Climate Control Receives a “Knockout Punch”

Donald Trump explaining to reporters the “hoax” of climate change (photograph by Kenny Holston for The New York Times)

 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/climate/trump-epa-greenhouse-gases-climate-change.html

Reflecting on the Oppenheimer Narrative

At this late period in my life, I realize that I have begun to lose count of the number of narratives I have encountered based on the biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. These have included at least one television series, performances of Doctor Atomic by both the San Francisco Opera and the Metropolitan Opera, and the documentary The Day After Trinity. Yesterday I allowed my curiosity to get the better of me, and I went over to AMC Metreon 16 to see the IMAX projection of Oppenheimer.

First impressions: Most of the film involves the ways in which those associated with the creation of the atom bomb engaged among each other, mostly in small groups for the sake of problem-solving and testing. Such encounters, along with those involving the title character’s love life and family life, were not well served by the enormity of the IMAX screen. That format was selected to provide a more realistic account of the Trinity detonation of the first atomic bomb, and there was no faulting the efficacy of the projection when it came to both sight and sound. This accounted for a relatively small fraction of the entire narrative, but the experience was such that one might be willing to forgive the tail wagging the dog.

Nevertheless, that is a pretty strong “might.” Ultimately, the film delves into the complexity of Oppenheimer’s personality that is far more extensive than any previous account of the narrative. Furthermore, unlike most of the previous accounts, the narrative does not end with the Trinity detonation. Having documented Oppenheimer’s rise and triumph, the film continues into his fall into contentious encounters with the Washington bureaucracy, which ultimately led to the loss of his security clearance on grounds that he was a threat to the defense of the United States.

In that context it would be fair to say that Oppenheimer actually consists of two “origin” narratives. The first is the more familiar: how we “got the bomb” before any other country did. The second is about the emergence of the Cold War and the impact it had throughout the culture of our country, with particular attention to the academic world. Those of my generation saw the end of the Cold War as a promise for a better life on a global scale, rather than just in the United States. Instead, we now have to deal with conditions that seem to be even more sinister and on a broader global scale.

Thus, I found that, while watching Oppenheimer I tried to keep my spirits up by focusing on the little things. There is one post-Trinity episode that may have affected me far more dearly than any other part of the film. In the narrative of the film, it was the last episode involving Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein. It took place when Einstein was walking home from the Institute for Advanced Study. He was always joined on those walks by Kurt Gödel, who may be the most accomplished individual in the discipline of mathematical logic. Sure enough, Gödel was there in the cast listing (even if his back was to the camera for the entire scene). If he was addressed by name, it was an instant that went by like lightning.

Nevertheless, it reawakened an old memory of Einstein’s life. It concerned two researchers at the Bell Telephone Laboratory in Murray Hill, who had gotten stuck on a thorny problem. They were able to arrange a meeting with Einstein to address this issue, since it involved only driving from Murray Hill to Princeton. The meeting lasting an entire afternoon. As it grew dark, the Bell researchers offered to drive Einstein to his home. Einstein replied, “No thank you. I always walk home with Kurt Gödel. You know, he is the only man I know that can give a logical reason why Eisenhower should be President!”

The screen may have been enormous, but it was all the little things that sustained my attention throughout the Oppenheimer narrative.

Eleonor Sandresky to Celebrate Harvest Moon

Poster design for this month’s Lunar Landscapes program (from the Eventbrite event page)

My guess is that those that have been following Eleonor Sandresky’s Lunar Landscapes concerts have been confronted with a barrage of unfamiliar names for the full moons that appear during different months of the year. This month, however, the name of the full moon being celebrated is likely to be very well known to at least some readers, even if they are limited to those of my generation. That familiarity is due to Jack Norworth, who wrote the lyrics for “Shine On, Harvest Moon.” The music was written by Norworth’s wife, Nora Bayes; and the song was first performed as part of the 1908 Ziegfeld Follies. I took some comfort from the Wikipedia page for this song, since it listed a new recording made as recently as 2017 by the indie folk singer-songwriter Mree.

As usual, Sandresky will take a more adventurous approach to the music prepared to celebrate the Harvest Moon. Her guest artist will be composer Mary Jane Leach, whose approach to composition is based on how different acoustic properties interact with the space in which they sound. She is particularly interested in difference, combination, and interference tones, each of which involves the emergence of a tone other than the ones sounded by the performers. These phenomena are familiar to those with a basic understanding of acoustics; but The New Yorker was so impressed by Leach’s work that they described it as an “acoustic ‘Through the Looking Glass.’” Leach’s music will be preceded by the music of Philip Glass and followed by one of Sandresky’s own compositions.

The performance will begin at 6 p.m. (Pacific Time) on Wednesday, October 20. Admission is $10, and payment can be processed through an Eventbrite event page. Once the processing is complete, electronic mail will be sent providing the URL for connection to the video stream of this performance. Subscriptions are also available as part of membership, with membership fees of $5, $10, and $15 per month.

“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.

Visualizing the First Two “Razumovsky” Quartets

Having spent this past Friday writing about how Quatuor Ébène approached the performing (and recording) of the first two of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 59 (“Razumovsky”) quartets, I decided to revisit Stephen Malinowski’s YouTube playlist of his visualizations of the Beethoven quartets to take a look at how he approached both of these quartets. Since this involved material with which I was familiar through both recordings and concert performances, I was curious as to how his videos would have an impact after one set of recorded performances was still fresh in memory. Once again, the experience had assets and liabilities.

