement for Dirda himself).

As a concluding thought I would like to observe that what Dirda says about "real" readers can also be said about "real" listeners where musical performance is concerned. Indeed, my music composition teacher, Ezra Sims, believed that both text and music had to pass a "first sentence test." At its most extreme, this test implies that, if the first sentence of a text does not excite you enough continue reading, then you may as well stop before you waste any further time. Similarly, your excitement is already heightened during the silence before the music makes its "first statement;" if that statement does not leave you excited about what happens next, then it is pretty likely that the mind will "tune out" long before the end of the composition. Peter Shaffer caught this in Scene 7 of Amadeus, when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart reproduces from memory the "March of Welcome" Antonio Salieri had written for his arrival in Vienna. Mozart reconstructs the beginning of the piece and then turns to Salieri to ask, "The rest is just the same, isn't it?" Centuries later Mozart continues to excite in ways that Salieri never could, but only at the hands of performers who can both perceive and convey that excitement. Listening for that excitement is no different from Dirda's concept of reading for excitement; and perhaps skill in one can facilitate the other, regardless of the direction in which the transfer may take place.

60 Years of Tailleferre with Quynh Nguyen

Cover of Quynh Nguyen’s Tailleferre album (courtesy of Crossover Media)

In April of last year, I announced that Nicolas Horvath had launched a project with the Grand Piano label to record the piano music of Germaine Tailleferre; and I wrote about the first album to be released through that project. While this effort progresses slowly but surely, Music & Arts Program released a single-CD survey of the the piano compositions in Tailleferre catalog this past May. The album, entitled The Flower of France, was recorded by Vietnamese American pianist Quynh Nguyen, who has received degrees from the Juilliard School, the Mannes College of Music, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

It is, of course, unfair to try to compare Horvath’s “complete works” project (with only the first of three planned albums currently available) with Nguyen’s effort to provide a representative sample that cuts across the complete canon. That said, the Wikipedia page of Tailleferre’s compositions provides a chronological list, which begins with an impromptu for piano dated 1909. This can be found on both CDs, although Nguyen’s track listing gives the date as 1912. If Horvath has tried to present the works chronologically, then he concludes with “Au pavilion d’Alsace,” composed for a World’s Fair in 1937. On The Flower of France it appears as Track 21, roughly in the middle of the total number of 40 tracks.

While these overall scopes differ, there is at least one way in which these two albums are similar. This involves the difficulty of attentive listening when the subject is a very large number of very short pieces. A four-movement symphony may not have the qualities of a narrative arc, but there still tend to be a generous number of structural cues that lead the attentive listener from a beginning through a middle into an end.

Musical miniatures are more like haiku, which are limited by the number of syllables and by how those syllables are grouped into three lines. When a haiku is recited, it almost always is over before you know it; and one encounters that same phenomenon is listening to Tailleferre’s miniatures. The problem is that one seldom commits to reading (or listening to) several dozen haiku in a single sitting.

At the risk of sounding heretical, I might offer the “modest proposal” that the CDs of both Horvath and Nguyen make for admirable sources of background music. I say this not to denigrate the quality of the music itself. Rather, when one is dealing with such miniatures, familiarity first begins to grow through the “background,” rather than the “foreground.” If the CD is played through several times (hopefully over the course of several days), then mind will begin to cultivate familiarity; and that familiarity, in turn, can enable more attentive listening, through which one can appreciate not only the composer but also the methods engaged for composition.

By way of establishing context, I should confess that I have been nursing these ideas knowing that I shall be visiting Flower Piano two weeks from today. Sometimes, there is much to be gained by wandering around the San Francisco Botanical Garden, letting the sounds from the keyboard come to you, rather than luring you to seek them. If I spend enough (but not too much) time listening to Tailleferre’s miniatures, maybe I shall detect one or two of them wafting across the Garden space to me!

