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 James
Tenney

From
Scratch
Writings in Music Theory

Edited by
L a rry Pol a nsk y
L a u r e n P r att
R o b e r t Wa n n a m a k e r
M i c h a el W i n te r
From Scratch
published with a grant
Figure Foundation
within hearing muse
 From Scratch
Writings in Music Theory

James Tenney

Edited by Larry Polansky, Lauren Pratt,

Robert Wannamaker, and Michael Winter

University of Illinois Press

Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield
© 2015 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

C 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015944784

isbn 978-0-252-03872-3 (hardcover)
isbn 978-0-252-09667-9 (e-book)
 CONTENTS

Notes on the Edition ix

Acknowledgments x

Introduction by Larry Polansky xi

1. On the Development of the Structural Potentialities

of Rhythm, Dynamics, and Timbre in the Early
Nontonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg (1959) 1

2. Meta / Hodos (1961) 13

3. Computer Music Experiences, 1961–1964 (1964) 97

4. On the Physical Correlates of Timbre (1965) 128

5. Excerpts from “An Experimental Investigation

of Timbre—the Violin” (1966) 132

6. Form in Twentieth-Century Music (1969–70) 150

7. META Meta / Hodos (1975) 166

8. The Chronological Development of Carl Ruggles’s

Melodic Style (1977) 180

9. Hierarchical Temporal Gestalt Perception in Music:

A Metric Space Model (with Larry Polansky)
(1978–80) 201

10. Introduction to “Contributions toward a Quantitative

Theory of Harmony” (1979) 234

11. The Structure of Harmonic Series Aggregates (1979) 240

12. John Cage and the Theory of Harmony (1983) 280

vii
13. Reflections after Bridge (1984) 305

14. Review of Music as Heard by Thomas Clifton (1985) 309

15. About Changes: Sixty-Four Studies for Six Harps (1987) 327

16. Darmstadt Lecture (1990) 350

17. The Several Dimensions of Pitch (1993/2003) 368

18. On “Crystal Growth” in Harmonic Space (1993/2003) 383

19. About Diapason (1996) 394

Appendix 1. Pre–
Pre–Meta / Hodos (1959) 397

Appendix 2. On Musical Parameters (ca. 1960–1961) 408

Appendix 3. Excerpt from A History of ‘Consonance’

and ‘Dissonance’ (1988) 424

Publication History 437

Notes 441

Index 459
 NOTES ON THE EDITION

All dates in the table of contents indicate when the articles were written
and completed, not necessarily when they were published.
Each article in this edition has been checked against published and
original sources. Substantive changes in Tenney’s writing are few and
are noted. Minor spelling corrections and grammatical changes have
been made by the editors, all of whom worked closely with Tenney for
many years.
All editors’ notes are indicated as such by square brackets and “—Ed.”
Robert Wannamaker had conferred extensively with Tenney on the con-
tent of three of the mathematically intensive articles (“The Structure of
Harmonic Series Aggregates,” “An Experimental Investigation of Timbre—
the Violin,” and “The Several Dimensions of Pitch”), and he has served as
technical editor for them in consultation with the other editors. Their con-
tent was nearly (but not completely) finalized at the time of Tenney’s death.
Certain corrections, derivations, and clarifications have been supplied by
the editors in the notes. Only “The Several Dimensions of Pitch” was ever
published in a version different from the one included here.
In a few cases, figures have been located or redone to complete an
unpublished essay. Most figures and examples have been left in Tenney’s
own hand. We have cleaned up some of them, visually clarifying a few
lines and words. In general, though, we have left the figures alone, avoid-
ing the temptation to regenerate them with modern technology.

ix
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Clarence Barlow, who made the original transcription of Ten-

ney’s lecture “The Several Dimensions of Pitch.” We extend our apprecia-
tion to Jim Fox and Nicolás Carrasco Diaz, who assisted in the preparation
of the graphic examples. Thanks also to two musicologists, Amy Beal
(ex camera) and Bob Gilmore (ex patria), for important contributions to
this project. The index was prepared by Amy Beal.
For previous publication of works reprinted in this volume, see Publi-
cation History on page 437.

x
 Introduction

A new kind of music theory is needed which 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 the things and relations
actually perceived or experienced.
James Tenney, “Review of Music as Heard,
by Thomas Clifton”

We must all be reduced to an attitude of humility that may once

have been associated with the word “theory.”
Tenney, “Contributions toward a Quantitative
Theory of Harmony”

The theoretical writings collected here were selected, sequenced, edited,

revised, and titled by James Tenney near the end of his life. Lauren Pratt,
Robert Wannamaker, Michael Winter, and I have edited this book into its
final form based on consultation with Tenney himself and the extensive
notes he left for the treatment of each essay in this collection. We believe
this collection constitutes one of the most important bodies of music-
theoretical thought of the twentieth century.
Tenney sometimes described himself as a “composer/theorist” despite
his understated claim in “The Several Dimensions of Pitch” that he was
“first of all a composer, and only secondarily and occasionally a theorist.”
He nurtured a synergistic and ineluctable connection between explana-
tion and creation. While his music has become better known in the last

xi
xii Introduction by Larry Polansky

twenty years, his writings have remained relatively unavailable, and his
ideas, consequently, are not well known or understood. This book repre-
sents the denominator of his self-description.
Tenney wrote prolifically. The articles in this volume are just a part of
his output, describing the most important theoretical ideas of his music.
He also wrote a great deal about the work of other composers, including
writings on Charles Ives and Conlon Nancarrow not reprinted here, as
well as the theoretical essays about John Cage, Carl Ruggles, and Arnold
Schoenberg included in this collection. Interestingly, he wrote sparingly
about his own music, some important exceptions being “Computer Music
Experiences,” “About Changes: Sixty-Four Studies for Six Harps,” “Reflec-
tions after Bridge,” and “About Diapason.” When he did write about his
music, compositional ideas are clearly explained in fine detail with trans-
parency. These articles are invaluable resources for understanding Ten-
ney’s compositions.
The articles in this collection are the most abstract and fundamen-
tal of his prose, perhaps the musical embodiment of his occasional self-
description as “amateur cosmologist.” He is trying to get to the bottom
of things. Tenney often stressed his concern for “what the ear hears.” He
is less interested in style, history, and culture than he is in acoustics and
perception. Each article in this collection asks: How might new and radi-
cal musical ideas emerge from how we hear?
Tenney’s writings are foundational. As a composer he was faithful to
his own theories. His theory became practice. The absence of the arbi-
trary in his music is reflected in the elegance of his theory. He didn’t
waste ideas, and he embraced Cage’s dictum about “possibility” (“nothing
is necessary, everything is possible”) by explaining it. The poetry of Ten-
ney’s music (what Cage might have called its “form”) is always partnered
in a subtle dance with his speculative theoretical designs.
The twenty-one writings included in this book span the years from
1955 to 2006. They include both previously published and unpublished
texts. In this introduction, I first describe what seem to me to be Tenney’s
major theoretical concerns (sound, cognition, form, and harmony). Next,
I discuss the articles in more detail, often highlighting specific ideas. I
try to elucidate the relationships among the articles by grouping them in
three general categories (not delineated by Tenney himself) that I hope
will be helpful. Those groups are Meta / Hodos and the writings directly
related to it; writings on harmony; and those on specific pieces.
 Introduction by Larry Polansky xiii

Sound, Cognition, Form, Harmony

Tenney’s central concern was not only “How do we hear music?” but also
“How might we hear and then make new music?” There is a grand design
in the chronological trajectory of this work—a lifelong attempt to explain
everything about sound, musical perception, and composition. Knowing
such an agenda was endless didn’t make him any less enthusiastic about
the trying.
Tenney first needed to consider the idea of a sonic parameter, both
acoustically and psychoacoustically. The next step, his groundbreaking
work in hierarchical and temporal formal organization, deals with higher-
level cognition and, by extension, models of form. The basic mechanisms
of these ideas (making distinctions, organizing things distinguished in
time) are fundamental to perception, perhaps some of the “oldest” cogni-
tive mechanisms we possess.
Some of the articles in this collection have a somewhat narrower
focus, as in the highly detailed “On ‘Crystal Growth’ in Harmonic Space”
and the article on Ruggles. Yet most of the articles refer to each other in a
variety of ways, gaining richness in the intersection of their ideas.
Much of his early writing deals directly with acoustics, psychoacous-
tics, and the phenomenological bases of cognition. There is a rough
chronological division between the earlier writings and his later writings
on harmony (pitch perception and tuning theory). The early articles, writ-
ten before 1970, include, in chronological order, “Pre–“Pre–Meta / Hodos,”
“On the Development of the Structural Potentialities of Rhythm, Dynam-
ics, and Timbre in the Early Nontonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg,” “On
Musical Parameters,” Meta / Hodos, “Computer Music Experiences,”
“On the Physical Correlates of Timbre,” “An Experimental Investigation
of Timbre—the Violin,” and “Form in Twentieth-Century Music.”
Later work, beginning in the 1970s, often explores Tenney’s reawak-
ened interest in harmony. In much of this work, the concept of harmonic
space is central—frequency and pitch relations are considered mathe-
matically based on perceptual assumptions (mostly about the ear itself).
These articles include “Introduction to ‘Contributions toward a Quanti-
tative Theory of Harmony,’” “The Structure of Harmonic Series Aggre-
gates,” “The Several Dimensions of Pitch,” and “On ‘Crystal Growth’ in
Harmonic Space.” Once Tenney solved some basic (but difficult) prob-
lems of harmony, he quickly began to integrate harmonic ideas with his
xiv Introduction by Larry Polansky

earlier work on form. Some good examples are found in articles like “John
Cage and the Theory of Harmony” and in pieces like Bridge (1982–84)
and Changes (1985).
When Tenney wrote about cognition, as far back as the earliest essay
in this collection (“Pre–
(“Pre–Meta / Hodos”), he did so in an unusual way.
Most of his work predates a more recent explosion of experimentally and
heuristically based research in psychoacoustics, perception, music cog-
nition, and neurocognition. Tenney read widely on all aspects of music,
the ear, and cognition, but he seldom utilized experiment- or evidence-
based arguments. By nature a scientific and exacting musical thinker, he
nonetheless felt strongly and clearly that he was not a scientist. Early
on, while at Bell Labs, he learned to trust the primacy of his listening
experience as a composer and musician over the data of the “laboratory”:

It is questionable whether such tests as the one described, carried

out in very artificial laboratory conditions and divorced from any
musical context, can ever be of much use to the composer. And
for this reason, primarily, I have not done any more experiments
of this kind. Instead, I have tried to gain an understanding of such
physical-to-psychological correlations more directly—by listening
to the sounds in a musical context. What this approach lacks in
precision (and sometimes, unfortunately, communicability), it more
than makes up for in efficiency. Only after giving up all intentions of
dealing with these problems in the strict ways of the psychophysical
laboratory has it been possible for me to produce compositions with
any degree of fluency. (“Computer Music Experiences”)

Freed from the cumbersome burdens of formal science—extreme specific-

ity, hypothesis testing, statistical analysis of experimental data, and institu-
tions like the academic laboratory—Tenney’s theoretical and musical ideas
were able to bloom. His methodology consisted of reading, a great deal of
thought, self-critique, and then even more thought (a recipe repeated until
he felt he had gotten it right). His laboratory subjects were his own ears,
his statistical analyses his own exacting logical criteria, and his experiments
often simple computer simulations of his models. The approach was that
of a humanist skilled in the logic of science and the clarity of mathematics.
This methodology and trust in his instincts found a natural rationale in
the work of the gestalt theorists. It is worth noting that since its early days,
 Introduction by Larry Polansky xv

gestalt theory has primarily dealt with the visual domain, even though
several of its pioneers were musicians themselves and often used music
examples (such as the transposition of melodies as an illustration of gestalt
invariance). Tenney was one of the first to apply these principles to audi-
tory perception in time, making important analogies between, for example,
spatial and temporal proximity, as well as visual and acoustic similarity.
Recently, I heard an anecdote from a psychologist who had been a
student of a well-known early gestalt theorist. A student had discovered
an optical illusion demonstrating a gestalt principle. When he asked his
mentor if he should run a subject-based experiment, the reply was: “No
need. If I can see it, it’s a phenomenon.” In his review of Thomas Clif-
ton’s Music as Heard (which, as Michael Winter points out, is not only an
excellent review of someone else’s work but an extraordinary articulation
of his own), Tenney cites C. S. Peirce: “This effort must ‘not . . . be influ-
enced by any tradition, any authority, any reason for supposing that such
and such ought to be the facts.’” Confidence in the veracity of one’s own
experience, only (and this is important) if that experience is rigorously
questioned, unbiased, and deeply explored, is central to the phenomeno-
logical approach.
Tenney was rigorous in assuring the consistency and completeness of
his models of “the things themselves.” I and others know all too well that
when he encountered a problem in a model, no matter how small, he bat-
tled it until there was a clear winner. In one particular case—the unfin-
ished late paper called “Multiple Pitch Perception Algorithm” (around
2005, intended as an appendix to the larger book manuscript “Contri-
butions toward a Quantitative Theory of Harmony”)—a small problem
finally doomed the idea to incompletion.

