Download Varieties of Tone Presence: Process, Gesture, and the Excessive

Harcus, “Varieties of Tone Presence” 1
Varieties of Tone Presence: Process, Gesture, and the Excessive Polyvalence of Pitch in
Post-Tonal Music
Aaron Harcus
The Graduate Center, CUNY
[email protected]
Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory
November 6, 2014
Milwaukee, WI
Outline of Talk
I. Introduction: Perceptual Presence
II. Traditional Approaches to Tone Presence (“Chunk and Match”)
III. Phenomenology of “Now” and the Embedded Character of Temporal Experience
IV. A Comparison of the “same” chord in Bartók and Schoenberg
I. Perceptual Presence
Phenomenon of Presence: “How the world shows up”; online (as opposed to offline) processing
in the various sensory modalities.
Main Thesis: The question of how tones show up for experience (their presence) is dependent
on getting an accurate description of the structure of temporal experience.
Secondary Thesis: The focus on principles of segmentation in music analysis, theory, and
cognition has virtually ruled out the possibility of a theory of tone presence because it begins
with a faulty conception of temporal experience.
Minimal requirement for an adequate description of tone presence:
Perceptual experience is (Noë 2012) transactional in nature: Our perceptual experience registers
both how things are and our relation to how things are.


Included in my conception of “relation to how things are” is understanding.
Take either one of these aspects of perceptual experience away and you no longer have
perceptual experience.
Harcus, “Varieties of Tone Presence” 2
Example 1. Bartók, String Quartet no. 5, second movement, mm. 1-14.
Harcus, “Varieties of Tone Presence” 3
Filled-in note-heads:
More vivid tone presence
Tones are less
present in texture
Profiled Tone
Object
Immediate Scope
endowing
profiled object
with conceptual
content
Focally
Prominent Tone
Relationship
Key to Symbols Used in Examples 1.b-f
b. Interpretation 1 of mm. 11-12
c. Interpretation 2
D♭M scale degrees
Major scale degrees
1̂  2̂  3̂  4̂  7̂
1̂  2̂  3̂  4̂  7̂
cseg <01>
m9
aa
Tonic: Root of Major Triad
Tonic: CM Triad
Content of Experience:




Content of Experience:
Assuming absolute pitch, you hear two
layers with distinct tonal
relations/functions in D♭ and C Major.
Root, third, and Fifth of CM triad are all
equally present.
The relation of minor ninth between the
two layers is equally present.
Visual Analogy: An abundance of pitch
relationships all in sharp focus from the
center out to the periphery.



Two distinct tonal layers in an
ambiguous relation to one another (thus
the arrow labeled cseg <01>).
Root of tonic triad and scale degree 1
more prominent than other pitches within
their respective layers.
The tonal relations, particularly scale
degree 1, in Violin 1 is much more
focally prominent than the pitch relations
in other layers.
Example 1. Continued.
Harcus, “Varieties of Tone Presence” 4
d. Interpretation 3
m9 elaborated
by cseg <0123>
e. Interpretation 4
M:
P8
5̂  6̂  7̂  1̂
m9
Root of Major Triad
Tonic: Major Triad Root Tonic:
M triad
Content of Experience:



P8
Major
Triad
Content of Experience:
The motion from m9 between layers to
the octave is focally prominent.
Slightly less prominent is the experience
of two distinct layers converging into
one layer, the Major tonic triad.
The m9 above the tonic root is elaborated
in Violin 1 by a stepwise ascending
figure without any tonal or set-class
implications.