Aucoin Writes About “Lessons” from Boulez

Before we had to deal with the constraints of pandemic conditions, my wife and I would make regular visits to the City Lights Bookstore when we were in the North Beach area. Inevitably there would be something that attracted my attention strongly enough that I ended up purchasing it. On our most recent visit (hopefully not the last), my acquisition was Music Lessons: The Collège de France Lectures, transcriptions of lectures given by Pierre Boulez between 1976 and 1995 translated into English by Jonathan Dunsby, Jonathan Goldman, and Arnold Whittal.

Like other purchases this book found its way to a pile where it has had to compete with other offerings vying for my attention. Because I have not touched the book since then, I was particularly interested in reading Matthew Aucoin’s review of it, which has just appeared in the latest (November 5) issue of The New York Review of Books. While I recognized Aucoin’s name as a composer, to the best of my knowledge, I have never had an opportunity to listen to his music; and I have been unable to find evidence of anything I have written about him. Given the clarity of his writing about the Boulez book and the acuity of his challenges to the contents of the book, I feel that I ought to learn more about his music.

I suppose my interest in Aucoin’s review derives from one of his strongest criticisms of the Boulez lectures. This has to do with the apparent conviction by Boulez that listening does not figure in the act of composition. To be fair, the index of the book has an entry for “listener/listening;” but it is just a reference to the entry for “perception,” which is broken down into a myriad of subcategories among which “listening” never appears. By now readers are probably aware that my own interests have involved arriving at a better understanding of the nature of listening as it is practiced by not only those making the music (both composers and performers) but also those on “audience side.”

If the nature of listening is not called out explicitly in Boulez’ lectures, he does seem to appreciate the significance of the concept of memory. Here is how Aucoin characterizes Boulez’ approach to writing about memory:

He defines active memory as a faculty not only of recall, but of presence and prediction: a performer must achieve a “global memory,” which consists of “recall-memory,” “monitoring-memory” (engagement with the present moment), and “prediction-memory.” Boulez compares this multidirectional memory to peripheral vision, without which we could not gain an accurate sense of an object’s position in space. The performer is like an Olympic skier, entirely alive to the present instant, yet also reliant on the momentum of past actions, and constantly scanning for obstacles ahead. Once a musician has fully absorbed a score, “a whole emerges in which memory can roam at will.” The score’s unidirectional temporal canvas becomes, in the hands of a master interpreter, a landscape within which the performer is free to rove, to discover.

What may be most interesting is that there is nothing particularly new here. Igor Stravinsky offered similar perspectives, acknowledging Henri Bergson as one of his inspiring sources. However, as Aucoin’s summary identifies, any understanding of memory must entail the nature of our awareness of the passing of time. Edmund Husserl gave a pioneering series of lectures on the subject of “time-consciousness;” and many of his insights were subsequently picked up by Martin Heidegger for his monumental Being and Time. What is more interesting, however, is that the “tripartite” nature of memory cited by Aucoin can be traced all the way back to the Confessions of Augustine. Sadly, the index to Music Lessons lacks entries for Augustine, Husserl, and Heidegger; and my guess is that, for Boulez, Bergson was just one of many names that Stravinsky dropped in his own reflections about music.

Stravinsky appears often in Aucoin’s review. I was particularly taken by his account of a “weak misreading” of Stravinsky by Boulez. Aucoin elaborates this point as follows:

In his eyes, Stravinsky was “highly original” in his earlier pieces, which did not have obvious models—or at least not models that Boulez was familiar with—but his later experiments with extant European idioms, and especially his overtly neoclassical pieces, constitute an unforgivable regression.

The kicker here is the aside about Boulez’ familiarity. By now just about anyone interested in details about Stravinsky’s approach to composition knows that Russian folk music played a significant role in those “earlier pieces.” Here, again, we discover that the index to Music Lessons has no entry beginning with the word “Russian.” Trying to overlook Stravinsky’s Russian origins is a bit like trying to overlook the French influences on Erik Satie.

For the most part Aucoin tries to restrain himself from going on an invective rant. Nevertheless, I have to say that I was taken by one particularly observation:

There is nothing more boring than the spittle-spewing invective of a demagogue railing against ill-defined, possibly illusory enemies, and unfortunately this book seethes with such denunciations.

