What are the Percepts When we Listen to Music?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Tenney: the Remaining Appendices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Encounter with Thomas Clifton’s Text

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas Clifton’s Impact on James Tenney

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tenney’s Effort to Move from Theory to Practice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Meta + Hodos” After a Decade

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

The preface to the retrospective document begins as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Tenney’s Formal Thoughts about Form

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

I do not compose principles, but music.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Urania Document’s Richter’s Schubert and Liszt

courtesy of Naxos of America

This past July Urania Records released a two-CD album of recordings of concert performances made by pianist Sviatoslav Richter between 1956 and 1966. The selections have been arranged in such a way that the first disc is devoted entirely to the music of Franz Schubert, while all of the selections on the second disc are by Franz Liszt. Each of the individual pieces was recorded at a different concert; so the intention seems to have been to provide a CD-by-CD compare-and-contrast approach to these two composers.

This may seem like an unlikely coupling. However, while Schubert may not have been the flamboyantly extroverted recitalist that Liszt was, both men were decidedly forward-looking composers. Furthermore, two of the Schubert selections on that first CD were composed during his prodigiously productive and adventurous final year of life. Indeed the first tracks on that CD are devoted to his final piano sonata, D. 960 in B-flat major; and, in what seems like a judicious effort of “parallel programming,” the second CD begins with Liszt’s only piano sonata.

It is also important to note that, regardless of matters of extroversion or introversion, both of these composers were capable of summoning up rhetorical devices of the highest order. When this music is properly played, the attentive listener is likely to find himself on the edge of her/his seat, no matter how familiar (s)he may be with the score itself. Richter was the sort of pianist who cared about whether or not you would sit up and take notice, and it is not difficult to appreciate the extent to which each of the selections in this collection exudes that demanding authority. Furthermore, the authority is reinforced with that clarity of execution that was such a key factor in establishing Richter’s reputation.

The Urania producers clearly appreciated these qualities in Richter’s recorded legacy. The D. 960 recording was made at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1964; and the first movement may well offer the slowest interpretation of “Molto moderato” that one is likely to encounter. Richter’s intention seems to be to remind the listener that Schubert’s overall intention was to establish a rhetoric of moderation in such a way that there are only a few occasions that “rock the boat,” so to speak; but they do so with an intensity that demands subsequent soothing with the return of that moderato. At the same time, Richter makes a convincing argument that, when he wished to do so, Schubert had a solid command of the ability to convey the impression of time standing still.

This contrasts sharply with the following selection, the D. 760 (“Wanderer”) fantasy in C major. This piece is suffused with manic qualities, almost as if Schubert is preparing the way for the Florestan side of Robert Schumann’s character that would soon follow. It is in this performance, which took place in Paris in 1963, that we can appreciate the clarity of Richter’s execution. One also gets the impression that, when the quieter reference to Schubert’s song of the same name arises, Richter approaches it with the same discipline that he would bring as an accompanist at a vocal recital. The Schubert set then concludes with one of Schubert’s venture into “impromptu structure” during the last year of his life, the second (in E-flat major) in the D. 946 set of three ternary-form piano pieces.

The Liszt sonata performance was also recorded in Aldeburgh, this time in the summer of 1966. It is the latest recording in this collection. It also provides abundant “food for thought” for those seeking parallels between Liszt and Schubert. Both of these sonatas were experimental in their respective times, and both were seeking new approaches to structure. The Liszt sonata, however, is a single uninterrupted movement. Every now and then a recording is released that uses track divisions to clarify structural boundaries for the curious listener. Unfortunately, this recording is not one of them; but Richter has his own gifts for escorting the attentive listener through Liszt’s structural framework.

The remainder of the Liszt CD presents selections from two of that composer’s best known collections. First there are five of the études from the 1852 Transcendental Études, taken from a performance in Prague in 1956. These are followed by three pieces from the three Années de pèlerinage (years of pilgrimage) suites, one from each of the respective “years.” These were taken from a performance in Moscow in 1958. With the exception of the first two of the études, these amount to Liszt exploring the idea of a tone poem as a solo piano composition. Indeed, several of his piano pieces that may be taken as tone poems would subsequently surface as orchestral music under the title Symphonische Dichtung (symphonic poem).

It would be fair to say that all eight of these offerings are finger busters. However, Richter has a way of drawing the attention to the technical challenges without dwelling on the efforts required to overcome them. Here again, it is because of his commitment to clarity that these pieces emerge as music worthy of attentive listening, rather than platforms for exhibitionist display. As a result, those who tend to take Liszt’s own capacity for exhibitionism as a necessary premise are likely to be convinced by Richter’s readings that there is more “genuine” music in these pieces than one might be inclined to expect.

Back to Beethoven

One of the nice things about this time of year is that I do not have to worry about a queue of recordings that require listening attention sooner rather than later. The result is that I have a chance to take stock of the entire collection, which has now grown to a size that makes the task almost impossible. One result is that it may seem to some almost banal that, given such “freedom of listening” opportunities, my choices should take me back to Ludwig van Beethoven, particularly since Beethoven did not figure at all in my recent articles about memorable concerts and recordings.

It goes without saying that there was no shortage of exposure to Beethoven in this year’s listening experiences. However, I think that what may be important is not that Beethoven is a composer “for all of eternity,” as the monument-worshippers would have us believe. Rather, as the best of both seasoned and emerging performers tend to recognize (and, more importantly, to communicate to listeners), Beethoven remains a composer “for the immediate present.” This is because, like many (if not most) of the composers that are still part of our “world of listening,” regardless of distance in the past, the music itself still admits of “present-based” interpretation, rather than nostalgia for the past. It is too often forgotten that, in Beethoven’s own day, that immediate present was all that mattered; but that was clearly the case whenever Beethoven himself was involved in performance, even after his hearing began to deteriorate.

Looking back on my own listening experiences, I realize that, even as a student, when it was almost impossible to get me to pay attention to anything other than marks on paper, I had been fascinated when one of the earliest collections of all the Beethoven piano sonatas came out when the Musical Heritage Society released the recordings made by Friedrich Gulda. It did not take me long to learn that Gulda was playing as significant a role in European jazz as he was in the classical repertoire. This may be one reason why, decades later, I had no problems encountering recordings of Keith Jarrett playing both Bach and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Preservation may be a major priority as far as marks on score pages (in both manuscript and published forms) are concerned. However, when one is talking about creating a listening experience for an audience sitting on the other side of the proscenium, preservation is far from a primary issue. If anything, it tends to get in the way of the performer thinking for himself/herself about just what sort of experience (s)he wants his/her listeners to have. Isn’t that the primary essence (if not substance) of “music appreciation?”

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.