Meta / Hodos and Its Allies

The necessary thing now is to start if possible at the very beginning,
to clear the mind of loose ends whose origins are forgotten; loose
ends and means become habits. What do we hear when we listen; if
we really listen, what do we really hear when listening. This means
too, what do we hear first and what later after learning after words.
(1) The substance of it is SOUND, the essence, TIME. Sound and
Time. Sound in time sounding time.
“Pre–
“Pre–Meta / Hodos”
xvi Introduction by Larry Polansky

Meta / Hodos (MH), despite its importance to Tenney’s work and wide
influence since the 1960s, was first published in book form only in the
early 1980s. MH is typical, perhaps archetypical, of Tenney’s writing. It
attempts to explain the why and, perhaps, the how of his own understand-
ing. His aim was to articulate a new formal theory that might shed light
not only on the composers who interested him (like Varèse, Ives, Webern,
Ruggles) but, more generally, on all music.
In MH he sought fundamental precepts using simply stated assump-
tions. First, we make perceptual distinctions by simple mechanisms of
/
/difference
similarity/difference , with a resultant mental representation of distance.
Second, sound events are grouped in time using various types of similar-
ity and temporal proximity, and third, this is done hierarchically. Apply-
ing those gestalt psychological principles to music, Tenney wrote a short
book that is now considered to be one of the most important and radical
explanations of formal perception in music. That it was written as a mas-
ter’s thesis should inspire graduate students everywhere, or perhaps make
them weep.
After leaving Illinois for Bell Labs, Tenney immediately began to apply
the ideas of MH to generate his computer music pieces. In “Computer
Music Experiences” he documents the application of the gestalt forma-
tion ideas to the remarkable pioneering computer music pieces he wrote
there. In the personal introduction to that article, he provides an outline
for the work he would accomplish not just at Bell Labs but for the rest
of his life.

I arrived at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in September 1961

with the following musical and intellectual baggage:

1. numerous instrumental compositions reflecting the influence of

Webern and Varèse;
2. two tape-pieces, produced in the Electronic Music Laboratory
at the University of Illinois—both employing familiar, “concrete”
sounds, modified in various ways;
3. a long paper (“Meta / Hodos, a Phenomenology of Twentieth-
Century Music and an Approach to the Study of Form,” June
1961), in which a descriptive terminology and certain structural
principles were developed, borrowing heavily from gestalt psy-
chology. The central point of the paper involves the clang, or
 Introduction by Larry Polansky xvii

primary aural gestalt, and basic laws of perceptual organization

of clangs, clang-elements, and sequences (a higher-order gestalt
unit consisting of several clangs);
4. a dissatisfaction with all purely synthetic electronic music that I
had heard up to that time, particularly with respect to timbre;
5. ideas stemming from my studies of acoustics, electronics and—
especially—information theory, begun in Lejaren Hiller’s classes
at the University of Illinois; and finally
6. a growing interest in the work and ideas of John Cage.

A number of other ideas are first discussed in the article that follows.
One such idea is the formal discussion of the “avoidance of repetition,”
which became central to his work beginning in the 1980s. Further on in
this same article, Tenney presages the emergence of his focus on pitch
and harmony beginning in the 1970s in works like “Postal Pieces” (1965–
99), Clang (1972), Chorales for Orchestra (1974), and Quintext (1972):
“Accordingly, I no longer find it necessary to avoid any pitch, at the same
time that I intend never to leave undisturbed—even when working with
instruments—the traditional quantized scale of available pitches. It is
not too difficult to get around this with instruments (except for such
as the piano)—it’s mainly a matter of intention and resolve.” “Form in
Twentieth-Century Music,” written ten years later, allowed Tenney to
restate some of MH’s ideas more concisely and expand upon others. But
he went further in this article, including a variety of important twentieth-
century compositional ideas into the larger schema developed in MH and
focusing on the varieties of compositional techniques that may occur at
various hierarchical levels. Some of his already stated musical/formal/aes-
thetic ideas, such as ergodicity (see “Computer Music Experiences”), are
discussed at length. Newer ideas, like those associated with early musical
minimalism, are theoretically considered here for perhaps the first time.
“Form in Twentieth-Century Music” led to the short speculative marvel
“META Meta / Hodos” (MMH, 1975). MMH is a distillation of MH with
some additional new ideas. MMH’s style, consisting of a series of logical
propositions, recalls, in its prose and organizational style, Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. A wonderful and occasionally confound-
ing read, it is sprinkled with elusively suggestive phrases like “nothing is
yet known about structural entropy” (one is tempted to respond: “You said
it!”). Its introduction is a bit ironic—“The intent was therefore to make
xviii Introduction by Larry Polansky

it as concise as possible, even if at the expense of comprehensibility, and

I am aware that the result is probably not easily penetrated by someone
not already familiar with Meta / Hodos”—in that few people at the time
even knew of MH’s existence. Tenney seems to have been confident that
this would change.
Around 1975, perhaps stimulated by MMH’s reformulation of the
ideas in MH, Tenney developed a simple algorithm to determine tempo-
ral gestalt (TG) boundaries, furnishing the central but not yet specified
“engine” of temporal gestalt formation. MH postulates that gestalt forma-
tions are made on one level on the basis of some kind of distinction at
the next lower level but does not say precisely how. Tenney introduces
the problem in “Hierarchical Temporal Gestalt Perception in Music”
(1978–80):

Many of the questions which might be the most relevant to musical

perception have not even been asked by perceptual psychologists,
much less answered. How, for example, are the perceptual bound-
aries of a TG determined? To what extent are the factors involved
in temporal gestalt perception objective, bearing some measurable
relation to the acoustical properties of the sounds themselves? As-
suming that there are such objective factors, is their effect strong
enough that one might be able to predict where the TG boundaries
will be perceived, if one knows the nature of the sound-events that
will occur?

The TG initiation mechanism is easy to understand. Gestalts at a given

level are initiated by peaks in series of parametric differences, or disjunc-
tion measures, at the next lower level. A “peak” is a greater difference sur-
rounded by lesser differences. In other words, given four TGs: a, b, c, d,
a peak occurs if diff(b,c) is greater than both diff(a,b) and diff(c,d). Thus
four TG (three differences) is the minimum needed for a peak to occur.
It follows, interestingly, that the highest level of gestalt organization is
the first that contains fewer than four gestalt units. With fewer than four
“things,” there are fewer than three “changes,” and, excluding groupings
of one, we don’t have enough information to make a subgrouping.
Tenney implemented the TG initiation algorithm in software (with my
assistance, starting in 1975) as a “working model” or “proof of concept”
of the mechanism. This algorithm, implemented in a short FORTRAN
 Introduction by Larry Polansky xix

program, uses a simple, parametrically weighted, multidimensional rep-

resentation of similarity/difference (a metric). The experimental data
consisted of a few monophonic scores and reductions of scores (by Rug-
gles, Varèse, Debussy, and Wagner). Given the powerful idea involved
(a model of formal perception), the goal (a “reasonable” segregation of
monophonic input), and 1970s computer technology, I was amazed that
the program actually worked!
This research posed as many questions as it answered. How does our
musical perception navigate these hierarchies: processing one level at
a time in a kind of multipass behavior, or more heterarchically, moving
fluidly between hierarchical levels in real time? (The program did the
former after attempts to model the latter proved unwieldy.) How do we
weight different parameters and adaptively modify those weights? How
should “morphology,” including things like motivic repetition and thus
memory, be integrated into the model? It is a testament to Tenney’s early
vision that these questions still concern musical thinkers and composers.
Three early articles add to our understanding of MH. They predate
MH and are published here for the first time (two of them as appendixes).
The first appendix, called “Pre–
“Pre–Meta / Hodos” (at Tenney’s suggestion),
from 1959, introduces Tenney’s theoretical and phenomenological ideas
in a prose style indebted to Gertrude Stein. (Tenney: “To go back. It is
necessary now to go back”; “To continue. It is necessary to continue.”)
Though this style all but disappears in later writing, the seeds of his later,
highly refined, economic prose are evident here, as is the focus on acous-
tic and perceptual fundamentals. (“We may say that the measure large-
small must correspond to the primary character of the sound and that
further differentiations will all derive from this.”) Tenney’s early interest
in Cage is also evident, especially in the repeated concern with silence
(although the book Silence had not yet been published).
“Pre–
“Pre–Meta / Hodos” raises, for the first time, many questions that
would continue to concern him. These include

• the relationship of shape to state (“The exact pitch-relations may

be altered, without substantially altering the ‘shape’ of the figure”);
• the theoretical, cultural, and perceptual bases of harmony (“It is
in this respect that our pitch-perception is ‘most refined,’ and the
capacity to hear subtle relationships has been the basis for much of
the development of Western music”); and,
xx Introduction by Larry Polansky

• the establishment of phenomenologically based parametric descrip-

tors (“The reciprocal of Duration is SPEED [or Temporal Density]”).