I suppose the value in this is that it allows for generalization. We all know that those attributes were aimed at Boulez, but I suspect that each of us has other targets in mind! More important is how, for better or worse, Aucoin guided my feelings about having this book. The “bottom line” is that I am not about to discard it; but I shall do my best to be judicious in how I allocate any attention to it!

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!

Glenn Gould: Bach Preludes and Fugues

It took a bit longer than usual for me to work my way through the third of the four categories into which I have sorted the 30 CDs in Sony’s The Bach Box collection of recordings of Glenn Gould playing the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. This is the category that covers different approaches to preludes and fugues. It consists of nine CDs, six of which are devoted to the 48 prelude-fugue couplings of the two books of The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846–893). Each of the books provides a coupling in each of the 24 major and minor keys. Neither of the books was published during Bach’s lifetime, but copies of the manuscript were widely circulated. The first printed edition appeared in 1801.

Neither of the collections would have been out of place in the series of Clavier-Übung (keyboard exercises) publications. Bach probably used the first book, compiled in 1722 during his service at Köthen, in training his sons and possibly members of the family and retinue of Leopold, the Prince of Anhalt-Köthen. Indeed, the title page includes a lengthy description emphasizing (in English translation) “the profit and use of musical youth desirous of learning, and especially for the pastime of those already skilled in this study.”

The title page of the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier in Bach’s handwriting (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

In this respect we would do well to consider at least the first book in the same light as the Inventions and Sinfonias (BWV 772–801) collection of two-part and three-part contrapuntal “inventions.” These are also included in my preludes-and-fugues category; and the fifteen two-part inventions (the first half of the collection) were also composed in Köthen. They are also given a lengthy text introduction as follows (again translated into English):

Forthright instruction, wherewith lovers of the clavier, especially those desirous of learning, are shown in a clear way not only 1) to learn to play two voices clearly, but also after further progress 2) to deal correctly and well with three obbligato parts, moreover at the same time to obtain not only good ideas, but also to carry them out well, but most of all to achieve a cantabile style of playing, and thereby to acquire a strong foretaste of composition.

In other words, from a pedagogical point of view, Bach expected this music to be performed with clarity but also with the intention of presenting “good ideas” through expressive (“cantabile”) rhetoric.

Gould clearly takes this introduction seriously in his recordings, not only of the entirety of The Well-Tempered Clavier and the Inventions and Sinfonias but also in his execution of many of the shorter preludes and fugues collected on a single CD and the BWV 903 coupling of a “chromatic fantasia” and a fugue, both in the key of D minor, also probably composed in Köthen. Furthermore, while it is clear that none of these collections were intended to be lumped together for “marathon” recital experience, one can still appreciate having a resource that provides a recorded account of all of them. Thus, when Gould fills a single album with eight prelude-fugue couplings, he clearly wants the listener to be aware that each of them has its own unique set of “good ideas.” Put another way, if I was concerned about Gould being too idiosyncratic in his Clavier-Übung recordings, his approaches to the diversity of preludes and fugues is more convincingly inventive.

That said, I have to get back on an old favorite hobby-horse about the second book of The Well-Tempered Clavier. The first time I had to write about a recital performance of this collection was in 2009, when Frank French performed the “second round” of 24 preludes and fugues in its entirety. This second collection was compiled in Leipzig in 1742, about twenty years later that the first collection and less than ten year’s before the composer’s death. Having already listened to French perform the “first round,” I found myself speculating that, rather than simply preparing another Clavier-Übung volume, Bach was using his second book as “a retrospective reflection of a life of making music in a wide variety of settings.” Particularly among the preludes, there is a diversity of forms and styles that bear “family likenesses” (a phrase coined by Ludwig Wittgenstein) to past compositions.

This is clearly little more than a “pet theory.” Were I to pursue more serious research, I would not be surprised to encounter more than a fair share of grounds for refutations. Nevertheless, I find that I have developed a tendency to refer to Bach as a “music-maker,” rather than a “composer.” I think this has to do with my own disposition to prioritize the act of making over the artifact that is made when writing about Bach. If these thoughts are leading me down the wrong tracks, I am sure that someone better informed will shake them loose some time in the future!

