Victor Zuckerkandl: Tone (Part 1 of 4)

I am currently working through Victor Zuckerkandl’s book Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World from 1956. The book is divided into four sections each containing a subheading: Tone – Motion – Time – Space. My blog entries on Zuckerkandl will come in four parts corresponding to these four sections.

In his opening section subtitled “Tone,” Zuckerkandl (henceforth referred to as VZ) concerns himself with general (but by no means simple) questions involving the nature of music, how and why it is that we hear sounds as music. His first order of business is to deal with melody. Since melody is more than a simple succession of tones, what exactly is melody? VZ initially provides a very unhelpful definition of melody as “a series of tones that makes sense.” (15) Obviously this begs a further question, “What is it that is meaningful in tones, that allows us to distinguish sense from nonsense in successions of tones?” (16) The answer to this question becomes a principal tenet of the entire section: “It is the dynamic quality that permits tones to become conveyors of meaning; that makes melodies out of successions of tones and music out of acoustical phenomena. The dynamic quality is the properly musical quality of tones.” (21) What VZ has in mind by dynamic quality is this: each tone we hear within a tonal system (C major, for example) “becomes active” and carries with it a tendency or tension (“almost a will”) that strives towards resolution. Ultimate resolution rests in scale-degree 1, which is the tonal center. And each scale-degree points to scale-degree 1 in its own distinct way, giving each tone its own unique dynamic quality. It is this dynamic quality that we hear inherent in the tones that gives them meaning—that makes them music.

VZ is very much a formalist, believing that the meaning of music comes from within, not from without. “Tones do not relate to things, do not express anything about things, represent nothing, betoken nothing, indicate nothing.” (16) Rather, meaning rests for VZ in music’s syntactical structure. Melodies are created when musical tones succeed one another in a sensical manner. Scale degree 2 leads to scale degree 1 in the same way that a transitive verb leads to a direct object.

From here VZ analyzes various theories of how the dynamic qualities came to reside in the tones. He offers and finally dismisses the Pulse Theory which has as its basis the frequential “pulses” of the acoustical pitches of the overtone series He also rejects “Associationism” which claims that the dynamic qualities came to inhere tones through conventionally established use. In other words, we learned to hear these qualities in.

VZ then sets up a dichotomy between the outer tangible world which we encounter through sense perceptions, and the inner world of our thoughts, emotions, and feelings. Every sensation is usually thought to be “made up of two components, one coming from without, physical, one coming from within, psychic.” (58) In other words, we see red in the external world through our eyes, and our inner thoughts add to that perception a feeling tone: warning, excitement, or whatever. The same applies to music. We hear a tone, an acoustical fact, through our ear, and then we apply to it an emotional tone. But music’s third component, namely its dynamic quality, links and ultimately drastically diminishes the other two components: “What makes tone musical tone is so much the work not of the physical and not of the psychic component but of the third, a purely dynamic component, that, compared with the latter, the two others appear to sink to the function of trigger and aftereffect: a physical process sets off the dynamic phenomenon; the latter reverberates in a psychic process.” (61) VZ calls musical tones dynamic symbols. They are unlike the symbolism of words in a language. “Words are signs that refer to things or ideas… they bring to our knowledge the things they signify… The meaning of a tone, however, lies not in what it points to but in the pointing itself; more precisely, in the different way, in the individual gesture, with which each tone points toward the same place.” (68) Tones are dynamic symbols because we hear forces in them.

VZ ends the section with one of his more provocative ideas. The sense of hearing, the hearing of tone more specifically, is unique from the other four senses. Our senses of feeling, seeing, touching and tasting encounter things, objects. We don’t see red, we see red things. We don’t feel smoothness, we feel smooth things. VZ claims though that “[musical] tone (as distinct from ‘noise’) is the only sensation not that of a thing.” (70) The sense of hearing then enables us to encounter an invisible, intangible part of this world. The final page of the section contains the following ideas to which these thoughts lead. Make of them what you will: “There are tones because there is music, not the other way around. Only in tone is the true nature of sound revealed; in the hearing of tones the sense of hearing fulfills its destiny and discovers the side of the world that is its counterpart. Which side is it, since it is not the material-factual side? Whatever the answer may be, we know that the question itself is reasonable… Because music exists, the tangible and visible cannot be the whole of the given world.” (71)

VZ’s writing is engaging and his ideas are always provocative. If one of the main goals of philosophers and music theorists is to question given assumptions which in turn stimulate deep though, VZ by all means succeeds. He is not afraid of the bold and dramatic statement. However, in my opinion, his analysis of melody and tone as being defined entirely by the dynamic quality of tones is far too simplistic. Meaning is not determines solely by this quality. True, the dynamism of tones contribute to our understanding of the syntax of tonal music. (Implied in VZ’s analysis is the idea that “atonal melody” and even “atonal music” are both oxymoronic.) And if the syntax of music is incoherent, we will have trouble making sense of the music. But so much is left unsaid by VZ. Even in the context of tonality, so much more than the dynamic quality of tones contributes to the meaning of music and to our emotional psychic responses to music. After all, these dynamic qualities can be heard in the worst of the worst tonal music.