Compositional Qualia in the Princeton School

COMPOSITIONAL QUALIA IN THE PRINCETON SCHOOL SCOTT GLEASON N MUSIC-THEORETICAL AND MUSIC-COGNITION circles musical qualia are commonly understood to be immediately given, often ineffable, “raw feels” of experience or what it is like to have certain musical experiences, usually of pitch, and often of scale degrees in a diatonic context. Historical examination of the role of qualia as understood, employed, and refined by the Princeton school of composer-theorists from the 1950s to the 1990s reveals a range of issues in their construal left unacknowledged in subsequent music-theoretical and music-cognitive discourses, and a critique of the notion of immediate givenness in particular. While the Princeton school—including Godfrey Winham, Benjamin Boretz, J. K. Randall, John Rahn, and Joseph Dubiel— figured qualia as the phenomenal content of music-compositionaltheoretical systems, they also construed qualia as entities subject to the composer-theorist’s construction within axiomatic theories, as proxies for investigation of subject formation within Milton Babbitt’s disciplined community of composer-theorists, and as explicitly created and thus chosen, not given.1 By arguing that there are cases wherein we consciously influence our perceptions of tonal, scale-degree qualia, Benjamin Hansberry (2017) I 288 Perspectives of New Music mediates music-cognitive accounts—as represented by David Huron (2006, 143–74) and which assume qualia are immediately given in experience—and music-theoretical accounts which understand qualia as conceptually inflected to such a degree as to seem wholly theoretical. Representing this latter pole, Hansberry discusses work by Steven Rings (2011, 41–99) which extends Lewin’s Generalized Interval Systems specifically to the tonal case.2 In this context, uniquely among Huron, Hansberry, and himself, Rings is aware of the Princetonian precedent, and yet distances himself from it: For more on scale-degree qualia, including a stimulating account of the various poetic descriptions that experienced listeners give them, see Huron (2006, Ch. 9). Music theorists will be familiar with the concept of qualia from Boretz ([1969] 1995), which takes Goodman ([1951] 1966) as a point of departure. Boretz’s pitch qualia are different from the qualia I explore here: he uses the term to discuss the experience of pitch or pitch class in the traditional sense, while I will reserve it for scale-degree sensations (as in Huron). This is not to imply that scale-degree sensations are somehow more qualitative than other musical phenomena (pitched and non-pitched); it is rather to limit the word for present purposes to avoid terminological confusion. (Rings 2011, 100n1) Absent further discussion it is unclear if Rings’s notion of qualia could be different in kind from that employed at Princeton, whether by Boretz in Meta-Variations ([1969] 1995), Winham in his unpublished project, Randall in his “Three Lectures to Scientists” ([1967] 2003) and Compose Yourself ([1970] 1995), Rahn in his (1974) dissertation, or Dubiel in his “Composer, Theorist, Composer/Theorist” ([1999] 2001), the texts which will serve as my corpus. I will treat each of these theorists in turn, but I think of Rings’s note as bracketing an important precedent for his own work, rather than marking a workable distinction.3 Rings is compositionally sensitive, able to accommodate the notion that perceptions influence qualia, hence the distancing of Princeton theory seems a product of institutional history, of forgetting: perhaps actively, and perhaps even political. Rings, with Huron, is concerned with potentially testable scale degree qualia, whereas Boretz, for one, while concerned with scale-degree qualia as existing cognitively (within the individual mind), is concerned to reconstruct them at a higher level of his broader reconstruction of any (that is, possible) music, music evoking scale degrees or not. Compositional Qualia in the Princeton School 289 But why qualia? How did they become a topic of conversation for philosophers, and then music theorists, such that we should be concerned to sift through their music-theoretical history? In addressing the broader philosophical issues, Tim Crane says that, the problem [of consciousness] is often expressed in terms of “qualia”: the “qualitative” or “phenomenal” features of conscious states of mind. How can a mere physical object, which we know a person to be, have states of mind with qualitative features or qualia? This question, which...