What are the Percepts When we Listen to Music?

As a result of some exchanges with Stephen Malinowski that followed up on my piece last Sunday about his visualizations of two of the “Razumovsky” quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven, I realized that I was scratching the surface of a landscape of far deeper issues pertaining to the acts of listening to music. However, this also revived earlier thoughts suggesting that the landscape itself could be divided into different regions, each of which could then be “mined” in efforts to understand the nature of listening. As I had mentioned this past July, when I was discussing the writings of James Tenney, one possible way to organize those regions was to appeal to the medieval trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric to serve as a foundation of “first principles.”

That said, however, there was a potential shortcoming to such a foundation. One might say that all three of the trivium disciplines are concerned with utterances. More often than not, those utterances are conveyed through text; but, even when they arise through viva voce delivery, those disciplines still treat what has been uttered as static objects. In other words those disciplines are concerned with what, for some time, I was calling “noun-based thinking.” On the other hand one of the key points I tried to make in my critique of Tenney’s efforts was that “the experience of listening to the ‘music-in-itself,’ [is] an experience that must, of necessity be verb-based.” (Tenney had been using Immanuel Kant as his point of departure!) Thus, there may be a fallacy residing in my choice of headline, because the very concept of a percept is noun-based. Making music, on the other hand, entails in-the-moment verb-based activities; and the listener’s response to those activities is just as verb-based.

If we are to think about how a specific performance of a specific piece of music can be realized as a “real-time” animation for which the performance itself provides the sound-track, then I think a case can be made that logic, grammar, and rhetoric provide “first principles” for the real-time visual experience as much as they do for the experience of listening just to the music being performed. Being able to identify those principles, on the other hand, is no easy matter. In the first place the very concept of a “sentential utterance,” which provides the foundation for all three trivium disciplines, is no longer “noun-based.” Nevertheless, there are clearly structural aspects to just about any “musical utterance,” which suggests that we should be able to appeal to basic principles of grammar (without deep-ending on parts of speech and sentence diagrams) to provide a foundation for identifying both the structures themselves and how they are used.

From this point of view, I continue to believe, as I first speculated back in 2007, that the very idea of structure allows us to sort out the embellishing from the embellished. Those who are more experienced in music theory and analysis probably recognize that this approach to sorting can be found in the theoretic writings of Heinrich Schenker, and those that are serious in their Schenker studies will probably be quick to point out that Schenkerian analysis owes much to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, whose Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (an essay on the true art of playing keyboard instruments) provides a systematic and extensive study of ornamentation. In other words, principles of grammar serve to sort out the embellishing from the embellished (sometimes taking into account the possibility that an embellishment may, itself, be embellished) just as the syntax of a language allows us to sort out the basic nouns and verbs from the adjectives and adverbs that modify them.

If grammar provides the tools for sorting out the embellishments from what they are embellishing, it may be fair to say that logic serves to identify what it is that is being embellished in the first place. Schenker did not seem to regard this issue as relevant. As far as he was concerned, the only construct “worthy” of embellishment in the first place was a basic I-V-I (tonic-dominant-tonic) cadence. Needless to say, this was far too restrictive an ideology, even before the first rumblings of atonality began to emerge from Vienna. My favorite example from one of the composers that Schenker favored comes from the orchestral introduction to Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken XXI/2 oratorio The Creation, which is “faithful” to the key signature of C minor but manages to undermine any attempt to suggest a dominant-to-tonic cadence.

The point is that there are any number of constructs that can be applied to embellishment. Indeed, the final act of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck opera was described as a set of “variations.” What is varied changes from one scene to the next. The act begins with the conventional approach to variations on a theme, but this is followed by a set of variations on a single note. There is then a set of variations on a rhythm. The fourth scene consists of variations on a single chord, and it is followed by an instrumental interlude of variations on the key of D minor. The final scene is then organized as variations of a rhythm consisting only of quavers (eighth notes). Thus, I would argue that it is through logic that one understands part-whole relationships, which may be based on a wide variety of different approaches to embellishment.