Perhaps highest among the assets is the extent to which these visualizations provide a representation of one way in which the marks on the score pages may be parsed. It is important to bear in mind that there is no reason why any composition by Beethoven (or any other composer) should be parsed in a single way. Indeed, from a grammatical point of view, performance itself is a means of expressing a particular approach to parsing. In that sense Malinowski’s video interpretations take a syntactic structure arising from a recorded performance and add a second layer of parsing in the visual domain to the one that performance has established in the auditory domain. If nothing else, this is a highly inventive approach to how, with the proper tools, one might be able to document a listening experience by working in the same time-based domain that provides the foundation for listening itself.

This suggests that each of these videos reflects a highly personal interpretation. This is not meant as a criticism. Rather, it suggests that it identifies strategies that others might consider when trying to account for their own respective listening experiences, not necessarily by creating their own visualizations but, rather, by coming to appreciate what those visualizations express and then finding other means to express them.

Nevertheless, there are certain aspects that concern me because they might distract when they should be indicating. From a personal point of view, I find the frequent use of blurred images to be an almost painful distraction, even though I realize that, from Malinowski’s point of view, it is simply one of several means to express the variety of different approaches to performance. On the other hand I appreciate that Malinowski’s approach to “scrolling through time” does not always provide all “future information.” Every now and then events simply “spring out of the void;” and, from a rhetorical point of view, they tend to have the same effect as that of certain abrupt introductions of thematic material in the score itself.

Still, from an information theoretic point of view, there is an almost overwhelming abundance of content in both of the quartets being visualized, meaning that every movement, even when taken on its own, serves up considerable “bandwidth,” which then requires equally considerable “processing effort” on the part of the viewer. I would postulate that such effort is far greater than what is engaged when one watches the members of a string quartet perform these pieces. My explanation would be that the visual experience of performance reveals cues about how the performers are taking their “parsing of the score” and realizing it as a listening experience. They are not providing a blueprint. They are providing their impressions of that blueprint, and it is through those impressions that those of us on the audience side come away with an absorbing listening experience.

Thus, to return to the issue of a “fatigue factor” that continues to occupy my appreciation of Malinowski’s visualizations, I would say that the bandwidth of a concert experience is more manageable that that of watching those visualizations, particularly if one wishes to experience a single quartet from start to finish (as it would be performed). Mind you, the same issue arises when one is trying to follow the score. There are just too many bits on the printed page for mind to keep up with the steady flow coming in through auditory sensation. Thus, when we follow a score during a performance, we tend to select where we look because we want to look for certain features for the sake of understanding how they are interpreted. One cannot be that selective when viewing one of Malinowski’s visualizations; and, to be fair, I do not think he expects his viewers to approach his work that way.

Still, I have to grant that any one of those visualizations almost always calls my attention to a variety of features that have always registered with listening but may not have been appreciated for the full worth of their contributions to the overall design. There is no doubt that, for any of the Beethoven quartets, there is always likely to be more than “meets the ear,” whether the ear is in the concert hall or listening to a recording. Malinowski consistently provides insights into what that “more” may be. Sometimes, however, those insights tend to overwhelm the viewer, tempting him/her to close his/her eyes and just get “back to the Beethoven.”

Ezra Sims Discusses his Approach to Microtonality

January 30, 2015 saw the death of composer Ezra Sims only a few weeks after his 87th birthday. Sims’ Wikipedia page describes him as “one of the pioneers in the field of microtonal composition.” His earliest venues into this domain involved dividing the semitone into either two or three equal parts.

When I first met him I was working on EUTERPE, a parallel-processing programming language for representing and performing music with up to six voices in counterpoint based on ideas proposed to me by my thesis advisor Marvin Minsky. When I invited Sims to use this system, he asked about whether I could accommodate his divisions of the semitone. With an appreciation for the lowest common denominator, I told him that I could divide the semitone into six steps, making for an equal-tempered octave with 72 distinct pitches. That division of the octave became the basis for Sims’ subsequent work.

This past week Frog Peak Music, the publisher of Sims’ music, released an anthology of papers Sims had written discussing his approaches to microtonality. The collection was edited by Johanne Heraty under the title How Long Should a Man’s Legs Be? I should observe by way of a disclaimer that both EUTERPE and I show up among the papers that Heraty collected for this publication, so I cannot approach this book with the objectivity that I bring to other books that I discuss.

This is not the first time that I have discussed Sims’ subdivision of the octave on this site. The last time was in July of 2017, when my head was full of thoughts about just intonation and the impact of integer ratios on both composing and listening. Sims’ approach could be described as “just intonation on steroids.” Rather than confine himself to the intervals defined in the harmonic series by the third and fifth overtones (perfect fifth and major third, respectively), Sims wished to explore the more remote overtones. Dividing the semitone into six micro-intervals (and inventing accidentals to represent those subdivisions introduced pitches that more closely approximated a larger number of those overtones.

Where Sims was concerned that involved experimenting with the use of the seventh and eleventh overtones. Those experiments were not matters of mathematical abstraction. Sims had become acquainted with vocal styles that “pull away” from equal-tempered intervals. He conjectured that they were “pulling” in the direction of natural overtones, so to speak; and his efforts as a composer allowed him to explore that conjecture. As a result, most of this book involves discussing both the conjectures and where they led him, often with extended analyses of passages from his own scores.

I have to say that I was a bit amused to read that the thirteenth harmonic was the first interval he felt he wanted to avoid. It is, indeed, a somewhat disturbing sound. However, it is familiar at least to those who know Benjamin Britten’s Opus 31 serenade, where that natural harmonic is inserted into the opening horn solo. Nevertheless, I would probably agree with Sims that, while the thirteenth harmonic is good for “shock value,” it may not have a place in efforts to explore harmony and counterpoint among the upper harmonics! (On the other hand, back in the distant past, the tritone was declared to be the Devil’s Interval!)

