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.