This brings us up to role of rhetoric. This is the discipline that it most closely linked to performance. One might say that, when composers like Haydn and Berg choose to go down a rabbit hole of complex grammatical structures, it is up to the performers to make the result accessible to attentive listeners. In Aristotle’s time rhetoric was all about suasion, getting those listening to a speech to accept what a speaker is saying, whether it is a compelling call to action or simply expressing a point of view to be shared. If there is any level of suasion in the performance of music, it probably comes down to just convincing the audience to pay attention to the music one is performing. That task of convincing is probably best appreciated in the performance of opera, where seizing and maintaining audience attention is usually shared by both the conductor and the stage director.

Note that, in the above paragraphs, one could approach matters of both grammar and logic using “noun-based” terminology. However, because rhetoric is more concerned with performing the results of grammar and logic, it is an activity, rather than a construct. This touches on the fallacy that lurks in how Johann Wolfgang von Goethe chose to dramatize the Faust narrative. The contract says that, when Faust declares that a moment is so wonderful that he wishes it to be suspended in time, Mephistopheles will them claim Faust’s soul. The fallacy is that, when a moment is suspended it time, it no longer exists!

Apparently, Goethe forgot any of his past studies of Augustine of Hippo. Anyone that wishes to think about the nature of time would do well to “go back to the basics” of Augustine’s Confessions. I refer specifically to the following passage (in the translation by Henry Chadwick):

What is by now evident and clear is that neither future nor past exists, and it is inexact language to speak of three times—past, present, and future.  Perhaps it would be exact to say:  there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things to come.

This clearly had an impact on Edmund Husserl, since his lectures on time-consciousness explicitly discussed that “present of things past” (which he called “retention”) and the “present of things to come” (which he called “protention”). I doubt that anyone would disagree that both retention and protention are actively “in play” when one engages in attentive listening; but just as important is how those engaged in the act of performance can impact awareness of retention and protention among those listeners.

This allows me now to loop back to my thoughts about the strategies Malinowski engages in creating his visualizations. The mere fact that a visualization is conceived as what amounts to a horizontally-scrolling pattern implies that the viewer always has on the screen representations of not only “things present” but also “things past” and “things to come.” For that matter, as one becomes acquainted with the patterns of the visualization, one may recognize connections between “things to come” and “things past” more readily than if one is only aware of the sounds themselves.

This then raises a challenging question: How do performers deal with those matters of listener awareness in the absence of such “visual aids?”

Morrison on Symbolism in Opera: second edition

Death and the Grave Digger, a symbol-laden painting by Carlos Schwabe, completed at the end of the nineteenth century and used on the cover of the book being discussed (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Last month the University of California Press released the second edition of Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement by Simon Morrison. I was first drawn to Morrison through his books about Sergei Prokofiev, so I was curious about the broader framework of this book. I had not seen the first edition; but, after reading the Acknowledgements, I was not worried about that matter. Morrison describes the second edition as the result of rewriting the first edition. He also refers to his “unhealthy obsession with the Russian ‘mystic’ Symbolists.” I sympathize, particularly where that first quoted word is concerned.

My own familiarity with Symbolism has to do with its French origins in an article in Le Figaro published in September 18, 1886 under the banner “Le Symbolisme.” The article was published by Jean Moréas and associated three poets with the movement, Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Verlaine. Much of my knowledge of all three of these poets is through the music of Claude Debussy. He set texts by both Baudelaire and Verlaine. The poem “L’après-midi d’un faune” (the afternoon of a faun) was written by Mallarmé; and Debussy’s “prelude” was intended to introduce a reading of that poem.

It is worth establishing, for context, that Symbolism has nothing to do with the symbol-based thinking of semiotics. That word can be traced back to John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; but the idea of making symbols an object of study probably originates, also late in the nineteenth century, with the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, later to be followed by the semiology of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. For both Peirce and Saussure, a symbol was an abstract construct that is capable of carrying meaning through a process called “signification.” The signification of a symbol can be anything in the phenomenal world of Immanuel Kant; but it can also be anything in the noumenal world of mental, rather than physical, objects.