The only disadvantage of this book is that it is text-only. Fortunately, recordings are available of several of the compositions that are discussed over the course of Sims’ essays. I have to confess that it took a while for my ears to adjust to Sims’ approaches to microtonality, particularly where melody is concerned. The ear may accommodate chords based on natural harmonics; but melodic lines always run the risk of devolving into what one of my teachers liked to call “slimy chromaticism.” Sims tried to avoid that kind of chromaticism by developing his own diatonic scale with limited chromatics inserted between the diatonic pitches. (An analysis of that scale worked its way into one of the chapters in my doctoral thesis.)

Given that I received my doctorate in September of 1971, this collection awakened many fond memories. However, that last sentence should make it clear that my ears have been exposed to Sims’ compositional techniques for roughly half a century. I doubt that many readers can enjoy such extensive experience. Thus, I would personally recommend acquiring some familiarity with recorded performances of Sims’ music before turning to what he chose to write about that music. Such a reader will be better equipped with points of reference when Sims goes into the details of what he did and why he did it.

Another Jazzman Honors Lennie Tristano

courtesy of Naxos of America

Almost exactly two months ago, I found myself writing about pianist Lennie Tristano, one of the most significant forces in forging new directions in jazz during the middle of the twentieth century. On that occasion I was writing about the release of a limited-edition album entitled Mark Turner Meets Garry Foster, which marked a productive relationship between two saxophonists, one young and the other old. The older of the two was Gary Foster, who had worked with Warne Marsh in the Sixties and learned much about the “Cool School” innovations of Tristano and alto saxophonist Lee Konitz. Turner’s album included a performance of Tristano’s “Lennie’s Pennies,” which, in my article, I described as “a far-out take on Arthur Johnston’s song ‘Pennies from Heaven.’” Prior to that article, my last serious writing about Tristano was in January 9 of 2010, when I was reflecting on the use of the adjective “weird” in describing adventurous new music.

It is therefore with some satisfaction that I can report that, at the end of last month, Whaling City Sound released a new album whose opening track is “Lennie’s Pennies.” The title of the album is No Boundaries, and the leader is pianist Dave Bass. Bass came on the jazz scene back in the Seventies but had to leave it after fracturing his wrist. He turned his attention to law and eventually became Deputy Attorney General of California. He retired from law in 2015, and he is now back to being a jazzman.

On No Boundaries Bass leads a trio that includes Ted Nash on reeds and Carlos Henriquez on bass. There are two vocal tracks featuring Karrin Allyson. Additional contributions come from Latin percussionists Carlos Caro, Miguel Valdes, and Mauricio Hernandez and Jerome Jennings on drums. As might be guessed, there is a generous breadth of stylistic diversity across the thirteen tracks on this album; and drawing upon Tristano as a point of departure definitely gets things off on the right foot.

There is, however, one major flaw, which is that the album does not appear to have been released with any printed background material. As a result, there is no information as to which musicians are playing on which tracks, nor is there any citing of the composers for each of the tracks. I thus feel obliged to refer all readers to the Amazon.com Web page for this recording, which includes a highly informative review by Debra Jan Bibel. Bibel does not compensate for all of the sins of omission in the production of this album, but she goes a long way in the right direction.

If playing Tristano is not a sign of a powerful intellect behind the repertoire on this disc, one need look no further than the third track for additional evidence. “Agenbite of Inwit” originated in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. This was Joyce’s spelling of “Ayenbite of Inwyt,” a confessional tract written in a Kentish dialect of Middle English, whose primary value is probably as a record of Kentish pronunciation. Even the most attentive listener is unlikely to encounter anything Kentish in Bass’ track; but the music offers a delightful way to tweak the know-it-alls. Similarly, the “serious music” set gets poked with an unmistakable appropriation from Manuel de Falla (the “Ritual Fire Dance”) in “La Mulata Rumbera.” (I also suspect that “Swing Theory” is a poke at the appropriation of the term “string theory” by modern physics.)

For all of its playful references to the arcane, No Boundaries is, without a doubt, a fun album, which I hope to revisit in subsequent listening experiences.

James Tenney’s Final Thoughts on Harmony

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Encounter with Thomas Clifton’s Text

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

“Lies, damned lies, and statistics”

The title of the eighth chapter of From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, the University of Illinois Press collection of the articles by music theorist and composer James Tenney, is “The Chronological Development of Carl Ruggles’s Melodic Style.” The essay was written in 1977; and those who have been following Tenney’s intellectual development by reading the chapters of From Scratch in their chronological order might expect that this would be an article in which Tenney takes his theoretical speculations about phenomenology and tries to put them into practice by examining the relatively limited (but decidedly revolutionary) repertoire of a single composer. Such readers need go no further than the last sentence of the first paragraph to abandon such expectations:

In this paper I shall report the results of some statistical analyses of Ruggles’s melodic lines, carried out with the aid of a computer.

Readers who now look at the above headline can probably see where things are going. I was rather pleased to see that this phrase actually has its own Wikipedia page. On that page one may read the “source sentence” taken from an article by Mark Twain entitled “Chapters from My Autobiography.” Wikipedia reproduced that sentence as follows:

Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

In the context of this particular Tenney article, that sentence deserves to be paired with another quotation:

To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer.

The Quote Investigator Web site has an impressively extensive discussion about the many possible origins of this witticism.

Those who have been following my progress through From Scratch may recall that I concluded my last article with a rather waspish dig about “misconceptions that Tenney probably picked up from Lejaren Hiller at the University of Illinois.” Hiller was trained as a chemist but became known as a pioneer in the domain of computer music, a rather loosely-defined area of both research and practice. The misconception I had in mind involved the technical term “entropy” as it is applied to the discipline of information theory. From a mathematical point of view, information theory amounts to a specialization within probability theory and its relation to statistical analysis. Statistical analysis is, in turn, a technique that has such a history of abuse that, in 1954, the journalist Darrell Huff published a book that remains one of the best plain-speaking accounts of the discipline. Huff chose to title his book How to Lie with Statistics.