Definitions and concepts that we now recognize from MH are first artic-
ulated, for example: “Another basic aspect of sound—(5) SHAPE—the
clang has a certain shape in time (this should really precede questions
of individual parameters). And if it has no particularly articulate shape
in time (i.e., if it is ‘rectilinear’), it will at least have QUALITY
QUALITY, which
might be understood as ‘shape’ independent of time.” The complex idea
of multidimensional parametric disjunction and distinction is also hinted
at: “There is little consistency in differentiability of these different fea-
tures.” This is fascinating in light of how early this article was written.
Perceptual parameters have independent scales. The relationship of
scales of measurement between different parameters (e.g., what would
a durational “octave” be?) are still not well formulated or quantified. To
understand multifeatured data we need to resolve features, understand
their relatedness and dependencies, and try to integrate them into a more
general distance-function (as Tenney did later in “Hierarchical Temporal
Gestalt Perception in Music”). Contemporary methods, such as machine
learning, neural networks, genetic algorithms, hidden Markov models,
and other nondeterministic analyses, can do this in sophisticated ways,
but these processes often lack transparency. We get an answer but don’t
always know how we got it. These techniques were not attractive to Ten-
ney. While yielding results, they are less able to provide the kind of clear
models of perception that Tenney sought. Even at the time of writing
“Pre–
“Pre–Meta / Hodos” he was interested primarily in those models—the
phenomenology of his own perception.
The second appendix, “On Musical Parameters” (a title that Ten-
ney may have affixed at a much later date), is the first example of what
became one of Tenney’s central concerns: What to talk about if not
pitch? He knew that the musical forms employed by twentieth-century
musical innovators who interested him were based not only on pitch
but also on “other things”: loudness, temporal features (density and
regularity, or “tempo” and “pulse salience,” being perhaps the two most
obvious), and most of all “timbre” (or some aggregation of time-variant
spectral features). These parameters, discussed here for the first time,
are more fully and formally explored in later articles also included in this
volume, such as “On the Physical Correlates of Timbre,” “Computer
 Introduction by Larry Polansky xxi

Music Experiences,” and “An Experimental Investigation of Timbre—

the Violin.”
The third early article in this collection, “On the Development of the
Structural Potentialities of Rhythm, Dynamics, and Timbre in the Early
Nontonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg,” is of unknown provenance. It
may have been written for a graduate seminar at the University of Illi-
nois. Its connection to MH is clear: it is a study of Schoenberg’s atonal
music without focusing on pitch relations. This was unusual at a time
when much of American academia, even in the nascent field of elec-
tronic music, focused musically and pedagogically on serial and atonal
theory. As Tenney pointed out, “Schoenberg himself gave little theo-
retical consideration to what might be called the nonharmonic aspects
of music—i.e., rhythm, dynamics, timbre, etc.—and most traditional
methods of analysis have practically ignored them.” Tenney’s article is
an implicit critique of the overemphasis on atonal and serial system-
atization, similar to “Pre–Meta / Hodos” but in a more conventional
scholarly style. Looking at the “other factors” in Schoenberg’s music, he
sets harmony aside in favor of a deeper and less stylistically based idea
of “music theory.”

With the gradual dissolution of the tonal system in the music of this
period, we are faced with a situation in which harmonic-melodic
analysis is obviously inadequate to describe the actual formal pro-
cesses in the music. It is no longer possible to ignore the rhythmic
and other nonharmonic aspects, because it is frequently these very
aspects that are the most potent shaping forces or that give a piece
its particular form and character. Indeed, the results of the various
attempts at harmonic analysis should have led to this conclusion,
unless one assumes either that new harmonic “laws” may yet be dis-
covered, more or less analogous to the old laws, which can account
for the musical facts, or alternatively, that the music of this earlier
period only represents a transitional or incipient stage in a longer
development—that is, in the development toward the twelve-tone
technique. The first assumption seems highly unlikely (though cer-
tainly not impossible), considering the fact that analysts have been
looking for such laws almost exclusively these last fifty years, and
consequently these should have been the first to be found, if they
exist at all. But the second assumption, it seems to me, overlooks
xxii Introduction by Larry Polansky

the real integrity and completeness—the relative perfection—of

this music.

“Rhythmic and other nonharmonic aspects” are crucial in MH and its

related theoretical explorations. “Unlikely” but “certainly not impossible”
“new harmonic ‘laws’” would occupy Tenney’s music and thinking for
much of the rest of his life.

Harmony
Clearly, a new theory of harmony will require a new definition of
“harmony,” of “harmonic relations,” etc., and I believe that such
definitions will emerge from a more careful analysis of the “total
sound-space” of musical perception.
Tenney, “John Cage and the Theory of Harmony”

Beginning in the late 1970s and in this volume with “Introduction

to ‘Contributions toward a Quantitative Theory of Harmony,’” Tenney
began writing about harmony. His music had, from the beginning,
been concerned with pitch in a variety of ways. Pieces like Seeds
(1956; rev. 1961) and the Stochastic String Quartet (1963) used pitch
systems inspired by the dissonation methods of Varèse, Ruggles, and
Ruth Crawford Seeger. For Ann (rising) (1969) might be said to be
about nothing but pitch. Other pieces from various times in his life,
like the Three Piano Rags (1969), Listen (1981), and Hey When I
Sing . . . (1971), evince his virtuosity and imagination within more
conventional harmonic traditions.
But in the early 1970s Tenney became explicitly interested in harmony
and tuning (and in the work of Partch, with whom he’d had a difficult
relationship at the University of Illinois). Harmony became integral to the
form and intent of the majority of Tenney’s pieces. Clang (1972), Chorales
for Orchestra (1974), Spectral CANON . . . (1974), the “Postal Pieces”
(1965–71), and Quintext (1972) are important early examples of this new
focus, as are the seven “Harmonium” pieces (beginning in 1976).
In the 1980s, exemplified by Bridge and Changes (1985), Tenney
began to deliberately and explicitly reconcile formal and harmonic ideas.
The compositions from the last twenty or so years of his life make use of
almost every one of his major ideas. The naturalness of their combination
 Introduction by Larry Polansky xxiii

bespeaks the culmination of a lifetime’s work: “To go back. It is necessary

now to go back” (“Pre–
(“Pre–Meta / Hodos”).
In “Computer Music Experiences” Tenney writes about his primary
relationship to pitch:

If I had to name a single attribute of music that has been more es-
sential to my esthetic than any other, it would be variety. . . .
. . . Since my earliest instrumental music (Seeds, in 1956), I
have tended to avoid repetitions of the same pitch or any of its
octaves before most of the other pitches in the scale of twelve
have been sounded. This practice derives not only from Schoen-
berg and Webern, and twelve-tone or later serial methods, but may
be seen in much of the important music of the century (Varèse,
Ruggles, etc.).

At the time (1964), Tenney referred to equal temperament, which he used

freely throughout his life. The method for achieving what, at that time,
he called “variety” but what was in fact a sophisticated way of ensuring
random selection with a minimum of bias (using what I and my coauthors
Michael Winter and Alexander Barnett have elsewhere called the “disso-
nant counterpoint algorithm”) was later integrated with harmonic space
and with temporal gestalt structures in later pieces like Changes and the
“Spectrum” series (beginning in 1995).
In the introduction to the never-completed “Contributions toward a
Quantitative Theory of Harmony” (1979), Tenney described the chronol-
ogy of his harmonic concerns, inaugurating the next stage of his work:

Until a few years ago, my own work in composition was such that
questions of harmony seemed completely irrelevant to it. Timbre,
texture, and formal processes determined by the many musical pa-
rameters other than harmonic ones still seemed like unexplored ter-
ritory, and there was a great deal of excitement generated by this
shift of focus away from harmony. Harmonic theory seemed to have
reached an impasse sometime in the late 19th century, and the in-
novations of Schoenberg, Ives, Stravinsky, and others in the first
two decades of the twentieth century were suddenly “beyond the
pale” of any theory of harmony—or so it seemed. I was never re-
ally comfortable with this situation, but there was so much to be
xxiv Introduction by Larry Polansky

done—so many other musical possibilities to be explored—that it

was easy to postpone questions of harmony in my own music.

The writings about harmony are about fundamentals. Harmony could

not be understood until words and concepts like “consonance” and “dis-
sonance” were clarified with respect to their historical, cultural, stylistic,
acoustical, semantic, emotive, narrative, and perceptual connotations.
Harmony had to be quantifiable—what happens. In “John Cage and the
Theory of Harmony” (1983), one of Tenney’s “bridges” between musical
worlds, he draws a blueprint for a new theory:

It seems to me that what a true theory of harmony would have to be

now is a theory of harmonic perception. . . .
First, it should be descriptive—not pre- (or pro-)scriptive—and
thus, aesthetically neutral. That is, it would not presume to tell a
composer what should or should not be done, but rather what the
results might be if a given thing is done.
Second, it should be culturally/stylistically general—as relevant
to music of the twentieth (or twenty-first!) century as it is to that
of the eighteenth (or thirteenth) century, and as pertinent to the
music of India or Africa or the Brazilian rain forest as it is to that of
Western Europe or North America.
Finally—in order that such a theory might qualify as a “theory”
at all, in the most pervasive sense in which that word is currently
used (outside of music, at least)—it should be (whenever and to the
maximum extent possible) quantitative. Unless the propositions,
deductions, and predictions of the theory are formulated quanti-
tatively, there is no way to verify the theory, and thus no basis for
comparison with other theoretical systems.

“Contributions . . . ,” as its working table of contents shows, was meant

as a comprehensive work. The broadly envisioned scope assumed greater
depth as several distinct, self-contained projects grew out of it. The first
was a fascinating and essential detour: A History of ‘Consonance’ and ‘Dis-
sonance’ (published in 1988).1 In that (now out-of-print) book Tenney
described the historical progression of cultural and musical classifica-
tions of consonance and dissonance.
 Introduction by Larry Polansky xxv

Several of the articles in this current volume, like “John Cage and
the Theory of Harmony,” “On ‘Crystal Growth’ in Harmonic Space,” and
“About Changes: Sixty-Four Studies for Six Harps,” utilize the concept of
harmonic space. This is Tenney’s term for the computational model and
geometrical visualization of rational tuning spaces, a conceptual expan-
sion of what Ben Johnston and others have called harmonic or prime lat-
tices. In harmonic space, frequency ratios are organized along prime axes
(2, 3, 5, 7, . . . ). Harmonic space is highly structured: we can navigate it
quantifiably and intuitively: “There is one simple generalization that can
be applied to nearly all of these different conceptions of consonance and
dissonance, which is that tones represented by proximate [italics added]
points in harmonic space tend to be heard as being in a consonant rela-
tion to each other, while tones represented by more widely separated
points are heard as mutually dissonant” (“John Cage and the Theory of
Harmony”).
One of Tenney’s key harmonic ideas was the harmonic distance (HD)
function. First published in “John Cage and the Theory of Harmony,” it
was originally defined in “The Structure of Harmonic Series Aggregates”
(begun in 1979), the previously unpublished second section of “Con-
tributions.” The HD function measures movement in harmonic space,
enabling a formal concept of distance (something like “dissonance”), or
its inverse, proximity (something like “consonance”), as well as an infinite
set of possibilities for harmonic invention. The HD function has become
well known among composers and theorists and was central to Tenney’s
musical thinking from about 1980 on.
Tenney’s HD function is the logarithm of the product of two (relatively
prime) numbers in a frequency ratio:

HD(a/b) = log2(a) + log2(b) = log2(ab)