I offer this background to clarify one of the key points about the Symbolists that Morrison makes in his Introduction:

To be a Symbolist, the composer must depart from fixed musical systems, which assign a grammar and syntax to music, placing a definable extramusical cover over its indefinable content. Hence the vagueness: scientific descriptions of musical expression avoided, or negated, the mysticism. The Symbolists cared about Music, the metaphysical experience, as opposed to music, the art or craft of composition, which put composers in a bind: How could the little m be joined to the big M? Might it be best, in this murky forest, merely to suggest such a connection?

One may draw a similar distinction between “Symbol” and “symbol.” The “little s” is an artifact that serves as a vehicle for meaning. The “big S,” on the other hand, is an object of “metaphysical experience” unto itself.

This then raises a problematic issue at the heart of this book. The world of the “little m” is one of artifice; and, as such, it fits comfortably into other worlds of artifice, such as the world in which operas are staged and performed. Where is there a meeting between the fundamental artifice of opera and the metaphysical experience of “the big M?” I would propose that it exists only in the mind of the individual experiencing the performance. That experience may be shared through conversations with others that have their own individual experiences. However, because it is a personal experience, it is noumenal, rather than phenomenal, and is connected to the phenomena of the performance itself only through the ideation of the individual.

Let’s go back to Mallarmé. Think of all the ways that his poem “L’après-midi d’un faune” undermines the effort of the reader to endow the text with semantics. Now think of what happens when the reader is replaced by a “real-time” listener attending a reading of that poem. In that context one can appreciate the ways in which Debussy’s music establishes a mindset for those about to experience listening to the poem being read.

Conceivably, one could approach the experience of opera in terms of first establishing a mindset. Having seen Einstein on the Beach, I think I can say one or two useful things about how to do this! Unfortunately, Morrison never really ventures into this territory; and, as a result, he never really gets beyond the world of that “little m.”

Ironically, the closest he gets to “the big M” is in his Scriabin chapter. My guess is that no one reading this has to be reminded that Scriabin never wrote an opera. This is consistent with the title of Morrison’s chapter, “Theurgy: Scriabin and the Impossible.”

The “impossible” is Scriabin’s final project, called the Mysterium. His description of this effort is quoted on its Wikipedia page as follows:

There will not be a single spectator. All will be participants. The work requires special people, special artists and a completely new culture. The cast of performers includes an orchestra, a large mixed choir, an instrument with visual effects, dancers, a procession, incense, and rhythmic textural articulation. The cathedral in which it will take place will not be of one single type of stone but will continually change with the atmosphere and motion of the Mysterium. This will be done with the aid of mists and lights, which will modify the architectural contours.

He subsequently specified that the performance would take place in the foothills of the Himalayas, that it would last for a week, and that it would conclude with the end of the world and the human race. (I guess that means that no one will be left to write a review, let alone read one!)

Scriabin had sketched 72 pages of music for a prelude to the Mysterium by the time of his death. This was called the Prefatory Action, and Morrison discusses it at considerable length. In all of that length, however, he overlooks the 28 years that Alexander Nemtin spent turning those 72 pages into something that could be performed. The result was a three-hour composition in three parts entitled “Preparation for the Final Mystery.” A performance conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy was recorded in 1996, and it was included in the Decca anthology Scriabin: The Complete Works.

In the context of Morrison’s book, however, there is a punch line that sort of gets swept under the rug. Most likely the major influence behind the very idea of the Mysterium had less to do with that “big M” than with another source. That source was the Spiritualism of Helena Blavatsky. This was a world in which symbols were, at most, vehicles for ritual; and any distinction between upper-case and lower-case was irrelevant. Blavatsky’s world was one of esoteric experiences, and the Mysterium was one of those experiences magnified to incorporate the entire human race.

Thus, at the end of the day (and the end of reading Morrison’s book), I had to agree with the author that the book was the product of an “unhealthy obsession.” Nevertheless, reading the book introduced me to a wide variety of operas about which I previously knew nothing. If I ever have the opportunity to see one of them staged, and least I know I can go the the performance with some useful background knowledge. On the other hand, given my current workload, I am in no rush to fill in any gaps in my past listening history!

