“Dangerous” may be Worse Than “Stupid”

Back in November of 2013, I departed from my focus on the performing arts to reflect on the technology that allows me to do what I do. On November 13 of that year, I wrote an article entitled “Is Google Making the Next Generation Stupid?,” which was my own reflection of an article that Nicholas Carr had written for Atlantic Monthly entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” While I doubt that things have improved very much since then, I fear that we are now up against a more critical question, which probably goes beyond the repercussions of Google searches: “Is the Internet making the world a more dangerous place?”

This question was motived by an article I read this morning on the Web site for The Guardian. To be fair, I know nothing about Ben Makuch, the author of this article, given the headline “Rise in vigilante attacks in US highlight growing online DIY terrorism resources.” As readers can probably expect, there is a connection to the Internet behind this threat. This was made explicit by The 5-Eyes, described in the article as “an intelligence sharing alliance between the spy and law enforcement agencies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the US.” The following paragraph extracted two sentences from the report to summarize the threat:

Violent extremist content is more accessible, more digestible and more impactful than ever before. Violent extremist individuals and groups share material which individuals often consume as part of their radicalisation process.

It goes without saying that such sharing is most easily achieved through electronic mail.

A classroom scene from the opera Innocence (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera)

Mind you, I would not be able to provide background material for the articles I write about music without the Internet as a resource. Furthermore, I would hate to be labeled as a “person of interest” just because I happened to write about Innocence, Kaija Saariaho’s opera about a “violent shooting incident, which took place at an international high school.” Nevertheless, I find it hard not to worry about the extent to which accounts of violence can beget further violence, rather than deter such activities.

If the Internet has become a dangerous place, then I fear that there is little more that I can to other than to be vigilant about the dangers. I suppose that my own efforts are guided by the immortal words of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright: “There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.” As a writer, I have no problems being guided by common sense; but none of us that put our efforts into writing can second-guess the reactions of our readers.

esperanza spalding Releases “Formwela” Album

This past July this site discussed esperanza spalding’s launch of the Songwrights Apothecary Lab and the three compositions entitled “Formwela” that she created as part of that launch process. At that time I described the nature of the lab as follows:

The “laboratory” provided a venue for collaboration among musicians, researchers, and practitioners in a variety of disciplines. The goal was to explore “how songwriters may meaningfully incorporate therapeutic practices and knowledge into their process and production.”

This was clearly a lofty vision that left me feeling more than a little skeptical. Furthermore, I have to confess that the home page for the Songwrights Apothecary Lab is far from user-friendly. Indeed, my primary impression is that anyone visiting the site is obliged to figure out how to explore it in the absence of any user-friendly interface. In other words the act of exploration is, itself, a creative act to be exercised by the explorer.

For better or worse, that Web site also served as a platform on which spalding would post her “Formwela” compositions as she created them. The project resulted in twelve songs numbered from one to thirteen with twelve omitted. A few months ago the entire cycle was released as an album, entitled SONGWRIGHTS APOTHECARY LAB, by Concord.

When I first wrote about the early stages of this project, the longest of the compositions was a little over seven minutes. Now there is “Formwela 8,” which is somewhat longer than eleven and a half minutes. This tends to undermine my initial impression that these pieces could be treated a musical haiku! I continue to be skeptical about spalding’s use of the phrase “therapeutic practices and knowledge;” but, to be fair, when I was involved with a research project that called itself “sensemaking,” I had to deal with my own encounters with skepticism!

Whatever one may say about the lofty goals of the Songwrights Apothecary Lab, there is much that is compelling in spalding’s vocal work in performing her “Formwela” compositions. When I encountered the “first round” of these pieces, I suggested that the music “seems to trigger the deployment of a unique set of cognitive processes.” I suppose my previous encounters with “sensemaking” are coming back to haunt me. However, there is nothing particularly scary about those hauntings, just a sense of plunging into an unknown without fear of every getting totally lost. I suspect that I shall be visiting the track on Songwrights Apothecary Lab with more frequency than I may have originally intended.

“It is not even wrong.”

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

A familiar anecdote in theoretical physics has to do with one of its most imaginative researchers, Wolfgang Pauli. One of Pauli’s friends presented him with a paper by a young physicist for evaluation. The paper was so badly reasoned and written that Pauli encapsulated his judgment in a single sentence: “It is not even wrong.” (This seems to be the “original version” of the story. I have also heard it attributed to Enrico Fermi interrupting a physics thesis defense at the University of Chicago.)