Most nonheuristic measures of consonance, dissonance, and roughness

are based on frequency ratios of positive integers. “Dissonance” is usually
thought to relate proportionally to the complexity of those numbers. Com-
plexity itself is a result of the magnitude and number of prime factors of
those integers, which have naturally become the ingredients of most per-
ceptual, theoretical, mathematical, mystical, numerological, and historical
recipes for “consonance and dissonance.” Specific quantifiable definitions
xxvi Introduction by Larry Polansky

of “harmonicity” vary by the quantities of the recipe’s ingredients—the dif-

ferent weightings of exponents and primes. What are the relative impor-
tances of smaller primes, smaller exponents, and fewer distinct primes?
And if “more important,” how to measure that “importance”? There are
thus many ways to construct such a function. In most, like Leonhard Eul-
er’s gradus suavitatis or Clarence Barlow’s harmonicity, these components
are explicit in the formal statements of the functions. Tenney’s HD func-
tion is unusual in that the factorization of integers is not obvious in the
function itself, whose appearance is elegantly but deceptively simple: just
the logarithm of the product of two numbers. “The Structure of Harmonic
Series Aggregates” provides a detailed explanation of its genesis.
Perhaps the most mathematical article in this volume, “The Structure of
Harmonic Series Aggregates” describes, through first principles (percep-
tion, simple mathematics), what happens when “two or more compound
tones are sounded simultaneously.” Using simple properties of relatively
prime (reduced) ratios, the harmonic series, and least common multiples
and greatest common divisors, Tenney approaches harmony in the way he
had suggested some thirty years earlier (in “Pre–
“Pre–Meta / Hodos”): “to start
if possible at the very beginning, to clear the mind of loose ends whose
origins are forgotten; loose ends and means become habits.” In this arti-
cle, Tenney laid the groundwork for much of his compositional work of
the next twenty-five years. At the same time, he convinced himself that,
at a basic level, he knew what he was doing. If he was going to write
harmonic music, he needed to be sure what harmony was. Tenney never
quite finished this article. He enlisted the aid of Robert Wannamaker to
check and clarify some of the mathematics (Wannamaker served as the
technical editor for this article and two others in this publication). Ten-
ney may not have felt a pressing need to publish it during his lifetime. I
like to think that a work of this importance had partly a hermetic func-
tion, serving invaluably as a composition lesson in which he was both
teacher and student.
The other projected sections of “Contributions” remain unwritten or
unfinished. It is unclear what became of part III (“Problems of Tonality”),
but those ideas most likely emerged in later articles on harmonic space
such as “John Cage and the Theory of Harmony” and “Darmstadt Lec-
ture” and, finally, in the major theoretical contributions of “The Several
Dimensions of Pitch” and “On ‘Crystal Growth” in Harmonic Space.” As
for the proposed “epilogues,” I noted above that near the end of his life,
 Introduction by Larry Polansky xxvii

Tenney worked on a multiple pitch-detection algorithm that grew natu-

rally out of “The Structure of Harmonic Series Aggregates.” He developed
an ingenious notion of “fuzzy” intersection between simultaneous com-
pound tones, which facilitated the determination of multiple fundamen-
tals from a compound source. As also noted above, this work was never
completed to Tenney’s satisfaction and is not included in this volume.
“The Several Dimensions of Pitch” is an intersecting and complement-
ing companion to “The Structure of Harmonic Series Aggregates.” The
title contains a typical Tenney-esque double entendre referring not only
to the several dimensions of harmonic space but also to two different
pitch percepts: contour (shape, melody) and harmony. In the consider-
ation of consonance and dissonance, the difference between simultane-
ous and consecutive relationships between pitches is often ignored. In
“The Several Dimensions of Pitch” Tenney attempts to explain, using
ideas from evolution and neurocognition, the different mechanisms
behind the two percepts. One of the most important things about this
article is the attempt itself. Tenney tries to unravel large and multifaceted
concepts that have become confused, entangled, and misunderstood and
in doing so clarifies their discussion. There are some alarmingly beautiful
insights here, often made almost as asides, such as what amounts to a
quantitative definition of the idea of skip and step, making use of a funda-
mental similarity measure (in this case, what I would call the intersection
over the union) on the amplitude skirts of excitation functions. In other
words, Tenney proposes a psychoacoustic explanation for contour forma-
tion based on the ear’s temporal processing.
The other articles on harmony (“On ‘Crystal Growth’ in Harmonic
Space” and “Darmstadt Lecture”) are self-explanatory. Tenney’s “crystal
growth” algorithm has already influenced a number of composers. This
idea suggests a new “harmonic syntax” (or perhaps “functional harmony”)
for harmonic space. As a quantitative model, it is both suggestively rich
for future composition and plausible as a description of the history of
tonal expansion. This is one of Tenney’s models that causes you to slap
your head and yell “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Darmstadt Lecture” is an invaluable, accessible introduction to Ten-
ney’s thinking. As one of the few published examples of his public lectures,
it is an important addition to this collection. I appreciate its depiction of
the kinds of interactions he had with friends, composers, and musicians—
interactions that largely wove the fabric of his daily life. His responses to
xxviii Introduction by Larry Polansky

audience questions are characteristic of how he spoke to me or anybody—

always with respect and thoughtfulness. He was sincerely interested in the
ideas of others, even if, as should be obvious, he had plenty of his own.

Pieces
Several of the articles included here are about Tenney’s own pieces or
those of other composers (Schoenberg, Cage, and Ruggles). The major-
ity of Tenney’s compositional methods, especially after about 1980, are
still largely undocumented. The few articles about his own work in this
collection offer rare insight into the musical implementations of his theo-
retical ideas.
Many of Tenney’s pieces after about 1980 were written with the assis-
tance of his own computer programs. Scholars, most notably Michael
Winter, have studied and documented this software in detail and, con-
sequently, Tenney’s compositional processes. In some cases, pieces have
been completed or re-created primarily from the programs themselves. It
is possible that to Tenney the computer code served as a “sketchbook.”
The software is an accurate, complete, and unambiguous document of
how pieces were composed. For this reason he may have felt it less urgent
to write in detail about his algorithms and techniques—they are in his
software.
But the writings that do exist are a rich source of ideas. In “The Chron-
ological Development of Carl Ruggles’s Melodic Style” Tenney develops
a computational analysis of Ruggles’s pitch usage in an early example of
what is now called “computational musicology.” He postulated that it was
possible to know what Ruggles was trying to do from what he did and
how what he did evolved over time. The computer analysis demonstrates
that Ruggles chronologically refined his aesthetic of “nonrepetition” of
intervals and pitches toward what Tenney referred to in “Computer Music
Experiences” as a greater musical “variety.” This study, I believe, was a
kind of pilot project toward Tenney’s own reconsideration (both pedagogi-
cally and compositionally) of Seegerian dissonation. As such, this compu-
tational musicology project not only contributed to our understanding of
Ruggles’s music but became foundational for much of Tenney’s later work.
“About Changes: Sixty-Four Studies for Six Harps” is unusual in Ten-
ney’s prose output as the most detailed explanation of any of his pieces.
It was written for an edition of Perspectives of New Music about Tenney’s
 Introduction by Larry Polansky xxix

music. Seldom has a composer explained a work so clearly and com-

pletely: “My intentions in this work were both exploratory and didactic.
That is, I wanted to investigate the new harmonic resources that have
become available through the concept of ‘harmonic space’ much more
thoroughly than I had in any earlier work. At the same time I wanted to
explore these harmonic resources within a formal context which would
clearly demonstrate certain theoretical ideas and compositional methods
already developed in my computer music of the early 1960s.” Changes is
one of Tenney’s largest and most complex works. In it he combined two
of his main theoretical/compositional ideas mentioned earlier: hierarchi-
cal temporal gestalt formation and distance in harmonic space. The piece
integrates some other important techniques, such as Cagean-style choice
procedures; the use of tolerance (approximation of rational relationships
by large-number equal temperaments) to practically achieve complex
harmonic spaces; the half-cosine function (a way of getting from point A
to point B that “takes off and lands smoothly”); and the “dissonant coun-
terpoint algorithm.”
Tenney describes this algorithm in print for the first time, I believe, in
this article, though it is informally mentioned elsewhere, most notably in
“Computer Music Experiences,” some twenty-five years earlier. Pitches
in Changes were chosen by a multiplication of two probabilities—one
having to do with aggregate harmonic distance, and the other dealing
with the stochastic control of nonrepetition, modeling the 1930s Ameri-
can “ultramodernist” style:

Just after a pitch is chosen for an element, [the probability of] that
pitch is reduced to a very small value, and then increased step by
step, with the generation of each succeeding element (at any other
pitch), until it is again equal to 1. The result of this procedure is that
the immediate recurrence of a given pitch is made highly unlikely
(although not impossible, especially in long and/or dense clangs,
and in a polyphonic texture), with the probability of recurrence of
that pitch gradually increasing over the next several elements until
it is equal to what it would have been if it had not already occurred.

In other words, harmonic space is navigated via both a harmonic distance

function and a purely melodic one, the latter derived from some of the
music that first fascinated Tenney when he was young.
xxx Introduction by Larry Polansky

The articles on Bridge and Diapason were program notes for music fes-
tivals where it may have seemed prudent for Tenney to explain his work
to an audience largely unfamiliar with it. Both are nontechnical explana-
tions of why he wrote each piece. “Reflections after Bridge” (1984) clearly
states Tenney’s aesthetic at the time, the “reconciliation” of two musical
worlds: formal and aesthetic ideas inspired by Cage; harmonic possibili-
ties suggested by Partch. Bridge marked a return (not made explicit in the
article) to Tenney’s use of the computer as a compositional partner. The
computer facilitates more evolved notions of intentionality (the Cagean
part) and naturally motivated a return to the formative gestalt ideas of
Meta / Hodos.
The last article in this volume, “About Diapason” (1996), is a fitting
conclusion. Its tone is again that of Tenney the teacher. At the time,
Tenney had taught for over thirty-five years, and he would continue to
teach. He told me once, when I began my own teaching, that his peda-
gogical philosophy was not to tell the student what to do but to help her
do what she wanted to do (“not presume to tell a composer what should
or should not be done, but rather what the results might be if a given
thing is done”). He taught at a high level and with a palpable enthusiasm
for ideas. His tone is faithfully rendered in both of these articles (Bridge
and Diapason), as in the almost Socratic rhetorical device anticipating a
student’s question:

Why do I correlate new developments in harmony with the design

of new tuning systems? Consider the history of musical innovations
in the early twentieth century. (“Reflections after Bridge”)

One might well ask why we should go to such extraordinary lengths

to produce these unusual pitches, and my answer is that I believe
we have entered a new music-historical era during which there
will be a resumption of the evolutionary development of harmony.
(“About Diapason”)

From Scratch
There are a number of books that I like to recommend to my students,
ones that I believe are essential to an understanding of twentieth-century
American music: Cage’s Silence, Partch’s Genesis of a Music, Ives’s
 Introduction by Larry Polansky xxxi

Essays before a Sonata, Cowell’s New Musical Resources, and Tenney’s

Meta / Hodos. To me, all these composers started “from scratch” in won-
derfully different ways, asking deep and liberating questions about aes-
thetics, establishing their own theoretical foundations with unique and
individual relationships to history. Often they accomplished these things
by returning to an earlier fork in the road and taking a new path or by
reexamining fundamental assumptions buried under layers of historic
stylistic development.
These composers not only rethought some central idea in what “music
theory” might be but also reformulated that idea in prose. These writings
are our roadmaps for the future of music, a set of hypotheses and experi-
mental designs. Others will have their own lists. This current collection
of Tenney’s writings, in my opinion, belongs on any such list.
Tenney felt strongly that he was part of the “American experimental
tradition,” a tradition that he himself helped define. Fundamental to that
tradition is, I think, an enthusiasm for starting “from scratch,” as Tenney
has done here. Only by doing so can the language of our musical conver-
sation and the ideas of our new music be radically reformulated, and for
the better.