Percussionist as “Humble Servant” of Five Composers

Percussionist Andy Meyerson (from the Web page for this performance)

Last night at Z Below, The Living Earth Show (TLES), the duo of guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson, began its 2019–20 San Francisco season with a solo recital by Meyerson, who now serves as the group’s Artistic Director. The title of the program was “Humble Servant,” which was also the title of the first selection on the program, a piece composed by Adrian Knight, which also served as the opening track on Meyerson’s solo album, “My Side of the Story.” The program as a whole lasted about an hour and consisted of five pieces composed for Meyerson by five different composers, of which Knight was the first.

While Knight’s composition was memorial in nature, commemorating the death of a close friend, the sense of the program as a whole suggested that Meyerson saw himself as a “humble servant” of the five composers whose works were performed. Each composition imposed its own set of demands on the skills of a percussionist, and Meyerson rose to the challenges of each of those demands with the consistent connotation that the performer was there simply to “give voice” to the creations of the composers. Those demands, in turn, often involved some experimentation on the part of the composer, exploring new ways to approach the semantics of the phrase “making music,” often by engaging extramusical factors.

Thus Knight’s “Humble Servant” could be approached as a study in meditative stillness. That sense of stillness was established though the soft dynamics of a vibraphone gently punctuating a “wash” of colored noise in the background. The tempo was such that the listener was aware of every stroke, including those for which Meyerson applied a harder mallet to press down on the metal bar, bending it enough to evoke a vibrato sound.

“Humble Servant” was followed by Sarah Hennies’ “Kisses.” This piece involved a driving compound rhythm played on a drum kit and inspired by the Prince song “Kiss.” However, the precision of this performance was coupled with the difficulty of tossing objects into a bucket at a great distance from the percussionist. In other words the score as a whole was basically “programmed for failure;” and, whenever an object actually did land in the bucket, there was a passing sense of satisfaction. (It was almost impossible to avoid thinking of how much Golden State Warriors player Stephen Curry prepares for three-point shots, only to see much of that preparation evaporate in the heat of the basketball game itself.)

Samuel Adams has been composing for TLES since their first round of public concerts; and his “Percussion Music for Robert and Andy,” composed in 2015, can be found on Meyerson’s solo album. “Surface” is his latest composition for Meyerson, and it involves considerable rhythmic intricacy. As a result, this was a performance in which the movement patterns of the performer had as much to do with the listening experience as the auditory experience of the performance itself.

The same could be said of Amadeus Regucera’s “IMY/ILY” but with entirely different connotations. Instrumentation consists only of bass drum, but the performance has as much to do with the confrontational stance that the percussionist must take as it does with the instrument itself. Indeed, the composition is as much choreography as it is musical performance; and the choreography is uncompromisingly brutal, often requiring masochistic acts by the percussionist. As a result, the imagery that accompanies the sonorities of the bass drum have strong connotations of a self-flagellating penitent, leaving the members of the audience wondering whether or not the overall experience is one of voyeurism, rather than a percussion recital.

Thus, when the program concluded with Christopher Cerrone’s “A Natural History of Vacant Lots,” the score’s combination of more subdued percussion and electronic sonorities came as a welcome relief. On the other hand, while Cerrone’s drew the listener away from Regucera’s brutality, “A Natural History of Vacant Lots” still had to contend with how deeply “IMY/ILY” rooted itself in the memories of the listeners. The subtleties of Cerrone’s “landscape” approach to composition probably would have registered more effectively had the piece’s performance followed a less disquieting selection.

In other words, by choosing to play the five compositions on the program without interruption, Meyerson established his entire recital as a unified journey. In that context, every composition reverberated both as reflection on the past and as projection into the future. (Given the rich extent of Edmund Husserl’s studies on the phenomenology of time-consciousness, the philosopher would probably have nodded in approval at the conception of this program.) During the final selection, the relationship between present and past became more confrontational, perhaps to the point that attention to the present was put in jeopardy.

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.

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.

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.