Now I have far too much respect for Tenney and his efforts to accuse him of being a liar. However, I fear that he may have fallen victim to at least some of the misconceptions that Huff made it a point to explain. Most important is the basic principle that statistical analysis can only be applied to what is usually called a “representative sample space.” Put in plain talk: You are trying to identify some common property shared by a very large number of objects. That number is too large for you to examine all of those objects, so you limit your analysis to a smaller number of them. That limited quantity is your “sample space;” and there are a variety of statistical tools one may apply to determine whether the small number of objects in the sample space accurately represents that larger collection of objects.

Tenney’s decision to apply statistical tools to the melodic lines in Ruggles’ compositions must be grounded in the way in which he chose to define a sample space. However, his approach to analysis presumed that the elements of that space (i.e. the notes in those melodic lines) had some underlying uniformity that made them all “equal” with respect to the mathematical tools applied to them. The problem is that, in just about any piece of music, there are always some notes that (to paraphrase George Orwell) are more equal than others. In other words, whether in the act of composing or in the act of performing, there is almost always some underlying sense that differentiates an embellishing note from the note it is embellishing. Thus, the methodology behind Tenney’s data analyses levels a playing field that is not supposed to be level.

Now, to be fair, sorting out the embellishing from the embellished in a Ruggles score is no easy matter. Because of the constrains of copyright, only one Ruggles composition can be found on IMSLP, a very early song titled “Toys.” Finding those melodic lines that Tenney decided to analyze is no easy matter; and, even if one limits oneself to the vocal part, resolving questions of embellishment is a significant challenge. Nevertheless, between changes in duration and breath commas, it is a challenge that can be met given adequate time to work with the content. (One can also take advantage of a perfectly good recording of a performance of “Toys.”)

I suppose the underlying fallacy in Tenney’s essay arises from his using mathematical tools that apply to abstract constructs. However, the concrete qualities of his “source data” cannot be reduced to such abstract constructs. As a result, the output of his techniques cannot reflect the properties of his input sources that reflect the music that Ruggles composed, rather than the marks on paper that try to document that music.

To be fair, Tenney was neither the first nor the last to be ensnared by this methodological trap. When I first started doing my own research, it did not take me long to recognize the shortcomings of Hiller’s work in both theory and practice. Ironically, 1977 was the year in which I sat as Respondent in the Current Advances in Computer Methods session of the Twelfth Congress of the International Musicological Society. At that time much of my active research involved using that aforementioned programming language LISP to translate the somewhat cryptic graphic system of notation used by Heinrich Schenker into more formal symbol structures that better captured Schenker’s own representations of relations between the embellishing and the embellished. The more of Tenney’s work that I read, the more I regret that our paths never really crossed!

“Meta + Hodos” After a Decade

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

The preface to the retrospective document begins as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Tenney Encounters Computers: 1961–1966

My last report on the essays of music theorist and composer James Tenney, compiled by the University of Illinois Press in the book From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, concerned his pursuit of, in his words, “A Phenomenology of Twentieth-Century Musical Materials.” That quotation comes from the title of his Master’s thesis at the University of Illinois, which he completed in 1961. The University of Illinois also provided him with his first serious encounter with digital computers and the technical skill of programming those devices. The three essays that follow his Master’s thesis in From Scratch document his experiences in working with computers and the impact of those experiences on this thinking about music and “musical materials.” The titles of those essays are “Computer Music Experiences, 1961–1964” (completed in 1964), “On the Physical Correlates of Timbre (1965), and “Excerpts from ‘An Experimental Investigation of Timbre—the Violin’” (1966). (The excerpted document was a grant proposal.)

Once again, I appeal to the reader to allow me to put these dates in a personal context. My freshman year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) began in September of 1963. My very first elective during that first semester was a course on computer programming, almost all of which was focused on working with machine code. I hated it. Programs had to be given as input to the computer as decks of punched cards, and the slightest error meant that the deck would be ejected without yielding any results. Since we were allowed only four attempts for each assignment, the pressure was maddening; and I came away with little more than the ability to decipher the “Principles of Operations” manual for an IBM computer.

Fortunately, that was enough to get me a summer job at the University of Pennsylvania. Initially, I was simply assisting a graduate student with data entry for a long program written in a long-forgotten programming language (IPL-V). After I had been there for about a week, another graduate student asked me to help him with writing the code for the system he was developing as part of his thesis research. Free of the constraint of getting everything right within four attempts, it did not take me long to get into a comfortable groove of implementing useful code.

That same graduate student then told me that I could use the computer for any other project that interested me. I told him that, having been instructed in the rules of counterpoint, I was curious to see if those rules could be translated into software. He encouraged me to go ahead with the idea and directed me to the book Experimental music: composition with an electronic computer by Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson. (Hiller had founded the Experimental Music Studios at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign by the time Tenney was beginning to work on this thesis.) Thus, I made my first steps down the rabbit hole in the summer of 1964.

This was a good time to be at MIT. The Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) had first been demonstrated in 1961; and it provided ways to program a computer through a keyboard (basically a repurposed teletype, some models of which could both read and write punched paper tape). It also supported a programming language called LISP (LISt Processor) that allowed you to type in programs as symbolic expressions and run them from the keyboard. There were also computers with interactive systems to support writing long programs (text editors) and testing them in “debugging” environments. By the time I had reached my senior year, I was enjoying the facilities available at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, whose Director, Marvin Minsky, supervised my senior thesis work around developing software for playing music.