Larry Polansky
Hanover, New Hampshire
December 2012

Note
1. [[A History of ‘Consonance’ and ‘Dissonance’ was published in 1988;
an excerpt appears in appendix 3.—Ed.]
From Scratch
 CHAPTER 1

On the Development
of the Structural Potentialities
of Rhythm, Dynamics, and Timbre
in the Early Nontonal Music
of Arnold Schoenberg
(1959)

Introduction
Beginning with the Three Piano Pieces, op. 11, and continuing through
Pierrot Lunaire and the Four Songs with Orchestra, opp. 21 and 22,
Arnold Schoenberg developed a style that he later characterized as one
based on “the emancipation of the dissonance,” which “treats dissonances
like consonances and renounces a tonal center”—and his further descrip-
tions of the developments of this period are almost exclusively in terms of
harmonic innovations.1 Analytical writings by others have reflected this
same concern with the harmonic (and, to a lesser extent, the melodic)
aspects of the music.2 Although anyone who is familiar with the music of
this period must be aware of the innovations in other areas, little attempt
has been made to study these innovations in detail or to incorporate them
into a consistent analytical or descriptive method. Schoenberg himself
gave little theoretical consideration to what might be called the nonhar-
monic aspects of music—i.e., rhythm, dynamics, timbre, etc.—and most
traditional methods of analysis have practically ignored them. This may
have been justified, insofar as most of the music to which these methods
were applied (music of the late baroque, classic, and romantic periods)

1
2 chapter 1

was primarily conditioned by structural potentialities inherent in the sys-

tem of tonality. That these methods do not thoroughly describe the music
is undoubtedly true, but they do perhaps describe adequately the most
important structural forces involved. Nevertheless, this single-mindedness
is surprising. With the gradual dissolution of the tonal system in the music
of this period, we are faced with a situation in which harmonic-melodic
analysis is obviously inadequate to describe the actual formal processes
in the music. It is no longer possible to ignore the rhythmic and other
nonharmonic aspects, because it is frequently these very aspects that are
the most potent shaping forces or that give a piece its particular form and
character. Indeed, the results of the various attempts at harmonic analysis
should have led to this conclusion, unless one assumes either that new
harmonic “laws” may yet be discovered, more or less analogous to the
old laws, which can account for the musical facts, or, alternatively, that
the music of this earlier period only represents a transitional or incipient
stage in a longer development—that is, in the development toward the
12-tone technique. The first assumption seems highly unlikely (though
certainly not impossible), considering the fact that analysts have been
looking for such laws almost exclusively these last fifty years, and conse-
quently these should have been the first to be found, if they exist at all.
But the second assumption, it seems to me, overlooks the real integrity
and completeness—the relative perfection—of this music, which stands
on its own, in terms of formal coherence and stylistic consistency, without
any justification through reference to later developments. It is true that
the 12-tone method represents a logical development of certain proce-
dures employed earlier in a spontaneous or even perhaps unconscious way
(and thus, unsystematically), but I should like to emphasize the qualifica-
tion “certain procedures” in the above statement: only some of the many
innovations in the earlier music actually became an explicit part of the
12-tone technique; others remained as implicit elements in the style; still
others seem to have been abandoned; while certain aspects of the later
method can hardly have been derived from the earlier music at all but
seem rather to have been “grafted on” from the outside or to have been
conceived simultaneously with the codification of the 12-tone method in
the 1920s. That this method is a partial systematization of procedures that
Schoenberg had already used (and that had been, as he said, “conceived
as in a dream”) is one of the points I hope to demonstrate in this paper.
Eventually, there might be possible a broader generalization of the basic
ideas underlying this same method, which could account for many more
 Rhythm, Dynamics, and Timbre in Schoenberg 3

of the earlier procedures, and at the same time include the propositions
of the 12-tone technique as a special case. I have not attempted to do this
here, of course, but it is to be hoped that the observations made in this
paper might later serve as the basis for such a generalization.

I. Rhythm
I said above that the nonharmonic elements of music are often the
strongest shaping forces in Schoenberg’s works of this period. That this
should have happened simultaneously with or immediately following the
breakdown of the system of tonality seems inevitable. Something was
needed to replace the older structural functions of harmony, and it is
obvious that Schoenberg did not wait for the 12-tone method to restore
these functions (although this is what is implied in most accounts of his
development). If we are to accept the pieces from op. 11 through op.
22 as self-sufficient and “perfect,” we must try to find the forces that
actually were called into play in the absence of the traditional harmonic
functions, and in many cases these will be found in the development of
the other attributes or parameters of sound—duration, intensity, timbre,
etc.—as well as pitch. It will be seen that one of the most significant
characteristics of the music of this period is that it greatly extended the
structural potentialities of all the attributes of sound.
The third of the Three Piano Pieces, op. 11, is an example of a kind
of musical development in which harmonic-melodic elements are so con-
stantly varied that there is virtually no thematic relationship between dif-
ferent parts of the piece—at least not in any commonly accepted sense
of the word “thematic,” implying more or less invariant interval-relations
among the constituent tones of a melodic line. There are no motives sub-
ject to variation and development—again in the harmonic-melodic sense.
I must emphasize this qualification, “harmonic-melodic,” because if the
terms “motive” and (more especially) “theme” are defined more broadly to
include other attributes of sound, we may find them here and in similar
pieces. Conversely, if we are to demonstrate thematic correspondence in
such pieces, it will be necessary to include all parameters in our definitions.
The motivic or thematic organization of this piece is primarily in terms of
rhythmic patterns. There are two (or perhaps three) basic rhythmic ideas
heard simultaneously at the beginning of the piece, and while the pitch
patterns undergo a constant, kaleidoscopic process of alteration, these
rhythmic patterns remain relatively invariant—or rather, certain relations
4 chapter 1

within the patterns remain invariant, while the ideas themselves are sub-
jected to more or less straightforward techniques of variation. In example
1,3 the various forms of one of these rhythmic ideas are superposed in such
a way that one may see the correspondences between the different ver-
sions, as well as the variation-processes to which they have been subjected.
In addition to this thematic or motivic use of rhythm, another aspect
of the duration-parameter, namely tempo, or temporal density (to distin-
guish between the tempo as notated and the actual “speed” of the music,
which involves both the tempo and the note-values), is one of the most
important means of marking structural divisions within the piece. There
are three main sections in the piece, and the divisions between these sec-
tions (at measures 10 and 24) are both marked by a significant slowing
of the tempo, followed by a faster tempo. The same is true of most of the
smaller sections and subordinate groups. In fact, changes in temporal
density (along with other factors that will be described in a moment)
actually serve to create these divisions, not merely to emphasize them.
The other factors that participate here in the creation of structural divi-
sions—sometimes paralleling the effect of tempo, sometimes indepen-
dently of this—are dynamic level, and a factor that is related to this,
conditioning the dynamic level to a great extent, which might be called
vertical- or pitch-density, i.e., the number of simultaneously sounding
tones at any given moment. In measure 9, the dynamic level is pianissimo,
the pitch-density decreases from five to three tones (or less, since the F
and G will have partially died away by the time the A is played), and the
second section follows with a sudden forte-crescendo and a pitch-density
of six or seven. Similarly, the third section is separated from the second by
a change in level from ppp to f, although there is little significant change
in pitch-density at this point. Such general (or even “statistical”) aspects
of sound do not fully account for the formal structure of the piece, which
will also depend upon the more specific thematic relations, but it is clear
that they do have a powerful effect in the articulation of the form and
that they can, to some extent, replace the earlier harmonic functions.
The relatively independent development of rhythmic ideas in this piece
is somewhat rare in Schoenberg’s work: usually the rhythmic patterns
are treated as subordinate features of an idea that is primarily charac-
terized by melodic or harmonic relations. This approach was implied by
Schoenberg when he said: “In every composition preceding the method of
composing with twelve tones, all the thematic and harmonic material is
 Rhythm, Dynamics, and Timbre in Schoenberg 5

primarily derived from three sources: the tonality, the basic motive which
in turn is a derivative of the tonality, and the rhythm, which is included
in the basic motive.” Here, the basic motive—from which the “thematic
material” is derived—is primarily a melodic unit that includes, as one of
its features, the rhythm. (I am assuming that his statement also refers
to his own pre-12-note music, in spite of the reference to tonality.) In
most cases this description would be appropriate, but in op. 11, no. 3,
the rhythm is the “basic motive,” while the pitch-elements might almost
be considered as derivatives of the rhythm. With this interpretation, the
roles of the rhythmic and melodic ideas are seen to be reversed, and his
description is not applicable. Another statement by Schoenberg, however,
is relevant to the problem here, in which he says, regarding the Rondo
of the Wind Quintet, op. 26: “While rhythm and phrasing significantly
preserve the character of the theme so that it can easily be recognized,
the tones and intervals are changed through a different use of BS (the
‘Basic Set’) and mirror forms.” In this case, as in the piano piece, the
rhythm is relatively independent of pitch-relations as a thematic determi-
nant (by which I mean that attribute—or those attributes, since there may
be several operating at once—that is the most effective shaping factor in
a sound-idea and is thus the one by which later variations of an idea may
be recognized). Rufer calls this use of rhythm the “isorhythmic principle,”4
and it has certainly had an important place in musical composition prior
to Schoenberg, although there would seem to be a significant difference
between the use of invariant rhythmic relations as a thematic feature and
the original isorhythmic devices employed by early Renaissance compos-
ers. In the latter case, the rhythmic pattern functions in a way similar to
that of the cantus firmus in the harmonic-melodic field, providing a kind
of unifying “base” to the flow of the music. That it did not have a thematic
function is indicated by the fact that the actual phrase-structure often did
not coincide with the isorhythmic patterns but overlapped these in various
ways. Furthermore, the very idea of thematic development—implying the-
matic recognition—was relatively unimportant in Renaissance music, and
we should not expect that the rhythmic patterns have any such thematic
functions. Nonthematic isorhythmic procedures, however, do constitute
an important structural force to be acknowledged along with the other
potentialities of the rhythmic factor, but I have not yet found an example
in Schoenberg’s music of this period of the use of rhythm in this particular
way. Nevertheless, in their use of specific rhythmic patterns as thematic
6 chapter 1

determinants, and in their use of changes in temporal density to mark

structural divisions within a piece, Schoenberg’s works of this period show
that the duration-parameter is capable of manifold structural functions at
both the smaller and larger formal levels.

II. Dynamics
Dynamic level has already been referred to as an effective means of delin-
eating different sections of a piece, but this parameter can operate in other
ways, too. As accent, it can create a rhythmic shape in an otherwise undif-
ferentiated succession of sounds. In the form of gradual changes of inten-
sity—crescendo and diminuendo—it can give shape to a motive, phrase,
section, or even sometimes an entire piece. A difference in dynamic level
can serve to emphasize certain parts in a complex texture, or simply to sep-
arate or distinguish two individual lines in a polyphonic passage. An inter-
esting use of the last effect can be found in Schoenberg’s Six Short Piano
Pieces, op. 19, in the third piece (see example 2) where the right-hand part
is to be played forte, the left-hand part pianissimo, and the difference being
clearly not intended for the purpose of bringing out the upper part. Here
also, the dynamic distinction may be considered an important feature of
the thematic idea, and this is similar in some respects to another effect of
relative loudness, which is used in the last piece in this same set (example
3). The difference between the pppp of the highest part and the p of the
D in the next lower octave produces a unique “coloration” of the sound.
These various functions of the intensity-parameter might be sum-
marized as follows: (1) the delineation of successive musical ideas and
sections within a piece; (2) the separation of simultaneous lines in a poly-
phonic texture (simple emphasis of one part over another being a special
case of this); (3) the creation of a rhythmic pattern through accent; (4) a
kind of “color-effect” that gives a sound a unique quality or timbre; and
(5) the shaping, in time, of a structural unit from the level of a single
motive up through sections or entire pieces. There may be others, but
these five are perhaps the most important, and of the five, only the last
two indicate the possibility for independent development, or the kind
of thematic significance that I have attempted to describe in the case
of rhythm. There are two apparent reasons for this limitation, the most
important one arising from a phenomenon that I call “parametric trans-
ference.” In (2) above (separation of lines), the dynamic factor will tend
to be absorbed into the pitch-factor by either focusing the attention on a
 Rhythm, Dynamics, and Timbre in Schoenberg 7

