From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory by Larry Polansky (review)

From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory collects the theoretical essays of composer James Tenney (1934–2006) into a single volume for the first time. A student of Carl Ruggles, by the time of his death Tenney could be described as an experimental composer, yet one who had developed a unique and rigorous style of music theory, and had upended most of the classical tenets of music-theoretical and compositional thought. This rethinking was enabled by the influence of John Cage and by Tenney's role as an early computer music composer, a proto- or American-spectralist composer, a researcher of psychoacoustics, a historian of theory (especially of consonance and dissonance), and a composition pedagogue.

Tenney recalled that early in his compositional career he left Bell Telephone Laboratories "in March 1964 with … a curious history of renunciations of one after another of the traditional attitudes about music due primarily to a gradually more thorough assimilation of the insights of John Cage" (p. 98). But to Tenney's great credit, this did not mean a renunciation in the sense of dropping out, or naively turning away from that tradition; rather, it occasioned a wholesale rethinking—a thinking again and through—of the music-theoretical tradition. From Scratch, then, is the result—the great gift—of that retracing.

As Robert Hasegawa rightly points out (in "Review of James Tenney: From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory," Computer Music Journal 40, no. 3 [2016], 83–86), Tenney created what can be considered a theory of musical perception at a time when mainstream theorists had not yet adapted such an approach. Some might even claim that a defining feature of music theory in the late 1950s and early 1960s was the bracketing of perception in favor of ideal systems, under the weight of atonal, twelve-tone, and serial idealisms, and music as built of pre-auditory materials or parameters. Tenney's brilliant intervention, then, was to seek out and reify a way of connecting theory and experience in the new music. With the aid of this volume, I can imagine writing a history of mid- to late-twentieth century music theory as a discipline traced as a series of attempts to confront the problematic of theory and experience in the new music that ignore those explored by Tenney. I am continually amazed at how quickly, at the age of twenty-seven—in his signal achievement, Meta + Hodos: A Phenomenology of Twentieth-Century Musical Materials and an Approach to the Study of Form (1961, pp. 13–96 in this volume)—Tenney was able to critique and transform the parametric conception and organization of sound of his nearly contemporaneous Darmstadt peers, utilize and suppress the influence of Hugo Riemann in his conception of the "clang" as the foundation of the perceptual unit of music, absorb and apply Gestalt psychological principles to music, and conceive a robust theory of music. He achieved all of this at a time when Milton Babbitt and his students at Princeton University, for example, were critiquing most music theories for being little more than lists of musical examples (whether from the literature or as scales, chords, etc.), with no broader connections or explicit grounds for transformation from one to the next, let alone what he would consider a meta-theoretical description of higher connections. Read in this context, Meta + Hodos becomes all the more remarkable as a theory of musical perception with few peers.

Such is his obvious yet suppressed relationship to Riemann that Tenney includes a glossary of terms (pp. 87–95) used throughout Meta + Hodos, calling directly to mind Riemann's Musik-Lexikon (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Instituts, 1882). The connection is greater than nominal, however, as Tenney introduces what he takes to be the historically innocent term clang as the foundation for his theory. He relates the clang first of all to the sounding...