That last paragraph is important, because Tenney does not seem to have had the luxury of working with such interactive systems for writing, testing, and running computer programs. Wherever he was based, he had to live in a world of “batch processing,” which seriously impeded the whole nature of research as an ongoing process of the interaction of ideas and their implementation. The present-day reader of the essays Tenney wrote between 1964 and 1966 will probably be inclined to ask, “Why didn’t he just …?” The answer is, “Because he worked in an environment that would not support his doing that sort of thing!”

Each of those three essays presents an admirable account of finely disciplined hypothesis-and-test thinking. Unfortunately, that discipline was seriously impeded by work habits that had to be developed to accommodate computer systems that had not been designed for “user interaction.” The most significant consequence of those work habits was a need to limit the hypotheses one could pose on the basis of which ones could be realistically tested. As a result, when Tenney sought to investigate timbre, he tended to focus on data consisting of individual tones, whose analog recording could then be transformed into digital data. His working environment was simply not up to “capturing” an actual performance of music as digital data; and, as a result, his hypotheses never tried to address the dynamic interactive relationship between an instrument’s timbre and what the player of that instrument is actually doing.

In other words we have come a very long way since Tenney wrote those essays. Indeed, the distance is so long that it is unclear that there is much value in these texts. The one thing that interested me was that his account of his work at Bell Labs probably had some connection to a piece by Princeton composer James K. Randall entitled “Lyric Variations for Violin and Computer.” As I recall, Randall wrote an article for Perspectives of New Music in which he chronicled the tortuous path he had to follow to get the computer at Bell Labs to make even the slightest peep of a sound. My guess is that this was a serious cri de cœur; but, to his benefit, he managed to maintain a sense of humor in documenting his experiences. Tenney was a much more serious writer; and, considering what he had to endure, I wish he had cultivated a better sense of humor.

Ellen Lockhart and the Music of Animated Statues

from the Amazon.com Web page for the book being discussed

Last year the University of California Press published a volume whose title almost read as if it had been generated by a computer. In fact, however, Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770–1830 was the published version of the doctoral dissertation written by Ellen Lockhart to conclude her graduate studies at Cornell University. The book presents Lockhart as a researcher who is not afraid to dive deep into her sources and then return to the surface to account for her findings in clearly accessible language. On the other hand the very nature of her subject matter stands as an indicator of how difficult it has become to come up with original thesis material than can be discussed and defended through a degree-worthy dissertation.

Given the clarity of Lockhart’s writing, it seems proper to reproduce her own words describing the thesis topic that she has chosen to present and justify:

I argue that from 1770 to 1830, the animated statue was not only a figure of spectatorial engagement—as an object shaped like a human body, inviting aesthetic attention from the human body, and curing a corresponding animation within the human body—but also a means of understanding the relation of human senses to the self and to the very matters and materials of the fine arts.

Those who follow this site know that I am not one to recoil from a lengthy sentence; and, for what it is worth, the adjective “spectatorial” can be found on an Oxford Living Dictionaries Web page, even if it is there only as the adjectival form of “spectator!” More interesting, however, is the universality of the topic, extending beyond music to the fine arts in general.

This past summer, when writing about the Profil album of the complete operas of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, I recalled the joke about a one-sentence book report written by a sixth grader: “This book told me more about penguins than I would ever want to know.” When it comes to animated statues, most of us think immediately (if not exclusively) of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 527 opera Don Giovanni. First performed in 1787, that opera fits comfortably into Lockhart’s time frame; but it receives relatively little attention in her book. Pride of place instead goes to the musical dramatization of the Pygmalion myth, best known from Ovid’s account in his Metamorphoses. However, Prometheus also figures in the examples that Lockhart explores, which include Ludwig van Beethoven’s 1801 Opus 43 score for the ballet The Creatures of Prometheus, based on a libretto by Salvatore Viganò.

For the most part, however, many readers will find most of the names that emerge in this book to be as unfamiliar as Viganò’s. Personally, I feel that the one name that deserves more attention is that of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, whose Traité des sensations was written in 1754. A disclaimer is appropriate here: When I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), I was informed that those of us with knowledge of French had the option of taking our four semesters of introductory humanities in French, rather than in English. As a result I was fortunate enough to encounter Condillac’s treatise in the spring of my freshman year, and my copy of that book is still on my shelf!

Given the state of knowledge in the middle of the eighteenth century, Condillac was a major pioneer in the domain of psychology as we now know it and the philosophical side of what has come to be called “cognitive science.” His treatise took a “bottom-up” approach to an analysis of sensation. He begins by asking the reader to imagine a statue. He then augments that statue by providing it with a single sensory organ, the nose and describes the effect this partial animation, so to speak, will have on the statue. He then works he way systematically through the other four senses before then turning to what happens when the sensory organs then interact among each other.

(Fun fact: The shortest path from the “outside world” to the brain goes through the nose. I learned this from a lecture given by Gary Lynch to a cognitive science seminar series at the University of California at Los Angeles. As Lynch put it, “There are only three neurons between your brain and air.” Think about that the next time you inhale the scent of someone’s marijuana joint!)

Lockhart basically treats Condillac’s analysis as a “recipe” for the sort of “animation” she cites in her title. Ultimately, however, I did not come away convinced that Condillac’s insights had much to do with the musical examples she presented, particularly the operatic ones. Far more significant were the examples she cited of how a “statue figure,” such as Galatea, acquires a sense of self and the ways in which different composers could lend expressive power to the delivery of a mere first person pronoun.