particular melodic configuration or else conditioning the harmonic effect

of the texture. In (3) (accent), there will be a similar transference to the
rhythmic field whenever the accents superimpose larger duration-rela-
tions upon a series of undifferentiated note-values. Although superficially
it might appear that (4) (the “color-effect”) would also be a case of trans-
ference (to the field of timbre), it is rather more clearly a dynamic effect,
as such, than (2) and (3); and of course the first of our five functions does
not raise the question of “thematic significance” at all.
The second reason for the limitation of the dynamic factor in its pos-
sibilities for thematic determination is the fact that intensity is not, like
pitch and rhythm, a periodic function of time. It is this periodicity that
makes it possible to perceive precise proportional relations within the
pitch- and duration-parameters. Without this periodicity there could never
have been a tonal system like the one developed in Western music since
the Renaissance, nor could there have been such a high development of
purely rhythmic organization as may be found in certain Asian and African
cultures. But before it begins to seem that I am contradicting some of my
own earlier assertions, let it be noted that in these works of Schoenberg,
periodicity has retained little of the importance it had in earlier music. The
most effective procedures by which the tonal system was suspended or dis-
solved were procedures that controverted the older proportional relations
by obscuring this very periodicity in both pitch and duration—i.e., through
highly complex dissonances and asymmetrical rhythmic structures. And as
pitch- and duration-relations become less and less proportional—and thus
more and more “statistical”—the importance of the other, nonproportional
parameters becomes correspondingly greater. The dynamic “coloration”
or characterization and the dynamic shaping of a sound-idea can actually
function as a thematic determinant in addition to the other, relatively more
subordinate functions of intensity. I suggest that this attribute of sound can
be—and is, in many of these works of Schoenberg—of much greater struc-
tural importance than has previously been admitted in analytical writings.
At this point I must backtrack a moment to explain something about
my use of the word “structure” and perhaps forestall certain objections to
my argument that can be anticipated. I do not assume any fundamental
distinction between the “structural” and the “expressive” features in a
piece of music—none, at least, from the standpoint of what might be
called a functional analysis as opposed to a historical analysis. A rather
superficial distinction does appear in the latter context, in that techni-
cal and stylistic innovations often seem to occur at first spontaneously,
8 chapter 1

unconsciously, and thus “expressively”—only later becoming consciously

used, deliberately planned, etc., and thus, in a way, “structural.” The
argument is tautological to some extent and dependent upon the way the
words are defined, but there is at least a grain of truth in it. There seems
to be a historical process involved by which those elements that are the
least consciously controlled—one might say, the least predictable—are
also the elements most subject to the expressive fantasy of the composer,
especially in periods of relative stylistic stability, when a body of techni-
cal devices is more or less commonly used and consciously understood.
This stylistic stability begins to break down when these same “expres-
sive” elements develop an importance out of proportion with that of the
“structural” elements: that is to say, when the expressive elements begin
to affect the structure significantly and thus actually to acquire structural
functions. This process can be clearly seen in these works of Schoenberg,
and unless the process is understood, there will continue to be made what
I consider a drastic misinterpretation of the music of this period, a mis-
interpretation that is reflected in the label that has been attached to the
style—“expressionism.” This term refers, at best, to only one aspect of the
artistic tendencies of the period, namely, the concern with the subjective
qualities of experience, with emotional and psychological “inner reality,”
as opposed to objective, materialistic “outer” reality. As such, it is hardly
more than an intensification of the first term in the old “romantic vs.
classic” dichotomy, and the word simply adds another to the list of such
labels that only serve to obscure the real complexity of forces involved
in any historical period. The term might more appropriately be used to
describe the period immediately preceding Schoenberg. His work was not
only a consequence of this “protoexpressionism” but a reaction against it
as well. The so-called expressionist period was as much characterized by
a concern with formal problems as was any other period in the history of
the arts and probably no more involved with “expression” for its own sake
than any other. It was the period of the birth of cubism in painting, surely
one of the most “formally” oriented approaches in the history of paint-
ing; James Joyce’s Ulysses was written, again manifesting a vigorous con-
cern with structure; Schoenberg himself wrote the Harmonielehre at this
time (1911); and so on. Curiously, and in seeming contradiction to my
argument, Schoenberg’s painting and literary works (such as Die glück-
liche Hand) are perhaps truly “expressionistic,” as are also the texts that
he borrowed from other writers for musical settings (Erwartung, Pierrot
Lunaire), but there is a substantial difference between his essays in other
 Rhythm, Dynamics, and Timbre in Schoenberg 9

media and his work in music and also a difference between the nature of
the texts he chose to set and the musical settings themselves. In any case,
whether or not my argument here is convincing from a historical stand-
point, it will perhaps be agreed that those characteristics of Schoenberg’s
music of this period that give it enduring value will not be those associ-
ated with the particular expressive attitudes of that period, which can
too quickly become “dated,” but rather those characteristics that provide
structural coherence and formal unity in the pieces.

III. Timbre
A third nonharmonic attribute of musical sound remains to be consid-
ered, and that is timbre, or “tone-color.” Schoenberg has written: “My
concept of color is not the usual one. Color, like light and shadow in the
physical world, expresses and limits the forms and sizes of objects . . .
[and] lucidity is the first purpose of color in music, the aim of the orches-
tration of every true artist.” The “usual” concept of color, with which he
contrasts his own, can be assumed to be one in which color is merely a
superficial aspect of the music, and in this contrast we can see an example
of the historical process described above. And yet, even this description
of the importance of “color” in his music does not go far enough. Again,
as with rhythm, there is some disparity between Schoenberg’s statement
and his actual musical achievement, or perhaps the disparity is between
an earlier and a later attitude. His concept of the Klangfarbenmelodie,
for example, which was first described in the Harmonielehre (1911) but
already applied in the Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16 (1909), assigns a
greater role to timbre than that of mere “lucidity” or of simply “expressing
and limiting the forms and sizes of objects.” In this work, tone-color fre-
quently creates the “forms and sizes” of the musical “objects.” In another
context—his essay on Mahler—he does accord this factor a more inde-
pendent significance when he writes about

the middle movements of the Seventh Symphony, with their sonori-

ties of guitar, harp, and solo instruments. This guitar in the Seventh
is not introduced for a single effect, but the whole movement is
based on this sonority. It belongs to it from the very beginning, it
is a living organ of the composition: not the heart, but perhaps the
eyes, whose glance is so characteristic of its aspect. This instance is
very close—in a more modern way, naturally—to the method of the
10 chapter 1

classical composers, who built whole movements or pieces on the

sonority of a specific instrumental group.5

In this last quotation, a particular “sonority” is described as being the

basis for a whole movement. From this it is not a long step to a situation
in which a movement, section, or even shorter unit is based on certain
changes in sonority, and if the articulation of the other parameters, partic-
ularly pitch, is reduced to the extent that timbre becomes the most effec-
tive determinant, we shall have a real “melody of tone-colors.” So defined,
the only clear-cut example I have found in Schoenberg’s music is the third
of the Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16, subtitled “Farben.” In this piece,
timbre does become the most effective shaping factor, and the degree of
articulation of all the other parameters is correspondingly reduced to a
minimum. There is some change in the harmonic (i.e., intervallic) struc-
ture of the five-note chord, but the actual effect of these changes is also
one of a change in timbre. The harmonic factor is absorbed or transferred
into the factor of timbre, or alternatively, one might say that the distinc-
tion between the two factors is neutralized—an interpretation that has
important implications in relation to harmonic events in most of Schoen-
berg’s music, as well as in that of many other composers of the twentieth
century. A succession of chords, in the absence of the clear-cut relations
of traditional functional harmony, is often heard as a succession of tim-
bres, colors, or sonorities, the nature of which is primarily dependent
upon the constituent intervals, the actual instrumental timbres involved,
the manner of articulation, pitch registration of the chord, etc.
The last piece in the same set (“Das obligate Rezitativ”) has also been
associated with this concept of the Klangfarbenmelodie, and certainly we
have here an example of an orchestral technique in which timbre plays a
much greater role in the articulation of the musical ideas than it had pre-
vious to Schoenberg, although it is questionable whether this piece can
be called an example of a real “melody of tone-colors,” since the pitch-
melody is so highly developed. Two more examples will be given, however,
in which the factor of timbre is at least as important as the pitch-factor
and that show that timbre is capable of relatively independent functions
in the musical structure.
The first example is another of the Five Pieces for Orchestra, the
fourth in the set, entitled “Peripetie” (example 4). The sudden, unpre-
dictable “reversals in dramatic action,” implicit in the title are reflected
in the music by violent contrasts in dynamic level, tempo, pitch-density,
 Rhythm, Dynamics, and Timbre in Schoenberg 11

and, of course, timbre. But timbre has another function here in addition
to this—that is, it does not function only on this one structural level.
If one examines each of the contrasting sections separately—sections
within which there is a certain homogeneity due to similarities in tempo
and dynamic level—it will be seen that certain changes of timbre are an
inherent feature in the particular shaping of the thematic ideas. In the
very beginning, the five-note upbeat figure in unison woodwinds leads
to a sustained six-note chord in the cellos and basses, the woodwinds
providing only an accentuated attack to the string sonority. While the
strings hold the chord, the phrase itself continues almost immediately in
the brass (the effect being similar to that obtained with the piano by the
use of the pedal to sustain earlier tones of a melodic pattern through the
sounding of later tones), then it passes to the woodwinds again, this last
part of the phrase being “capped” by the pizzicato in the upper strings.
That this three-part structure actually constitutes a single phrase is per-
haps open to question, but the overlapping or dovetailing of its various
parts and the singularity of gesture—an upward movement—indicate that
it is to be considered a single musical idea, or to use Schoenberg’s term, a
“basic shape.” A singular (though complex) “line” passes from woodwinds
to strings, brass, woodwinds again, and finally plucked strings, all within
a span of about three seconds. There can be little doubt that the essential
nature of this line is intimately connected with the particular sequence
of timbres involved and that an alteration in this respect would affect the
character of the line as much as, say, an alteration of its interval-structure.
In measures 5 and 6 of the same piece (example 5), the repeated chord
in trumpets and strings is echoed by the woodwinds, and this effect is devel-
oped later in the alternation between violas and oboes (measures 291 to 294
of the full score, and anticipated in measure 290 by the brass) and again (in
measures 296 to 298) by the alternation between woodwinds (1st and 2nd
flutes and oboes) and trumpets (see examples 6 and 7). In these two ver-
sions, the pitch structure of the two members of the alternating pairs is not
the same as it was in the original, “echoing” version, but the effect is similar,
and the difference actually serves to underline the importance of the tim-
bre-change to the motivic or thematic character. Thus, the pitch-relations
can be considerably altered without much changing the basic shape—as
long as the timbre shape is retained (as also, of course, the rhythmic shape,
which is perhaps the primary determinant here). Here it is not the specific
timbres that are involved but the more general effect of timbre change—a
distinction that should be made in regard to the third piece in the set, too.
12 chapter 1

A last example pertinent to the question of timbre is the fourth piece

in Pierrot Lunaire, “Eine blasse Wäscherin.” In the first eight measures,
the instrumental part consists of a simple, almost chorale-like texture in
three voices, but the individual instruments constantly cross each other
so that each successive chord has a sonority slightly different from the
previous one. The effect is similar to that in op. 16, no. 3, and this piece
is an extraordinary example of compositional economy, achieving with
three instruments an effect that would seem to require a whole orchestra!
There is here, of course, more harmonic and melodic shaping, as such,
than in the orchestra piece, but it is obvious that Schoenberg has here
taken great care to superimpose a timbre-pattern upon the pitch-pattern,
the two remaining relatively independent of each other.
So far in this paper I have been considering those attributes of sound
not included in the realm of pitch-relations, thus avoiding the usual har-
monic and melodic aspects of the music. I have done this deliberately in
order to point up the importance of factors that are too often overlooked
or ignored or perhaps simply taken for granted in musical analysis. I do not
intend to undervalue the pitch-factors, but I believe that a fuller under-
standing of the music of Schoenberg (and many other significant twen-
tieth-century composers) can only be gained after all the various shaping
forces are seen to be of more nearly equal importance. That they function
differently there is no doubt, and that some are more effective than others
in particular situations is quite obvious, but none of them can be ignored in
any reasonably adequate analysis of the music. We have seen that each of
the nonharmonic parameters may attain structural importance at various
levels, from that of the individual motivic and thematic ideas to that of the
larger formal units. It seems not unreasonable to believe that these param-
eters could be controlled in ways comparable to those exercised over pitch
in the 12-tone method—though these need not necessarily be identical to
the pitch-controls, as they seem to be in more recent “total serialization”
procedures. The mere fact that each parameter can function as an effec-
tive shaping factor does not mean that all such parametric shapes can be
treated in the same way, since they may not be heard in the same way. Nev-
ertheless, the possibility remains that all these factors might be brought
into one comprehensive system that would be based on realities of musical
perception rather than arbitrary and quasi-mathematical assumptions.
 CHAPTER 2