This encapsulates my reaction to last month’s release on Signum Classics of Lim Fantasy of Companionship, composed by Manu Marin. The title is named after the Singaporean surgeon Susan Lim, who has shifted her attention to a topic she calls “Future of Companionship,” investigating the beneficial impact of robots as a new generation of caregivers. The selections on this new album were originally conceived as songs for a proposed musical, but almost all of the tracks involve piano and orchestra. The pianist is Tedd Joselson, and the ensemble is the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Arthur Fagen.

The good news is that the entire album is only slightly longer than half an hour. The bad news is that the schmaltz is so thick that even the casual listener may have to schedule an appointment with a cardiologist. The fact is that anyone that follows the SYFY Wire Web site is well aware that no end of quality fiction, movies, and television series have explored myriad aspects of companionship involving humans and sentient robots in far greater depth than this flimsy musical composition. For my own part, I acquired enough battle scars during the debates over consciousness that unfolded during the pre-Internet days of Usenet to know sheer twaddle when I encounter it. I have definitely encountered it on the Lim Fantasy of Companionship album.

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!

Jazz for Brain Scientists

courtesy of Naxos of America

When I first learned about the album Yuko Mabuchi Plays Miles Davis, my curiosity was immediately piqued. Having spent almost a decade of my life at an “outpost” research laboratory in Palo Alto funded by a Japanese company, I quickly found more enthusiasm for jazz among my Japanese colleagues than I had encountered among Americans. Yarlung Records has provided an impressive platform for pianist Mabuchi and her trio, and it was hard to resist seeing what they would make of compositions that had been indelibly stamped with Davis’ unique approaches to creativity.

I quickly discovered that there was more to this album than I had anticipated. It turned out to be a concert recording taken from a performance in Cammilleri Hall on the campus of the University of Southern California on April 25, 2018. Cammilleri Hall, in turn, is in the building of the Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI); and Mabuchi’s gig turned out to be the last in a two-year series of concerts inspired by Davis in response to the hanging of his 1988/89 painting in the Cammilleri lobby. (The painting is reproduced in the booklet that accompanies Mabuchi’s album.) For the record, this is one of two USC research laboratories concerned with what pioneering researcher Warren Sturgis McCulloch liked to call “embodiments of mind.” The other is the Center for Neural Engineering, directed by Michael A. Arbib. BCI is led by Antonio and Helen Damasio, the former having written several perceptive books for lay readers on the relationship between brain and mind.

With all that as context, I found it hard to silence Davis’ own gravelly voice in the back of my head saying, “Jazz ain’t brain science, man!” Indeed, between the history of cognitive psychology and the various “wet brain” specialties, there is a long history behind trying to study “the mind behind the musical ear,” a phrase which happens to be the title of an excellent book by Jeanne Bamberger that was first published by Harvard University Press in 1991. During my tenure with Examiner.com, I wrote about a book entitled Music, Language, and the Brain by Aniruddh D. Patel, a Senior Fellow at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego; and reading that book was not a particularly satisfying experience.

By way of a sidebar, I would like to observe that, when that San Diego campus first opened, its Director, Gerald Edelman, arranged a “launch seminar,” which included, as “entertainment,” a recital by the Juilliard String Quartet. It was on that occasion that I first met Antonio Damasio; and I have to wonder whether “jazz at USC” was his response to “chamber music in San Diego!” If nothing else, the Cammilleri concerts are a sign that brain scientists are still as occupied with music as they were two decades ago.

Where the music itself is concerned, the other members of Mabuchi’s trio on this new album are Del Atkins on bass and Bobby Breton on drums. They are joined by trumpeter JJ Kirkpatrick. I am afraid that Kirkpatrick was the weak link in this chain. I can appreciate that he was determined not to “channel” Davis through his own solo work; but he never seemed to find a distinctive voice of his own to add to the trio players. I was more interested in listening to Mabuchi and what she could do with not only Davis’ thematic inventiveness but also the impact of those themes on the pianist Bill Evans. Indeed, Mabuchi’s creative skills advanced beyond Davis’ legacy to take on three original tracks on the album, culminating in a concluding track entitled “Missing Miles.”

Ultimately, what I most appreciated was that Mabuchi provided me with a new context for listening to the five Davis “classics” included in her recital: “All Blues,” “Blue in Green,” “Milestones,” “So What,” and “Nardis.” For the record (so to speak), “So What” is the longest track on the album; and other Davis motifs creep in during its performance. The most recognizable of those motifs comes from “Four;” and it is introduced at the end of Kirkpatrick’s opening solo. A healthier share of that kind of free-association inventiveness would have been appreciated.