It is through this issue of how self is established that we encounter another familiar name among the composers that Lockhart discusses. It involves a significant transition in which the regular rhythms of vocal music from the eighteenth century and earlier begin to bend to the more flexible rhythms of speech:

It is in the music of Vincenzo Bellini that we may hear the speech-like song … in its purest form. This declamation is most evident in Bellini’s early operas and was identified immediately by startled spectators, who (for reasons that should now be clear) called the style “philosophical.” His operas for La Scala bear a number of strong family resemblances to the first essays in melodramatic opera, Through large portions of Il pirata (1827) and La straniera (1829), Bellini employed vocal lines that were so austere and so resolutely speech-like that one contemporary critic wondered whether they should be called canto declamato (spoken song) or declamazione cantata (sung speech). An emphasis on “the rhythms of the spoken word” resulted in brief lyric portions that eschewed ornamentation and repetition, taking their melodic forms directly from the verse …. Perhaps more striking, though, are the fluid musical forms that play host to this song. Bellinian “numbers” like Gualtiero’s aria in act 1 of Il pirata feature a continuous texture, devoid of extended ritornelli but defined instead by a constant interchange between accompanied recitative, arioso, and orchestral gesture; a single number might encompass dozens of tiny shifts of character, tempo, and key, and a few larger ones. (John Rosselli called this music “startlingly Wagnerian.”)

(Readers may recall that I invoked the latter part of this passage last weekend when writing about Franz Liszt’s paraphrases of operas by both Bellini and Richard Wagner.)

Lockhart also includes a chapter on sensory deprivation, which struck me as valuable for shifting the domain of discourse from general questions of self to the more specific issue of time consciousness. She pays particular attention to how the blind can only perceive objects “diachronically,” usually by applying the sense of touch to different parts of the object over a span of time. She then asks whether there might be a “spatial” way to perceive music the way a sighted person recognizes an object in an instantaneous glance.

This is the one place in which Lockhart’s background scholarship turns out to be lacking. There is (and has been for some time) a shape-based approach to the representation of a time-dependent audio signal. It is known as a sonogram. It is basically a graph with time as the horizontal axis and frequency on the vertical. It essentially provides an instant-by-instant representation of the spectral content of a sound. I once attended a lecture by a specialist in computer-based speech recognition, who supposedly could look at a sonogram and “read” the text being uttered by the data sample; but I never saw him actually demonstrate this skill. (The MIT Media Lab explored the possibility of accounting for mapping two independent dimensions along the time line through a rectangular solid called a “micon.”) Andrew Bregman wrote an entire book entitled Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound about the interpretation of sonograms, but the book never made a convincing case that his techniques would account for perceiving music.

Personally, I am not entirely convinced that Lockhart’s book follows through on the thesis statement quoted above. On the other hand it presents a highly engaging account of both social and intellectual contexts during that period of transition from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth. If most of the members of Lockhart’s “cast of characters” tend to be obscure, the roles they played in a changing artistic frame of reference are still worthy of consideration.

New Music to Inspire Climate Awareness

The mission of the ClimateMusic Project is to educate, inspire, and enable diverse audiences to engage actively on climate change. Put another way, the organization seeks to present experiences for their audiences that will make climate science personal, rather than an objective compilation of data and interpretations of those data. To this end project participants include not only world-class scientists and technology visionaries but also composers, musicians, and artists.

As of this writing, two composers have been actively involved in the project. The first contributor was Erik Ian Walker, whose “Climate” is a 30-minute multimedia composition that provides musical accompaniment for the visualization of climate conditions over a 500-year period that reaches back to 1800 and projects forward, through two possible future scenarios, to 2300. Played in front of a projection of the animated visualization, the music is scored for a combo of both acoustic and electronic instruments with solo violin work written for Michèle Walther.

Next month will see the premiere of a new string quartet by the second composer to contribute to the project, Richard Festinger. The title of his piece is “Icarus in Flight.” The piece may be viewed as a chamber music tone poem, conceived to track the last 200 years of human drivers of climate change, including land use, fossil fuels, and population growth. The piece will be given its premiere performance by the members of the Telegraph Quartet: violinists Eric Chin and Joseph Maile, violist Pei-Ling Lin, and cellist Jeremiah Shaw:

Eric Chin, Jeremiah Shaw, Pei-Ling Lin, and Joseph Maile, members of the Telegraph Quartet in performance at Old First Presbyterian Church (from the Telegraph Quartet Gallery)

This performance will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 9. The venue will be the Noe Valley Ministry, located in Noe Valley at 1021 Sanchez Street, just west of the 24th Street stop for the Church Street trolley and near the southeast corner of 23rd Street. General admission will be $25 with a $45 charge for reserved seating in the first three rows. Tickets are currently available in advance online from a Brown Paper Tickets event page. Doors will open at 7 p.m.

According to the ClimateMusic Project, this will be the only musical performance of the evening. The program will begin with an introduction by Dr. William Collins, Director of the Climate and Ecological Sciences Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. There will also be time to engage with both the artists and the scientists behind the work, both before the music is played and afterwards at a closing reception.

Kyle Gann Tries to Reinvent Tonality

courtesy of Other Minds

A little over a week ago, Other Minds released its latest recording, a two-CD album of Kyle Gann’s seventeen-movement suite Hyperchromatica. On the strength of numbers alone, this marks a significant addition to the ranks of compositions whose creators have chosen to reject equal-tempered tuning in favor of working with natural harmonics. The tuning systems for such efforts are known collectively as just intonation. In such systems all intervals are based on integer ratios, usually with a limit on the number of integers involved.

The movements in Hyperchromatica are based on 13-limit just intonation. Thus, the integers used in forming the ratios range from 1 to 13 along with different combinations arising from multiplication. Put in another way, all of the ratios have numerators and denominators that arise from multiplicative products of the prime numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and 13.