Meta / Hodos*
A Phenomenology of Twentieth-Century
Musical Materials and an Approach to
the Study of Form
(1961)

Publisher’s Introduction
Meta / Hodos was originally written by James Tenney as his master’s thesis
at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1961. It was pub-
lished in a limited edition by Gilbert Chase some years later but has been
difficult to obtain since its creation. Yet it has had a wide and powerful
impact on music theory and composition in the past twenty-five years to
a degree greatly disproportionate to its availability. “META Meta / Hodos,”
written in 1975, was first published in the Journal of Experimental Aesthet-
ics 1, no. 1 (1977). The present Frog Peak Music edition of Meta / Hodos
and “META Meta / Hodos” marks an attempt to make these seminal theo-
retical documents available to a larger community of artists.
This second edition includes corrections and revisions by the author.
Larry Polansky
Oakland, 1988

* “meth-od, n. [F. méthode, fr. L. methodus, fr. Gr. methodos, method, investiga-
tion following after, fr. meta after + hodos way].”

13
14 chapter 2

Meta / Hodos
June 1961

Section I. The New Musical Materials

A good description of a phenomenon may by itself rule out a num-
ber of theories and indicate definite features which a true theory
must possess. We call this kind of observation “phenomenology,”
a word which means . . . as naive and full a description of direct
experience as possible.
Kurt Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 73

One must be convinced of the infallibility of one’s own fantasy

and one must believe in one’s own inspiration. Nevertheless, the
desire for a conscious control of the new means and forms will
arise in every artist’s mind, and he will wish to know consciously
the laws and rules which govern the forms which he has conceived
“as in a dream.” Strongly convincing as this dream may have been,
the conviction that these new sounds obey the laws of nature and
our manner of thinking . . . forces the composer along the road of
exploration.
Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea, 218

The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame

and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of es-
thetic apprehension.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 208

The increased aural complexity of much of the music of the twentieth

century is such an evident characteristic that it should need no demon-
stration. Nevertheless, an examination of the many factors that produce
this complexity and of some of its effects in our perception of the music
will be necessary before we can hope to describe the musical materials
in a really meaningful way. The complexity is not merely of structure but
also of substance. That is, it is not simply the result of a new arrangement
 Meta / Hodos 15

of traditional materials or elements. (I shall use the word element in this

book in the sense of “part” or “portion” rather than “aspect” or “factor.”)
The elements themselves have changed, and the changes affect not only
the musical structure but our way of listening to the music as well. And
the problems that arise from this seem to go beyond the mere question
of the amount of time required for the ear and mind to assimilate the
novelties of a new style until they no longer have what Schoenberg once
described as a “sense-interrupting effect.” Time has given us some degree
of familiarity with even the most advanced musical achievements of the
early twentieth century, and yet our descriptive and analytical approaches
to this music are still belabored with negatives—“atonal,” “athematic,”
etc.—that tell us what the music is not rather than what it is. The nar-
rowness of the traditional musical concepts is manifested by this very
negativism and by the fact that many significant works of this earlier
period are too often relegated to the realm of “exceptions,” “deviations,”
or “interesting experiments.” And the disparity between the traditional
concepts and the actual musical “object” becomes even greater with
the more recent (noninstrumental) electronic and tape music. But even
here, the problem is not really one of a lack of familiarity but of a nearly
complete hiatus between music theory and musical practice. Thus, even
when the novelties of the various styles and techniques of twentieth-
century music have become thoroughly familiar, certain “complexities”
will still remain outside of our present conceptual framework, and it is
clear that this conceptual framework is in need of expansion.

Example 1. Charles Ives, Scherzo: Over the Pavements (mm. 93–94). All
instruments sound as written in these examples.
 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
‘Your father’s steed in my stable,
He’s eating corn and hay,
And you’re lying in my twa arms;
What need you long for day?’

8
‘If I had paper, pen, and ink,
And candle for to see,
I wud write a lang letter
To my love in Dundee.’

9
They brocht her paper, pen, and ink,
And candle for to see,
And she did write a lang letter
To her love in Dundee.

10
When he cam to Linlyon’s yetts,
And lichtit on the green,
But lang or he wan up the stair
His love was dead and gane.

11
‘Woe be to thee, Linlyon,
An ill death may thou die!
Thou micht hae taen anither woman,
And let my lady be.’
 D
Campbell MSS, II, 254.
1
Bonnie Annie Livingstone
Was walking out the way,
By came the laird of Glendinning,
And he’s stolen her away.
The Highlands are no for me, kind sir,
The Highlands are no for me,
And, if you wad my favour win,
You’d take me to Dundee.

2
He mounted her on a milk-white steed,
Himself upon a grey,
He’s taen her to the Highland hills,
And stolen her quite away.

3
When they came to Glendinning gate,
They lighted on the green;
There many a Highland lord spoke free,
But fair Annie she spake nane.

4
When bells were rung, and mass begun,
And a’ men bound for bed,
Bonnie Annie Livingstone
Was in her chamber laid.

5
‘O gin it were but day, kind sir!
O gin it were but day!
O gin it were but day, kind sir,
That I might win away!’

6
‘Your steed stands in the stall, bonnie Ann,
Eating corn and hay,
 at g co a d ay,
And you are in Glendinning’s arms;
What need ye long for day?’

7
‘O fetch me paper, pen, and ink,
A candle that I may see,
And I will write a long letter
To Jemmy at Dundee.’

8
When Jemmie looked the letter on,
A loud laughter gave he;
But eer he read the letter oer
The tear blinded his ee.

9
‘Gar saddle,’ he cried, ‘my war-horse fierce,
Warn a’ my trusty clan,
And I’ll away to Glendinning Castle
And see my sister Ann.’

10
When he came to Glendinning yet,
He lighted on the green,
But ere that he wan up the stair
Fair Annie she was gane.

11
‘The Highlands were not for thee, bonnie Ann,
The Highlands were not for thee,
And they that would have thy favour won
Should have brought you home to me.

12
‘O I will kiss thy cherry cheeks,
And I will kiss thy chin,
And I will kiss thy rosy lips,
d ss t y osy ps,
For they will neer kiss mine.’
 E
Kinloch MSS, V, 355, in the handwriting of John Hill Burton.
1
Bonny Baby Livingstone
Went out to view the hay,
And by there came a Hieland lord,
And he’s stown Baby away.

2
He’s stown her in her coat, her coat,
And he’s stown her in her gown,
And he let not her look back again
Ere she was many a mile from town.

3
He set her on a milk-white steed,
Himself upon another,
And they are on to bonny Lochell,
Like sister and like brother.

4
The bells were rung, the mass was sung,
And all men bound to bed,
And Baby and her Hieland lord
They were both in one chamber laid.

5
‘Oh day, kind sir! Oh day, kind sir!
Oh day fain would I see!
I would gie a’ the lands o Livingstone
For day-light, to lat me see.’

6
‘Oh day, Baby? Oh day, Baby?
What needs you long for day?
Your steed is in a good stable,
And he’s eating baith corn and hay.

7
‘Oh day, Baby? Oh day, Baby?
What needs you long for day?
You’r lying in a good knight’s arms,
What needs you long for day?’

8
‘Ye’ll get me paper, pen, and ink,
And light to let me see,
Till I write on a broad letter
And send ‘t to Lord ...’

A.
“On the other page you will find the whole
ballad of Bonny Baby Livingston. I found upon
recollection that I had the whole story in my
memory, and thought it better to write it out
entire, as what I repeated to you was, I think,
more imperfect.” Mrs Brown, MS., Appendix, p.
xv.
a.
35 . first may be fast, as in b.
4

b.
2
1 . gaed out.
1
2 . And first.
3
2 . in his.
1
3 . He’s mounted her upon a.
 1
4 . oer yon hich hich hill.
2
4 . Intill a.
3
4 . He met.
1
5 . And there.
2
5 . And there were kids sae fair.
3
5 . But sad and wae was bonny Baby.
4
5 . was fu o.
1
6 . He’s taen her in his arms twa.
3
6 . I wad gie a’ my flocks and herds.
4
6 . Ae smile frae thee to.

7.
A smile frae me ye’se never win,
I’ll neer look kind on thee;
Ye’ve stown me awa frae a’ my kin,
Frae a’ that’s dear to me.

Dundee, kind sir, Dundee, kind sir,

Tak me to bonny Dundee!
For ye sall neer my favour win
Till it ance mair I see.

3
8 . But I will carry you.
 4
8 . Where you my bride shall be.
1
9 . Or will ye stay at.
2
9 . And get.
3
9 . Or gang wi me to.
4
9 . we’ll live.
2
10 . I care neither for milk nor.
3
10 . gang.
2
11 . If I were in.
3
11 . I’d send.
3
12 . coudna win.
1
13 . tongue, my brother John.
3
13 . I hae.
4
13 . This mony a year and day.
1
14 . I’ve lued her lang and lued her weel.
2
14 . But her love I.
3
14 . And what I canna fairly gain.
4
14 . To steal.
3
15 . they cam, his three sisters.
4
15 . Their brother for to greet.
 1
16 . And they have taen her bonny Baby.
3
17 . why look ye sae.
4
17 . Come tell.
3
18 . I’m far frae.
2
19 . Afore.
3
19 . letter wrate.
4
19 . And sent to.
After 19:

And gin I had a bonny boy

To help me in my need,
That he might rin to bonny Dundee,
And come again wi speed.

20. Wanting.
1
21 . And they hae.
2
21 . Their errand for to gang.
3
21 . And bade him run to bonny Dundee.
4
21 . And nae to tarry lang.
22, 23. Wanting.
1
24 . oer muir.
 2
24 . As fast as he.
25, 26. Wanting.

27.
Whan Johnie lookit the letter on,
A hearty laugh leuch he;
But ere he read it till an end
The tear blinded his ee.

O wha is this, or what is that,

Has stown my love frae me?
Although he were my ae brither,
An ill dead sall he die.