Further Thoughts about Fatigue and Multimedia

Having rambled my way around the question of whether or not visualization can compensate for the fatigue that tends to arise when listening to a long and challenging piece of music, such as the original version of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 130 string quartet in B-flat major with the “Große Fuge” as its final movement, I realized that the recital by Calidore String Quartet that prompted these thoughts had a “punch line” that I had overlooked. Having felt as if I had been pushed to some limit of endurance by the “Große Fuge,” I discovered that my attention span was not going to get a break during the encore. The selection served up more Beethoven in the form of the second (Adagio ma non troppo) movement from the Opus 74 (“Harp”) quartet in E-flat major. My reaction at the time was to describe this selection as pushing too-much-of-a-good-thing beyond the limits of “reasonable endurance!”

To be fair, I have a rather unconventional history with this particular movement, which dates back to when I had been using a music data-entry system on an early Macintosh laptop. Unless I am mistaken, I was using an early generation of Lime™ software, whose manual demonstrated a notational “acid test” taken from that particular Opus 74 movement:

An example of challenging data entry from the second movement of Beethoven’s Opus 74 string quartet (from the Dover Publications reprint of the 1863 Breitkopf und Härtel edition, from IMSLP, public domain)

It is relatively easy to see that there is a lot going on in this excerpt, all of which could be handled in Lime™ by a patient user.

On the other hand, this is the sort of composition that poses as many challenges to the listener as to the performers. Even the most avid score-follower runs the risk of letting his/her eyes glaze over during this passage. As a result, I was very curious as to what Stephen Malinowski would present to the attentive listener in the visualization he created for this particular movement.

The good news is that he was spot-on in accounting for every note and aligning it properly with the accompanying recording of the Alexander String Quartet playing this movement. On the other hand my own subjective impression was that watching this single movement tended to impose significantly more fatigue than I had encountered in yesterday’s exercise with the “long version” of Opus 130. Was this a matter of my personal state of well-being; or was it actually a “content-related” issue?

I suspect the answer has much to do with what the attentive listener knows about this music and what (s)he expects of the experience of listening to it. Let’s not kid ourselves. Even the most attentive among us will probably confess to incidents of “tuning out” for some reason or another, perhaps for something as trivial as checking to make sure that the phone was turned off. We are all all-too-human; and mind can wander off on its own without our necessarily paying much heed to it.

However, I would conjecture that, when an auditory experience is reinforced by an animated visual one, attention is less inclined to wander, simply because so much of the “space” is now being “covered.” After all, even the slightest movement tends to draw attention; and, in accounting for the many subtleties in this one Adagio ma non troppo movement, attention is being not only prompted but also drawn to many different loci on the screen. In other words keeping track of what is happening on the screen is more demanding than watching the activities of a gathering of four musicians.

Mind you, every now and then we come across evidence that suggests that such a high level of attentiveness is not always necessary. There is an old joke that Igor Stravinsky claimed that the music of Franz Schubert would consistently put him to sleep. However, he then continued by observing that, when he awoke, he discovered he was in Heaven! The reader is free to decide whether this is nothing but a joke or a suggestion that attentive listening may involve some kind of subconscious substrate in the background that complements the wealth of detail one encounters in the foreground.

Another old joke is the observation, “Sometimes I sit and think, and other times I just sit.” Perhaps we all need to come to terms with the relationship between sitting and thinking. I have no idea how to begin to approach that relationship, but I am pretty confident that it is not a static one!

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.

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.

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.

Elizabeth Hardwick on the Computer

The latest issue of The New York Review has a “preview” of the introduction that Darryl Pinckney wrote for The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, which will be published by New York Review Book this coming October 17. One sentence about Hardwick leapt out at me:

She blamed the computer for finishing a lot of books that ought not to have been.

This reminded me of a more humorous essay that Calvin Trillin wrote for The Nation when the phrase “word processor” was just entering our working vocabulary. Trilling wrote about his first experience with this software, marveling at how many more words he was processing compared with his past work with paper and pencil or at a typewriter. Those of us who could appreciate Trillin’s characteristic tone agreed that this would be one of those cases in which a tool for office efficiency could have unexpected consequences (not necessarily desirable) in other settings.

To be fair, I do all of my writing from a keyboard sitting in front of a computer screen. Nevertheless, I both understand and sympathize with the joint stance taken by Trillin and Hardwick. Indeed, I once had to review a book in which a large section of content had been copied and pasted, the result being that this extended passage appeared in exactly the same way in two different chapters. For that matter, even when word processing software was just moving out of research laboratories into the commercial sector, I was already suffering from reading doctoral theses that could be boiled down to only a few pages but, thanks to “word processing,” had been inflated to 100-page tomes.