Those who read my extended essay about listening to integer ratios, written when I was trying to get my head around Lou Harrison’s compositions based on just intonation, may recall that the thirteenth harmonic has rich history. Benjamin Britten singled it out in the horn solo that begins and concludes his Opus 31 serenade, requiring that the horn be played without the use of valves. As might be guessed, that solo involves an abundance of tonic-to-dominant perfect fifths. However, towards the end of the solo, the dominant pitch is approached by stepwise motion from above; but the “step” is neither a semitone or a whole tone. It is somewhere between the two; and the result can be spooky, provocative, or downright disturbing, depending on the personal disposition of the listener. That result is the movement from the thirteenth harmonic to the twelfth (two octaves above the third harmonic, the basis for the so-called “perfect fifth”).

Britten wrote that daring passage in 1943 for Dennis Brain, the leading horn player of his day. Some 75 years have elapsed since then, during which Harrison emerged as only one of several composers bent on turning to just intonation to explore new ways to think about the fundamental foundations of musical composition. Remember, this was a time when many composers were wrestling with how to approach composition after Arnold Schoenberg had “emancipated” the concept of dissonance. Schoenberg himself saw that emancipation as a liberation from harmonic progression, meaning that the primary foundation of his own work was polyphony; but his was a polyphony that was similarly “emancipated” from the strictures of species counterpoint, which had is own rules based on a distinction between consonance and dissonance.

45 years on we now have Gann, who has written in his notes for the booklet accompanying Hyperchromatica, that his goal “is no less than to reinvent tonality.” I have to confess that this quote sticks rather uncomfortably in my craw. I prefer to think that tonality was discovered, rather than “invented.” Making music is a behavior that probably goes back to the earliest practices of prehistoric social groups. During those prehistoric times, there was probably the emergence of a fundamental precept that, if you liked something you did, do it again. Eventually, when our ancestors were not hunting or gathering, they would assemble in a group to tell stories, or sing them, or perhaps even sing them while others provided “instrumental accompaniment.” Not too long thereafter, those “instrumentalists” realized that they could “perform” just as well without “accompanying” the singers!

It probably took many centuries before mind developed to a point where one could consider these practices and recognize them as instances of some systematic infrastructure. Such systematic thinking dates back (at least) to Socrates (or Plato’s documentation of Socrates’ wisdom). However, it was only in the Middle Ages that more extensive efforts at such documentation advanced. Those efforts would eventually work their way into educational curricula. However, for a long time educational practices seemed to lack the ability to recognize the difference between a document that was descriptive and one that was prescriptive. So it was that the confusion between rules to be followed and descriptions of past practices first emerged; and, on the basis of some of Schoenberg’s more caustic writings, it would appear that all too many practitioners are still laboring under that confusion.

I am not sure where Gann stands in the midst of that confusion, but I think that one way to establish a point of view is by going back to the basics behind practices of making music. Put another way, what was Gann actually making in the process of creating each of the seventeen movements of his suite? At the most fundamental level, he was writing MIDI programs for Disklaviers. MIDI, of course, was based on the equal-tempered tuning of twelve semitones, all the same size, to the octave, the usual way in which most pianos are tuned. In order to deal with just intonation Gann had to alter the hardware of his Disklaviers to synthesize pitches they had not been designed to synthesize. Furthermore, to account for a gamut of 33 pitches per octave, he needed three of those Disklaviers to account for all of the pitches. In other words what Gann made was an extensive library of software to run on an array of hardware, which he had made specifically for that software.

All that probably sounds so dry that many readers may wonder, “What does that have to do with making music?” It is therefore to Gann’s credit that I have to say that, if one puts all thoughts of theory aside and just listens to these two CDs, it is not difficult to imagine that Gann was playing at some non-standard keyboard, perhaps even improvising, rather than building a software library. In other words, while his methods were not actually products of the tight coupling between listening and making, he has successfully created the illusion of that coupling.

Having accepted that illusion, what is the listening experience that emerges from these recordings? The overall impression is one of exploration, often involved with establishing some “seed” of content and then playing around with different approaches to expressing that seed. Those who have listened to (and enjoyed) many of the prolonged improvisations that have been recorded of Keith Jarrett’s solo piano work can appreciate this approach to listening; and, for the most part, Gann works on durational scales that are not quite as extended as Jarrett’s.

On the other hand everything we listen to in the present is informed by what we have listened to in the past. One of my first counterpoint teachers (from the days of that “great confusion” between description and prescription) would consistently come down on all of his students for writing what he called “slimy chromaticism.” Gann has a frequent tendency to run through long strings of consecutive “micro-semitones” in his gamut that would escalate my former teacher’s sense of “slimy” to a level he could not have imagined.

However, Gann’s “hyperchromatic” runs may be the tip of a more imposing iceberg. Over the course of these seventeen pieces, there is little sense of hierarchy in what Gann is playing. The durational value of individual notes often serve as a clue to which of his notes are basically embellishments, but it is not always clear just what they are embellishing. As one who continues to have considerable respect for the theoretical writings of Heinrich Schenker, I feel that the absence of a clear distinction between the embellishing and the embellished reduces much of what Gann is doing on these recordings to another term that my counterpoint teacher used to throw at us: noodling.

To be fair, I am sure that Jarrett has any number of critics that would throw that same term at many (all?) of his prolonged improvisations. For that matter, there are any number of reasons to believe that Miles Davis felt the same way when John Coltrane launched into one of his longer improvised takes on whatever tune they happened to be playing. In other words the experience of listening to Hyperchromatica may, for better or worse, simply be similar to that of my recent account of listening to the world premiere of Lera Auerbach’s Labyrinth, in which I cited Henry Miller’s definition of “confusion” as “a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.” Fortunately, a recording provides ample opportunity to eventually home in on an order that is not yet understood!

On the Entropy of Stupidity

This morning ZDNet published an informative article by Steve Ranger entitled "Encryption: In the battle between maths and politics there is only one winner." This is a piece that offers an impressive amount of information concerned with the technology of encryption; but, sadly, it is one of those pieces that embodies Anna Russell's description of having been written by a "great expert, primarily for the edification of other great experts." The problem is that, where politicians are concerned, expertise is rarely, if ever, the deciding factor.