Similar to Interpretation 3, but with two
differences: 1) cseg <0123> is heard as scale
degrees 5, 6, 7, 1 in major, and 2) The root of
the major triad is NOT heard as a tonic
chord.
f. Interpretation 5, mm. 11-14.
Convergence of two layers
into a single major chord.
Growing isolation
between the two layers
M: sol-la-ti-do
Two layers retain their
own distinct…
M: do-re-me-fa-ti
Up P5
Root of Major Triad
Root of Minor Triad
Content of Experience:



Two chords lack tonal focus and the
roots of the chords are still focally
prominent.
The motion up a perfect between the two
chords is focally prominent.
Greater isolation between layers, as the
second instance of the prominent
descending m2 in Violin 1 (E-D♯) does
not resolve into the chordal layer.
Example 1. Continued.
Harcus, “Varieties of Tone Presence” 5
II. Traditional Approaches to Tone Presence (“Chunk and Match”)
3) Tone Presence:
A match is found, a
structural description
assigned (the
propositional light
bulb is turned on),
and the object is
experienced “now.”
Formal Models
2) “Match”: Identity
or Best fit between
musical object and
formal model.
1) “Chunk”: Break
stream up into objects
Representational Models:



Schemata (Prototype or
Exemplar-based)
Location (or relative
distance between two
chords) in some quality
space
Grammar (primitives +
rules of combination)
Open-Ended/Subjectively
Autonomous models:


Associative Set
GIS/Transformational
Network
Principles of
Segmentation


Sonic (S1 and S2)
or Contextual
Criteria (given
two+ segments)
WellFormedness
(WFR) and
Preference Rules
(PRs)
Continuous
stream of
music
Example 2. Schematic Outline of Traditional Approach to Tone Presence (“Chunk and Match”).
III. Phenomenology of “Now” and the Embedded Character of Temporal Experience
How should we characterize Now?
Quote 1 (Noë 2012, 77-78): “What you hear when you experience the temporal extent of the
note are not the sounds that have already passed out of existence…What you experience, rather,
is…the rising of the current sounds out of the past; you hear the current sounds as surging forth
from the past. You hear them as a continuation. This is to say, moving on to a better
approximation, you hear them as having a certain trajectory or arc, as unfolding in accordance
with a definite law or pattern. It is not the past that is present in the current experience;
rather, it is the trajectory or arc that is present now, and of course the arc describes the
relation of what is now to what has already happened (and to what may still happen).
(italics in original, bold my own).
Harcus, “Varieties of Tone Presence” 6
Quote 2 (Hasty 1997, 76): “I suggest that now might be regarded as a continually changing
perspective on becoming. Now is continually changing and ever new, because becoming is ever
new and never fixed or arrested. What has become is fixed and past, but what is past becomes
past only with a new becoming and is past only for what is becoming or will become. By calling
now a perspective I mean that it is a ‘view’ taken on present becoming from the standpoint of the
particular opportunities offered by what has become and what might become. In this way, ‘now’
might be considered most generally as a condition for freedom of action and more specifically as
a condition for feeling rhythm” (emphasis my own).
Larger, ongoing situation (e.g., phrase formation, topic, gesture, etc.) that impinges on the immediate scope
Immediate Scope
Arc or trajectory of sound (“Now”)
|(beginning)
\ (continuation)
Past Aspect*
tone object
(traditional
“segment”)
Present Aspect
indeterminate
tone object
*The use of the word “aspect” in past and present aspect refers to a suggestion from Hasty 2010 that past,
present and future represent three aspects (or “faces”) of one unified time.
Example 3. Schematic Representation of the Embedded Character of Temporal Experience.
Two main points regarding Example 3 with respect to tone presence:
1) The past aspect corresponds to what is traditionally identified as the segment;
HOWEVER, it is not the segment (or past aspect) itself that is present to experience;
instead what we hear is the trajectory of the tone object arising out of this segment (“past
aspect”).
2) It is this process of the segment coming into being by virtue of being made past and
relevant for present becoming that helps determine the relevant immediate scope of the
tone object.
Harcus, “Varieties of Tone Presence” 7
A. Measures 1-6.
6-32 (024579) [143250]
B. Analytical Reduction of measures 1-6.
|
\ Major diatonic: do-ti
|ti (only realized at this durational level)
|
\ la→mi
|(?) \(re?)–\ (do?) |(la?) \(re)
\→|
Example 4. String Quartet no. 4, third movement.
|
6-32 (024579):
\ stacked fourths
Example 5. Schoenberg, Chamber Symphony no. 1, op. 9, Figure 77.
Harcus, “Varieties of Tone Presence” 8
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