1
28 . Gae saddle to me the black, he says.
2,3
28 . Gae.
1
29 . He’s called upon his merry.
2
29 . To follow him to.
3
29 . And he’s vowd he’d neither.
4 1
29 . he got his. 30 . him on.
2
30 . And fast he rade away.
3
30 . And he’s come to Glenlyon’s yett.
2
31 . And the.
 4
31 . Aneath.
1
32 . window loup.
34. Wanting.
4
35 . As fast.
4
36 . laverock.
1
37 . nae the.
B.
3 . ewes. Indistinctly written.
4

2
5 . fore.
 223

EPPIE MORRIE

‘Eppie Morrie,’ Maidment’s North Countrie Garland,

p. 40, 18

“This ballad,” says Maidment, “is probably much

more than a century old, though the circumstances
which have given rise to it were unfortunately too
common to preclude the possibility of its being of a
later date.” He does not tell us where the ballad
came from, and no other editor seems to know of it.
Two stanzas, 10, 11, occur in a copy of ‘Rob Roy’ (No
225, J) which had once been in Maidment’s hands,
and perhaps was obtained from the same region.
Four-and-twenty Highlanders, the leader of whom
is one Willie, come to Strathdon from Carrie (Carvie?)
side to steal away Eppie Morrie, who has refused to
marry Willie. They tie her on a horse and take her to
a minister, whom Willie, putting a pistol to his breast,
orders to marry them. The minister will not consent
unless Eppie is willing, and she strenuously refuses;
so they take her to Carrie side and put her to bed.
She defends herself successfully, and in the morning
comes in her lover, Belbordlane, or John Forsyth, well
armed, and we presume well supported, who carries
her back to her mother, to be his bride.
Scott, Introduction to Rob Roy, Appendix, No V,
cites two stanzas of a ballad derived from tradition
which, if we had the whole, might possibly turn out
to be the same story with different names.
Four-and-twenty Hieland men
Came doun by Fiddoch side,
And they have sworn a deadly aith
Jean Muir suld be a bride.

And they have sworn a deadly aith,

Ilke man upon his durke,
That she should wed with Duncan Ger,
Or they’d make bloody worke.
1
Four-and-twenty Highland men
Came a’ from Carrie side
To steal awa Eppie Morrie,
Cause she would not be a bride.

2
Out it’s came her mother,
It was a moonlight night,
She could not see her daughter,
Their swords they shin’d so bright.

3
‘Haud far awa frae me, mother,
Haud far awa frae me;
There’s not a man in a’ Strathdon
Shall wedded be with me.’

4
They have taken Eppie Morrie,
And horse back bound her on,
And then awa to the minister,
As fast as horse could gang.

5
He’s taken out a pistol,
And set it to the minister’s breast:
‘Marry me, marry me, minister,
Or else I’ll be your priest.’

6
‘Haud far awa frae me, good sir,
Haud far awa frae me;
For there’s not a man in all Strathdon
That shall married be with me.’

7
‘Haud far awa frae me, Willie,
Haud far awa frae me;
For I darna avow to marry you,
Except she’s as willing as ye.’

8
They have taken Eppie Morrie,
Since better could nae be,
And they’re awa to Carrie side,
As fast as horse could flee.

9
When mass was sung, and bells were rung,
And all were bound for bed,
Then Willie an Eppie Morrie
In one bed they were laid.

10
‘Haud far awa frae me, Willie,
Haud far awa frae me;
Before I’ll lose my maidenhead,
I’ll try my strength with thee.’

11
She took the cap from off her head
And threw it to the way;
Said, Ere I lose my maidenhead,
I’ll fight with you till day.

12
Then early in the morning,
Before her clothes were on,
In came the maiden of Scalletter,
Gown and shirt alone.

13
‘Get up, get up, young woman,
 And drink the wine wi me;’
‘You might have called me maiden,
I’m sure as leal as thee.’

14
‘Wally fa you, Willie,
That ye could nae prove a man
And taen the lassie’s maidenhead!
She would have hired your han.’

15
‘Haud far awa frae me, lady,
Haud far awa frae me;
There’s not a man in a’ Strathdon
The day shall wed wi me.’

16
Soon in there came Belbordlane,
With a pistol on every side:
‘Come awa hame, Eppie Morrie,
And there you’ll be my bride.’

17
‘Go get to me a horse, Willie,
And get it like a man,
And send me back to my mother
A maiden as I cam.

18
‘The sun shines oer the westlin hills;
By the light lamp of the moon,
Just saddle your horse, young John Forsyth,
And whistle, and I’ll come soon.’

1
5 . pistol, and.
 2
5 . Set.
1
16 . their.
 224

THE LADY OF ARNGOSK

Sharpe’s Ballad Book, 1823, p. 99.

“The following fragment,” says Sharpe in his

preface (he had not then recovered the second
stanza), “I cannot illustrate either from history or
tradition.” Very soon after the publication of the
Ballad Book, full particulars of the carrying off of the
Lady of Arngosk were procured for him by David
Webster, the bookseller. Webster addressed himself
to Mrs Isobell Dow, otherwise Mrs Mac Leish, of
Newburgh, Fife, whose mother, he had learned, was
waiting-maid to the lady at the time of the rape. “In
my very early years,” he wrote, July 4, 1823, “I have
listened with great delight to my mother when she
sung me a song the first stanza of which was this:
 The Highlandmen are a’ cum down,
They’re a’ cum down almost,
They’ve stowen awa the bonny lass,
The lady of Arngosk.

“Now Miss Finlay informs me that Isobel Stewart,

your mother, was waiting-maid to the ‘bonny lass’ at
the time she was ‘stowen awa,’ and that you are the
most likely person now alive who will be able to
recollect the song, or the particulars that gave rise to
it. My reason for requesting this favour from a lady I
have not the pleasure to know is, some gentlemen,
my acquaintance, are making a collection of old
Scots songs, which is printing, and they are anxious
to have it as full as possible. We therefore wish a
copy of the song entire, if you can recollect it, and
the name of the lady who was the ‘bonny lass,’” etc.
Mrs Dow replied, July 8, through John Masterton,
that she was “sorrow” to say that she could not
recollect more of the song than Webster was already
in possession of, but the story she could never
forget, having heard her mother repeat it so often:
and this story Masterton proceeds to give in Mrs
Dow’s own words. Although Mrs Dow was liberal of
details, Webster seems to have wanted to hear
more, and accordingly Masterton writes at greater
length July 30, repeating what had been said before,
with “some particular incidents” omitted in the
former letter, but nothing very material except that
Miss Gibb was rich, and that Isobell Dow had
“brought to her recolection another verse of the
song” (st. 2). The earlier letter even is somewhat out
of proportion to so meagre a relic of verse, an
intolerable deal of bread to a half-penny worth of
sack; but it is very readable, and has some value as
a chapter from domestic life in Scotland in the first
[124]
half of the last century.
Newburgh, 8 July, 1823.

Dear Sir. I am directed by Isobell Dow to acknowledge the receipt

of your letter, and to write you an answer to your request respecting
the stealing awa the Lady of Arngosk. She is sorrow to say she
cannot recolect any more of the song than what you are in
possession off already. As for the truth of the story, she can never
forget, having heard her mother repeat it so often. I will therefore
give you it in her own words.
Yours, &c.,
Jn Masterson.
My mother was waiting-maid to the Lady of Arngask, whose name
was Miss Margret Gibb, at which time two gentlemen paid addresses
to her; the one a Mr Jamieson, a writer in Strathmiglo, the other a
Mr Graham, of Bracko Castle, who was the subject of the story; but
his love did not meet with a return suitable to his wishes; he
therefore came to the strong resolution of taking her away by force.
It will be proper to mention that he came two nights previous, when
my mother was in the barn dighting corn, and accosted her thus:
Tiby, I want to see Margret. She answerd: I doubt, Mr Graham, you
canna see her the night, but I’ll gang an tell her. She went and was
orderd to tell him that he could not see her; which put him in such a
frenzy that he ran up and down the barn through chaff and corn up
to the middle; however, he forced in to her company, but what
passed betwixt them my mother did not know. But on the second
night after, at midnight, when in bed (my mother alway sleeping
with Miss Gibb),[125] a very sharp knock was heard at the door, which
alarmd them very much, it being a lonely place. My mother went and
called, who was there; she was answered, Open the door, Tiby, and
see. She said: Keep me! Mr Graham, what way are you here at this
time? Ye canna won in the night. She drew the bar, and was almost
frighted out of her sences by the appearance of above thirty
Hillandmen on horseback, all armed with swords and dirks, &c. She
atempted to shut the door again, but Mr Graham pressed his knee in
and forced his way. He went ben, and ordered them to put on their
clothes an go along with him. Miss Gibb insisted on stoping ere
daylight, and she would go with good will; but he would admit of no
delay, but ordered her to dress herself imediately, otherwise he
would do it by force. She then said she would not go unless Tiby
acompanied her, which he said he intended to propose had she not
mentioned it; but my mother would not go, she said, to ride behind
none of these Hillandmen. Mr Graham then proposed to take her
behind himself. They did then all mount; he at the same time used
the precaution of placing sentries on the houses where the other
servants lodged, to prevent them giving the alarm, and also three
stout men at the bell of the church, to prevent it being rung. They
kept their posts till they thought them a sufficient distance on the
way, Mr Graham always joking to my mother about something or
other, asuring her so soon as he had all over he would make her
happy and comfortable all the days of her life. They rode on over hill
and dale till within sight of Bracko Castle, when all of a sudden the
Hillanmen dispersed, or deserted them, excepting his own imediate
servants; which my mother thought was because he had deceived
them, saying that the lady was willing to marry him but her friends
would not alow, which by this time they must have found out. He
told my mother that a minister was waiting them at Bracko, but he
must have been disappointed, for the minister never appeared; else,
she always thought, they would been married. Report said that Mr
Jamieson had so contrived to stop his arrival. My mother and Miss
Margret were then secured in an uper room in the castle till the next
day, when there appeared mostly all the men of the parishes of
Arngask and Strathmiglo, demanding their lady; my father among
the rest, demanding my mother as his intended wife. It seemed so
soon as the Hillan sentries were gone from the houses and church-
bell of Arngask, that the servants ran to the bell, and rang such a
peal as made all the Ochles resound wi the sad news that their lady
was stowen awa by Graham an his clan. Mr Jamieson was no less
busy in alarming and rousing the indignation of the good folk of
Strathmiglo, who were much atached to her interest, so that both
parishes rose to a man, and armed themselves with whatever came
in the way, and marched in a body to make an attack on the castle,
and rescue their much esteemed lady. But on their making their
appearance before the castle in such formidable array, Mr Graham
thought it prudent to surender rather than sustain the attack of such
a body of desperate men. Mr Graham conducted them down stairs
with his cap in hand (the gentlemen in those days wore velvet caps),
and addressed her thus: I shall see you on your horse, Margret, for
a’ the ill you’ve done me, and bade her a long and lasting farewell;
at which she stamped with her foot and recommended him to the
devil. They all came home in safety, and the bells, that so lately rang
to alarm and spread the dismal news, were again rung to proclaim
the happy return of the lady that was stowen awa. Bonefires were
also erected on the highest of the Ochles. She was married that
same year to Mr Jamieson, and I suppose some of their children are
alive to this day. It was generaly reported that Mr Graham was so
much affronted at the dissapointment that he left the country soon
after.
Such, sir, is the story that gave rise to the song you are so much
in request off, which I have gathered from Isobell Dow, and put in
order according to my weak capacity, knowing it will fall into better
and abler hands, and that, altho the song be a wanting, there is
ample mater for composition.
I remain your most Obedt Hle Servt,
 John Masterton, for Isobell Dow.
P. S. I had almost forgot to mention as to the period of time when
it happened, which cannot be less than 87 years, which Isobell
makes out in the following maner; it being two years before her
father and mother was married, and that they lived together fifty-
one years, it being now thirty-four years since her mother died,
which makes it to have been about the year 1736.
J. M.

1
The Highlandmen hae a’ come down,
They’ve a’ come down almost,
They’ve stowen away the bonny lass,
The Lady of Arngosk.

2
They hae put on her petticoat,
Likewise her silken gown;
The Highland man he drew his sword,
Said, Follow me ye’s come.

3
Behind her back they’ve tied her hands,
An then they set her on;
‘I winna gang wi you,’ she said,
‘Nor ony Highland loon.’
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