The result is that Ranger got his headline wrong, simply because he does not appreciate what politics can do. Perhaps because he is based in the United Kingdom, he may not have heard of the powers of our country's state legislators. Ultimately, they have turned out to be even less enlightened than those Papal Inquisitors who defied Galileo. Having gone to high school in a suburb of Philadelphia, I could easily see the absurdity of the Scopes Monkey Trial; but long after that trial had become distant history, there was at least one state legislature that passed a law declaring pi to be equal to 22/7; and I seem to recall another that declared it equal to 3!

Because those who have devoted themselves to the value of mathematics and science as tools see truth as an objective concept, they tend to disregard the relevance of social factors. Thus, while social theorists have no trouble seeing reality as a social construct, mathematicians find such a proposition to be thoroughly absurd. Ironically, those of us who look beyond the objective can persist in believing that reality can be a social construct with the same certainty that Galileo persisted in believing that the earth moved!

None of this should trouble mathematicians to any great degree, because, so the most part, the social world does not care what they do. As long as calculations that deal with mortgages and taxes (for example) work out reliably, there is no reason to worry about what a theorem of abstract algebra does or does not tell us. Encryption, on the other hand, is very much a product of the objective truths of abstract algebra; and it is very unlikely that the sorts of politicians who like to monkey around with the value of pi are likely to get very far in a book like Cryptography for Dummies. (One wonders how far they would get with the Hacking for Dummies volume!)

So, yes, in Ranger's "battle," there is, indeed, only one winner. However, that winner is "political reality," rather than "objective reality." The more serious question is not who the winner is but how we, as a society, can live with the power of politics to trump objectivity, even when serious issues, such as the many uses of digital technology, are involved.

The Bleeding Edge: 7/17/2017

Today is a “lucky seven” day, since the digit seven appears in the date, month, and year. Things being what they are, it is the second of three occasions this month, after which we shall have to wait ten years for the next round. Out on the bleeding edge, good fortune has come with an increase in concert-going opportunities. Several of these have already been reported, including the return of the Friction Quartet to the Old First Concerts series, the second (of two) MicroFest North events at the Center for New Music, the free Touch the Gear expo that will precede the sixteenth annual Outsound New Music Summit, and the 75 Dollar Bill concert at The Lab. Remaining events of interest will, for the most part, occur earlier in the week as follows:

Wednesday, July 19, 8 p.m., Peacock Lounge: The Peacock Lounge continues to host the reincarnation of what had been the Monthly Experimental Music Showcase at Second Act in the Haight. The program continues to follow the four-set format. This month’s performers will be as follows:

1. Ralph White will accompany his own vocal work on six-string (Texas style) banjo, violin, accordion, and chain-draped kalimba.
2. Chris Cooper and Jess Goddard will perform as the Angst Hase Pfeffer Nase duo.
3. Raub Roy will continue his electronic pursuits performing as Scy1e.
4. RTD3 decodes as Ron Tom Doug Trio, referring to trombonist Ron Heglin, who also contributes electronically enhanced vocalizing, Tom Nunn playing on his invented instruments, and cellist Doug Carroll, who also works with electronic enhancements.

The Peacock Lounge is located in the Lower Haight at 552 Haight Street. Doors will open at 7:45 p.m. Admission will be $5 and will be restricted to those age 21 or older.

Thursday, July 20, 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, July 23, 2 p.m., Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA): As part of its Global Sounds on Screen series, YBCA will present a selection of short films on the evolution and formation of what came to be called free jazz. The program will be guest curated by Brian Belovarac and will focus on the New York-based ESP-Disk label:

ESP-Disk poster courtesy of YBCA

While Atlantic Records is rightfully acknowledged for having released Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet in September of 1961, ESP provided a much broader account of the new movement, which included groundbreaking records by artists such as Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, and Sun Ra. It also offered live recordings of historically-significant predecessors of the free jazz movement; and, when I was writing for Examiner.com, I devoted attention to two major reissues of Bud Powell performances at Birdland in 1953 and in Paris in 1961, respectively. Belovarac has prepared a program of five short films covering several of the ESP projects, including one about The Fugs, which was less involved with free jazz and more interested in subverting prevailing trends in both folk and rock music.

This event with take place in the YBCA Screening Room. YBCA is located at 701 Mission Street on the southwest corner of Third Street. Regular admission will be $10 with a $9 rate for students, seniors, and teachers. Tickets may be purchased at the Box Office, which is open when YBCA is open, Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tickets may be purchased by phone by calling 415-978-2787. Finally, online purchased may be made at separate event pages for the Thursday and Sunday screenings.

Thursday, July 20, 8 p.m., Luggage Store Gallery: This week’s installment of the Luggage Store Creative Series will be a two-set evening with an emphasis on signal processing rendered as artistic expression. The first set will present the Ear Spray trio, which features Ann O’Rourke combining percussion work with processed vocals and live-processed video samples. She will be joined on percussion by Mark Pino with additional electronics work from Carlos Jennings. Pino will then join Mika Pontecorvo for a project entitled Alien Call Signs with technical roots in both complex adaptive systems and generative design architectures. Pontecorvo will handle digital and analog electronics, while Pino will shift over to waterphone. They will be joined by Adriane Pontecorvo on cello. There will also be some solo pieces, also involving complex adaptive systems, played by RiotNozzle, who will then do some duo work with Pontecorvo. The Luggage Store Gallery is at 1007 Market Street, directly across from the Golden Gate Theatre at the corner of Golden Gate Avenue and Taylor Street. Admission for this performance will be on a sliding scale between $6 and $15.