Hardwick could be a notorious grumbler; and one of her favorite grumbles was, “Nobody knows how to write any more.” She died in 2007, by which time she probably realized the extremes to which that grumble could now be taken. Still, Pinckney’s recollection was a gentle nudge for me to consider my own habits.

The name “The Rehearsal Studio” was originally coined with more than the performing arts in mind. I saw it as an opportunity to “rehearse” the many ideas what were knocking around in my consciousness in anticipation that those ideas might eventually find their way into a book. Since then I have prepared any number of different chapter outlines for what that book might be, never making very much progress in fleshing any of the outlines into readable prose. Given the extent to which the very reputation of the book and the service it can provide has degraded, even over the lifetime of this site, I no longer feel bad about my procrastination.

These days I focus on writing about in-the-moment experiences with the intention of rendering in words my own in-the-moment impressions. Once those impressions have been established in my mind, I know how much background I need to provide to translate them from private feelings to public assertions. I have discovered that, over the years of doing this sort of thing, the practice has become relatively easy to me, even to the point that I can often frame an entire presentation during the half-hour swim I take shortly after waking every morning.

Mind you, I shall be the first to admit that I wish an editor were “in the loop.” I am sure that Hardwick would have been merciless in taking apart anything I have written. I would like to think, however, that she would then direct me on a path towards building things up again. On the other hand my own grumble still prevails: In an age in which content is limited by a cell phone screen, almost no one has the patience for anything that strives to be an essay. (Hell, I’m not sure that the current generation even has the patience to follow a shaggy dog story!)

Probably I should just fess up and acknowledge the recreational value of what I do. It may amount to little more than making mud pies at the beach, but probably less than I would have liked. Still, Alfred North Whitehead once told Suzanne Langer that the joy of making mud pies comes from sharing them, in which case putting them out to share seems like the best thing I can do!

Paul Hersh Brings an Expressive and Cerebral All-Beethoven Recital to SFCM

Last night in the Sol Joseph Recital Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), pianist and violist Paul Hersh presented what amounted to a “final report” of a project he undertook during the fall term with three graduate students, violinists Kevin Matson and Shelby Yamin and cellist Evan Khan. The “surface structure” of this undertaking involved preparing performances of three chamber music compositions by Ludwig van Beethoven with consecutive opus numbers. As was observed when this concert was announced on this site, opus numbers are a highly unreliable guide to Beethoven’s chronology.

However, the project was not so much an evolutionary perspective on Beethoven’s efforts as a composer as it was an exercise in teasing out the expressive elements that distinguished these pieces in the Beethoven canon. Nevertheless, Hersh always introduces works on his program with remarks; and it was clear that the pursuit of this project entailed considerable cerebral effort. On the basis of those remarks, one can assume that much of that effort went into the nature of time itself.

Indeed, Hersh had much to say about the significant distinction between subjective time and “clock time.” However, he seems to have overlooked a temporal element that may have been the most significant attribute that all three works had in common. The one time Hersh identified this element specifically was at the beginning of the program, the Opus 95 string quartet (“Serioso”) in F minor in which he played viola with the three graduate students. The coda of the final movement shifts from F minor to F major for a rapid flood of eighth notes at a breakneck Allegro pace, keeping the dynamics as soft as possible until a few forte punctuations arise towards the conclusion, culminating in a surging crescendo in the last three measures. This idea of an almost disruptive “dash to the finish line” also concluded the other two works on the program, the Opus 96 violin sonata in G major and the Opus 97 (“Archduke”) piano trio in B-flat major. (This same device would later show up in one of Beethoven’s most popular works, the Opus 125 (“Choral”) symphony in D minor, with its wild Prestissimo coda to the final movement.)

While Hersh did not dwell on this particular aspect of Beethoven’s subjective approach to time, he had much to say about subjectivity in general, particularly pertaining to the sense of prolongation or of time standing still. What made this discussion interesting was that, by virtue of framing his points in many of his own experiences, Hersh offered up valuable insights into the performer’s sense of time. This tweaked several of my own personal nerves, since it was the first time it occurred to me that the listener’s sense of time need not align with that of the performer’s. Thus, Hersh’s anecdotes about time standing still had more to do with moments or episodes that seemed to take forever, while the listener’s experience often arises from a combination of what has gone into the score pages and how the performer(s) choose(s) to interpret those pages.

From the listener’s point of view, the best example last night of time slowing down, if not coming to a full stop, could be found in Opus 97 in the Andante cantabile ma però con moto. This is an early example of Beethoven composing variations on a theme whose duration decidedly exceeds the “length specifications” encountered in the eighteenth century. One might almost say that the variations do not emerge from a “theme” as much as from an episode that is traversed multiple times, each of them involving a different context. When that episode unfolds at a slow pace, as is the case in Opus 97, the listener often has to go do great deliberative effort to orient himself/herself around a defining pulse. One might almost say that, while the variations composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart were poetic, in this movement of Opus 97 Beethoven was experimenting with prose. This means that the listener’s very sense of the passing of time has been, to some extent, undermined, thus encouraging the illusion that the very flow of time has been suspended.

In his discussion of Opus 96, Hersh also dwelled on the need to find significance in every note on the page. He observed how when, in the first movement, Beethoven returned to his opening thematic gesture, he added a passing tone to what had originally been a wider interval. This gave Hersh the opportunity for a brief riff on the distinction between sign and symbol based on his reading of Susanne K. Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key. Langer’s thoughts on this matter basically came out of her exposure to Charles Morris’ Signs, Language and Behavior, which, in turn, had been inspired by the pioneering writings on semiotics by Charles Sanders Peirce. All of those thinkers put considerable effort into the problem of how we make sense of what I casually like to refer to as “marks on paper;” and, since those score pages are based on their own systematic lexicon of marks on paper, it is understandable that all of us, from time to time, find ourselves barking up the semiotic tree. Indeed, some of the most committed barks have come from Jean-Jacques Nattiez, author of a book whose English translation by Carolyn Abbate is entitled Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music.

Nevertheless, here, too, problematic issues of time rear their heads. The problem is that those marks on paper are static, while making music must, of necessity, be dynamic. (Just to be clear about this, basic physics tells us that making any sound is dynamic. Sound does not exist in any immediate instance of time, a point that continued to haunt Edmund Husserl in his own efforts to grasp the nature of time-consciousness. Martin Heidegger did not manage much better in this regard.) In other words making sense of marks on paper may be prerequisite to making music; but, unlike those marks, making music involves actions that progress through the flow of time itself. Mind may carry the burden of the sensemaking; but the music arises through what James V. Wertsch called “mind as action” (a phrase he used as the title of a book he published in 1998).

Thus, almost all of Hersh’s commentary comes back to the tight coupling of the actions of making music to the very consciousness of time itself. It is through that consciousness that we are aware of succession and simultaneity, of evenly-spaced pulses and the grouping of those pulses to expose rhythmic patterns, and of the extent to which any act of performance entails a metaphorical journey. The marks on paper may denote the beginning and ending of that journey; but in the mind of the attentive listener, that journey only “exists” through its process of unfolding in the immediate present. This is what makes the act of listening so satisfying, the fact that, because it is an act, it always reveals its own unique identify every time it occurs.

Indre Viskontas Augments her SFCM Faculty Artist Series Recital with Thoughts About Brains

Last night’s Faculty Artist Series performance in the Sol Joseph Recital Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) was actually a lecture-demonstration by Indre Viskontas. The program sheet listed her as “soprano and neuroscientist,” the latter due to her doctoral degree in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California at Los Angeles. Viskontas made a case for the relevance of knowledge of the brain in our efforts to understand the nature of music in both behavioral and artifactual terms, using her own vocal performances to reinforce that case. She was joined by the members of the Telegraph Quartet (violinists Joseph Maile and Eric Chin, violist Pei-Ling Lin, and cellist Jeremiah Shaw), Stephanie Payne on bass, and Keisuke Nakagoshi on piano.

It goes without saying that, over the course of two hours with a generous amount of time allowed for the performance of music, Viskontas could only scratch the surface of her neuroscience expertise. She chose to focus primarily on time and memory; and, while confined to that surface level, she could still offer up a few clues about brain physiology that offered more than a few strong hints as to just how complex this subject matter is. Nevertheless, my own academic background conditioned me to the conviction that the best lectures are the ones that raise good questions. So, rather than stick to Viskontas’ path, I am hoping I can convey a better sense of last night’s experience by raising some reflections on the content.

With regard to her primary focus, she casually dropped the observation that you cannot have memory without time. Such an assertion can be an effective stimulus to speculation, but I would like to be a bit of a stickler for terminology. While there are any number of schools of thought of the question of just what memory is (most of which tend to agree that human memory definitely is not like computer memory), time is nothing more than a basic physical property. If you are going to say that you cannot have memory without time, you may as well also say that you cannot have life itself without time, let alone planets orbiting around a star (or the swinging of a pendulum, for those reluctant to leave the planet).

Most likely, Viskontas was using “time” as an abbreviation for “time-consciousness.” This is a far trickier concept, sufficiently tricky that, with reinforcement from my own reading experiences, I would differ with the ordering she proposed. Those who have been following this site for at least a year know that my personal thoughts about mind (not to be confused with brain) have been strongly influenced by an admittedly speculative book by Friedrich Hayek entitled The Sensory Order. While the book has never had wide appeal, it has influenced several major thinkers.

The title of the book could easily have been inspired by William James’ famous assertion that our sensory organs bombard the brain with a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” To the extent that brain is the organ of mind, it has the job of bringing order to that sensory confusion. Hayek’s book speculated on how a physical (albeit biological) object could achieve that task; and he developed a sort of “gradus ad parnassum” that began with a fundamental ability to form perceptual categories and escalated through a series of steps to what the cognitive science community now calls consciousness.

Now categorization clearly depends on time. It amounts to establishing, one way or another, some kind of similarity between stimuli experienced now and stimuli experienced then. Thus, Hayek’s path initially ascends from the ability to form categories to the ability, at some relatively primitive level, to retain them; and this is where the word “memory” enters his vocabulary. On the other hand time-consciousness (i.e. explicit awareness of the distinction between “now” and “then”) does not arise until later in Hayek’s plan. So, while it may be not be possible to have memory without time, it is possible to have memory without explicit consciousness of how time passes.

(This is probably a good time to state that one of those “major thinkers” influenced by Hayek was Gerald Edelman. Edelman’s book The Remembered Present amounts to efforts to find physiological evidence in support of Hayek’s speculations. The book never makes an airtight case, but suggests that Hayek may have been on to more of substance than even he may have dreamed. On the other hand, Edelman’s title resonates with one of Viskontas’ key observations: Because the brain needs time to process the signals it receives, “now” is always the result of processing a “then!” Another thinker influenced by Hayek, by the way, was artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, who also happened to be my doctoral thesis advisor!)

I feel it is important to establish a firm perspective around the concept of time-consciousness, because this probably provides the foundation for how mind kicks in when one is either making or listening to music. For example, Viskontas’ first round of remarks converged on the fundamental property of awareness of a pulse. This was illustrated by having the Telegraph Quartet perform three of the movements (omitting the Menuetto) from the fifth of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 18 string quartets (written in the key of A major). Viskontas’ observations made this a fascinating experience, because one could begin to appreciate how the definition of that pulse would pass from one quartet player to another as Beethoven developed his ideas.

All that was overlooked was the skill with which, for rhetorical purposes, Beethoven could abandon that pulse. Beethoven’s interest in full-stop silences goes all the way back to the three Opus 2 piano sonatas he dedicated to Joseph Haydn. Indeed, his interest in the rhetorical impact of those silences can probably be traced back to many of Haydn’s own compositions. In the first of the Opus 18 quartets (in the key of F major), the Adagio affettuoso ed appassionato movement is a high-wire act that pits the presence of pulse against its absence; and it offers some of the earliest signs of rhetorical techniques that would mature significantly by the time of the “late period.”

The weaker side of the evening came with the vocal selections. This included songs by Gabriel Fauré and Ernest Chausson in French and Aaron Copland in English. What was problematic is the need to add linguistic semantics to the mix when considering what the brain is doing with such repertoire. Language capacity was very high up Hayek’s ladder, high enough that he passed over much of it in silence. Fortunately, this was music that could be taken on its own terms, particularly Noah Luna’s string quartet arrangements of the four Copland settings of poems by Emily Dickinson. If he has arranged the entire cycle of twelve of these Copland songs, then here’s hoping that they will all get presented in recital in the near future.

Mahan Esfahani Takes his Harpsichord (and his Audience) on a Stunning Journey

Last night on the Rembe Stage of the Strand Theatre, San Francisco Performances launched the 2016–17 season of its PIVOT series of concerts. When this series was initiated this past spring, its full title was PIVOT: New Adventures in the Performing Arts; and it would be safe to say that last night’s performance was truly adventurous. Harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani presented a solo recital entitled Time Present & Time Past, which also happens to be the title of his Archiv Produktion album that was released in May of 2015. Only one selection from that album was included on the program; but it became quickly clear that Esfahani’s thoughts about time could not be crammed into a single album.

Indeed, his title is actually a quotation from T. S. Eliot:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.

These are the opening lines of “Burnt Norton,” one of four rather lengthy poems collected under the title Four Quartets. Eliot had a reputation for a keen intellect and a stunning breadth of knowledge. It is therefore reasonable to assume that any educated reader of this poem would quickly have seen those lines as the poet’s reaction to the chapter of the Confessions in which Augustine of Hippo wrestles with understanding the nature of time. Indeed, Book XI of the Confessions, entitled “Time and Eternity” has a sentence (translated into English by Henry Chadwick) that could easily have triggered Eliot’s opening:

It [the human heart] will see that all past time is driven backwards by the future, and all future time is the consequent of the past, and all past and future are created and set on their course by that which is always present.

In all fairness it is worth noting that Augustine may well have had just as powerful an influence on the philosopher Edmund Husserl, who was still alive when “Burnt Norton” was first published and had put much of his effort into trying to understand the phenomenology of time-consciousness.

None of this is intended to confuse Esfahani’s recital with an academic presentation. Nevertheless, his remarks prior to playing Steve Reich’s “Piano Phase” (the one piece from last night’s program that can be found on his album), made was clear that, on the subject of time, he was just as boldly inquisitive as his predecessors, Augustine and Eliot. Indeed, there was even a bit of Gerald Edelman in those remarks. Edelman was the author of The Remembered Present, a book whose title confronts the problem that the brain needs time to process signals from the sensory organs. As a result, once the brain has “figured out” what has been sensed as “the present,” time has advanced; and it is not “the present” any more and has become memory retained by mind!

Esfahani was understandably cautious in preparing his audience for the experience of listening to “Piano Phase.” Apparently, it sparked a riot when he played in in Germany; but then “Four Organs” nearly caused a riot when it was played in Carnegie Hall in 1973 (when one of the organists was Michael Tilson Thomas). Esfahani’s cautiousness took him down several fascinating rabbit holes. Not only did he tease out the curious relations among present, past, and future; but also he was bold enough to take on one of the most crucial dimensions of consciousness, that of understanding. He cited Stravinsky saying that he did not understand a lot of music, but he knew how to feel it. This provided Esfahani with grounds for confessing that he could not claim to understand “Piano Phase;” but he clearly had a strong desire to play it.

Most importantly, particularly in the context of his thoughts about time, Esfahani observed that “Piano Phase” will be 50 years old next year. In a similar vein he might also have mentioned that when he (Esfahani) was born in 1984, “Piano Phase” had been around for seventeen years. Yet, over all of these spans of time, those who have come to know it (and even love it) still feel at least some need to be apologetic about it. Esfahani’s reluctance to claim understanding, however, led me to wonder about the more general breadth of his exposure to Reich’s music.

If I, personally, claim to “understand” any of Reich’s “phase” pieces at all, it is because one of my earliest exposures to Reich was “Come Out,” a tape piece that he had created in 1966, in which two recordings of the same spoken text uttered by a single voice begin simultaneously; and then one, as a result of a very slight difference in tape speed, gradually falls out of sync with the other. This was the basic idea of “phase shifting;” and in “Come Out” the words on the tape recording become less and less intelligible and transform into new textures of sounds that are neither instrumental nor, in the strictest sense of the word, “electronic.” If one has the requisite curiosity to appreciate “Come Out,” then any of Reich’s subsequent instrumental “phase” pieces are basically exploring new possibilities in the underlying technique.

Having said all that, it is also worth noting that the instrumental pieces are, for the most part, rigidly procedural. Each of the pieces is based on little more than a single repeated phrase. That phrase needs to be played as close to mechanically as possible, since any hint of “expressive” phrasing would jeopardize the effect of phase shifting. In other words, in order to perform “Piano Phase” effectively, Esfahani has to “follow the directions faithfully” and do little more. To put this in terms of the vocabulary he evoked, no “understanding” is necessary. The music does all the “heavy lifting.” This was, indeed, how Esfahani performed Reich last night; and, writing as one with a generous amount of Reich listening experience, I can attest personally that his performance was a compelling one, as much in the spirit of the composer’s intentions as one could expect.

This then raises a more interesting issue across the entire program. The selections were divided between those composed prior to 1750 and those composed after 1940. However, in addition to that wide temporal separation, there is even a significant gulf between the six sonatas that Lou Harrison wrote in 1943 and the Reich piece, which is the chronological successor to the Harrison sonatas. Then the program leaps ahead to Toru Takemitsu’s 1986 “Rain Dreaming” and Kaija Saariaho’s “Le Jardin Secret II,” composed in 1987 and a piece Esfahani got to work on with Saariaho’s guidance. “Le Jardin Secret II” was the other work on the program that included tape accompaniment, in this case a quadrophonic projection into the audience area. (“Le Jardin Secret I” was strictly electronic.) This listener is thus confronted with leaping over some rather wide intervals of time with differences in music-making practices being just as broadly separated.

In approaching “Le Jardin Secret II,” Esfahani was again a bit shy in introducing the music. Apparently, it gave offense to some of his European audiences. It is hard to say for certain why it should have provoked such a reaction. My own guess is that the taped sound had a few rather suggestive intimations of orgasm; but, compared with some other tape pieces that are now part of the repertoire, those suggestions were pretty tame. For the performance itself Esfahani used a stopwatch (on his cell phone) to coordinate with Saariaho’s tape; but the composer was impressively practical in giving him the right “space” in which to coordinate. In contrast to “Piano Phase,” this was a piece in which instrument and recording had decidedly different sonorous qualities, making the composition an engaging study of the interplay between those differences.

Esfahani decided to play the Harrison sonatas as the second part of a two-part set that began with three of the keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti (thus establishing another wide gulf for the listener to cross). His Scarlatti choices were, in order of performance, K. 518 in F major, K. 516 in D minor, and K. 517 in D minor. In his extensive notes for his recording of all of the Scarlatti sonatas, Scott Ross suggested that K. 516 and K. 517 could be played as a two-movement sonata; but he also advises coupling K. 518 as a predecessor to K. 519, which is in F minor. (K. 518 is actually also in F minor, but it concludes in F major.) Esfahani did not say anything about whether or not the Scarlatti sonatas should be grouped. Rather, he performed them as three independent pieces, which is also how he performed the Harrison single-movement sonatas that similarly seemed to have been conceived independently.

More interesting were two selections that provided more fuel for my argument that jamming was part of the practice of making music long before blues and jazz musicians started using it to describe improvisation. This was evident in the selections by both William Byrd and Johann Sebastian Bach. The former consisted of a pavan and galliard both given the title “the Passinge Mesures” in My Ladye Nevells Brooke, while the Bach selection was the BWV 911 keyboard toccata in C minor. Both of the Byrd compositions serve as prime examples of how the simplest of tunes could be so overloaded with embellishment that only those intimately familiar with the melody would be aware of its presence. The breadth of Byrd’s imagination can stand admirably beside “Moody’s Mood for Love,” one of the most elaborate bebop improvisations by saxophonist James Moody (clearly inspired by Charlie Parker) taking “I’m in the Mood for Love” as a point of departure and then obscuring even the slightest hint of it.

BWV 911, on the other hand, is another one of those Bach compositions that establishes him as an honored predecessor of another saxophonist, John Coltrane. Regular readers may recall this connection being discussed this past Wednesday with respect to the fugues in Bach’s solo violin sonatas. The fugue that occupies the better part of BWV 911 has that same Coltrane spirit of improvisation during which each idea triggers a wealth of succeeding ideas until it is clear that the music-maker just does not know when or how to stop. (It is said that Coltrane once tried to explain his inability to stop to Miles Davis, who replied, simply, “You could begin by taking the sax out of your mouth!”) Both the Byrd and Bach offerings thus presented the prospect of being able to fashion a wealth of inventiveness from what seemed like, on the surface, not very much. Esfahani knew just the right spirit in which this music could be approached as “pre-Classical jamming;” and these pieces gave an energetic kick to the overall spirit of the evening.

(At this point I should add parenthetically that, when I returned home, I put on KCSM to listen to Michael Burman’s Just Jazz. One of his selections was another saxophonist, Sonny Stitt, playing “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” in a combo with Hank Jones on piano, Wendell Marshall on bass, and Shadow Wilson on drums. This was a night in which I could not get away from over-the-top jamming; and the Stitt selection made it clear that thoughts of time-consciousness were still with me!)

Esfahani’s remaining “time past” selection was a three-movement sonata in D major by Bach’s eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann. This was Sebastian’s first serious pupil and the inspiration for some of the earliest pieces Sebastian created for pedagogical purposes. Friedemann was a good pupil and became a skilled performer and composer. However, his dissolute life style left him in poverty at the time of his death. His music is seldom performed, and Esfahani clearly felt that this neglect needed to be remedied. Hopefully, he will follow through on this particular interest when he prepares his next album.

If all this sounds like a lot of music, it definitely was. The program claimed that the evening would run for about 75 minutes. By the time things had concluded with “Piano Phase,” about two hours had elapsed. However, there were no signs that anyone was interested in leaving prematurely. Esfahani clearly knows how to engage with an audience; and no one seemed to mind his taking more than the “advertised” duration allotted for his performance. Indeed, I am sure I not the only one wondering when he will make his next visit.