The Presentism of Tonal Hearing

as a graduate student, one of my most cherished volumes—indeed, one of the first books of music theory scholarship I ever purchased—was Tonal Structures in Early Music, edited by Cristle Collins Judd (1998). With no little difficulty, the essays in this book mapped the route I hoped to follow as a scholar. The authors mined musical and music-theoretical sources for clues that might help us understand pitch and pitch relationships, from the level of the individual note to the musical work as a whole to the complex history of specific tonalities as they changed over time. As Judd deftly explains in the volume's introduction, the essays are a masterclass in methodological pluralism and they embrace modern analytical techniques even as they situate their readings in historical sources and contexts. Judd (1998) writes, The essays in this volume succeed by engaging the perspectives of past and present as only possible when one possesses a thorough knowledge of theoretical sources and manuscript traditions, a deep awareness of repertory and the culture which surrounded it, and a willingness to attempt to understand the music not only as it might have been understood by its contemporaries but also as modern historian and listener—to position one's self not only as critic but as advocate. (9)In my own work, I am constantly navigating the self-positioning that Judd describes, doing my best to understand sixteenth-century compositional and theoretical works on their own terms and to recapture how sixteenth-century musicians might have sung, heard, and conceptualized their work while acknowledging that I bring the whole of my modern selfhood to this enterprise. This work is as rewarding as it is fraught. The work is fraught, in part, because of the word tonal, carefully adjectival and pluralized (as tonal structures) in Judd's title.This is by design. As Yust recounts, the primary function of the word tonality is to link a set of musical parameters (and the tools we use to interpret them) to a specific repertoire, bounded geographically and temporally: European art music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yust and Christensen (2019) have detailed how, from its inception, this was a project designed to segregate repertoires—and peoples—rather than identify points of continuity among them. As a result, according to Fétis, to seek tonality in a repertoire from before Monteverdi or from outside the European art music tradition is to impose a listening sensibility that its practitioners did not possess (Christensen 2019: 108–9). Much of my own research explores tonal structure in music of the sixteenth century. When I write about fifth-related cadences, key-defining points of imitation, and trajectories of tonal expectation, I wonder if I'm imposing my modern ears, my tonal hearing, onto the repertoire. Yet, I come back to the word tonal time and again—why? In part because there are real, meaningful continuities that connect early repertoires to later ones, continuities that are difficult to describe because they must be disentangled from the baggage that accompanies Fétis's tonalité moderne.If the freighting of the word tonal complicates the study of early music, so it facilitates the study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music. Our continued acceptance of Fétis's tonal narrative allows us to position ourselves—musicians educated in the practices of Western art music—as the inheritors of the tonal tradition; therefore, the tonal music of the common practice period constitutes our "present." Such a framework treats us as competent and contemporary listeners of tonal styles, even though some of these styles flourished more than two hundred years ago. We consider ourselves to be expert listeners; our personal listening histories qualify us to make truth claims about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music. Accordingly, "I hear it this way," "We expect a cadence in m. 34," and "The return to tonic in m. 145 feels . . ." are all meaningful interpretive claims in our discipline and our teaching. Judd (1998: 6) mentions this phenomenon in passing, noting that "there has, no doubt, been a certain non-critical comfort associated with analyzing works from the 'common-practice' period, an assumption of continuity of tradition that provides a veneer of 'intuitive knowing' to the enterprise." In other words, living musicians can trace the roots of our music pedagogy back to Mozart or Bach or Fux, therefore their traditions are our traditions. In a blog post connecting the field of philosophy's "diversity problems" to those of music theory, Robin James (2014) similarly invokes the specter of intuition: "music theory . . . separates out analysis (the purview of 'theory') from history and ethnography. . . . This separation allows analysis to be something of an epistemology of ignorance, a theoretical practice that naturalizes the commonsense intuitions of the most privileged members of society as 'objective' knowledge." Analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music need not be burdened with "context" to produce valid observations.The implicit presentism of tonal hearing—and the authority that such presentism grants—provokes at least two questions. First, what music is excluded from our expert listening? Under Fétis's model, we are positioned not only as native listeners to tonal music, but also as nonnative listeners to everything else. Our expert listening implicitly excludes not only early music, but also vernacular musics, global musics, popular and folk traditions, and jazz. At best, "native speakers" of these musics develop methodologies drawn from the discourses indigenous to them.1 Sometimes, scholars of these repertoires have to undo years of analytical colonization: for instance, Adem Merter Birson (2021) has recently shown how adaptations of Western notation and theory distorted some aspects of Turkish makam practice, and Liam Hynes-Tawa (2021, 2024) has advocated for an analytical model for traditional Japanese music that reflects the hybridization of Western and Japanese thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Early music, which is implicated in evolutionary narratives of progress toward tonality, presents different problems, which I will address in more detail below.Second, our assumed expertise shapes the questions we choose to ask (and not to ask) of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art music. What might we learn from the challenges faced by scholars of repertoires that do not benefit from our "intuitive knowing?" What analytical methodologies and theoretical traditions have we ignored?The presentism of tonal hearing has been a longtime fascination and frustration for me as a scholar of early music, where the opposite assumption holds: we cannot think or hear like Renaissance musicians did.2 The exclusion of medieval and Renaissance music from expert listening has profoundly shaped the field of early music scholarship. Crucially, this exclusion established the terms of the decades-long debate between so-called presentist and historicist methodologies.3 The sides are easily parodied: the presentists argue that the past is inaccessible and attempting to frame our analyses in historical terms provides only the illusion of authenticity (Schubert 1994). The historicists argue that contemporary analytical tools bring with them contemporary assumptions about the evolution of musical materials (tonality in particular), and that such analyses "set out to demonstrate qualities assumed a priori to be there" (Bent 1998: 24). In practice, most contemporary scholars have settled on a historically informed compromise.4 But this debate exists because of the way Fétis framed tonality: its historical, stylistic, and most importantly, perceptual apparatus erected a wall between modern listeners as tonal hearers and music of the Renaissance as a "primitive" musical system. Embedded in the historicist viewpoint is an anxiety that we can't "unhear" tonality; our status as expert listeners of tonal music disqualifies us from hearing early music on its own terms. This anxiety, too, derives from Fétis: as Yust points out, Fétis explicitly situated tonality in listener psychology rather than acoustics or musical style. In Fétis's framing, non-Western people simply did not have the capacity to hear tonality; Western listeners, on the other hand, could not hear in any other way.5 Hence, the task of understanding early music is often framed as one of "rewiring" our brains; Susan McClary (2004: 12), for instance, writes, "Our contemporary ears—all long since oriented toward the tonal strategies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—have to be reoriented to hear in significantly different ways if they are to discern the madrigal's expressive and allegorical strategies."6The presentism/historicism debate has been both vexing and productive for scholars of early music. Today, methodological best practice is to use the work of contemporaneous theorists (and pedagogues) as a reference point; we should attempt to analyze music in terms that these theorists articulated, or at least in terms that they would recognize.7 In recent years, this dialogue between past and present has led to real breakthroughs, especially in our understanding of counterpoint and improvisation. But this methodology has some shortcomings. Renaissance composers were notoriously tight-lipped about their compositional strategies; often, the only evidence we have to reconstruct them is the music that survives. And Renaissance music theorists were, like us, not necessarily reliable witnesses to contemporary practice. We often place too much value on their claims, which were sometimes speculative, poorly informed, prescriptive rather than descriptive, or outright wrong (Powers 1992a: 18). These sources have much to offer us, but we must not approach them too credulously.But is it fair to assume that contemporary musicians cannot gain stylistic competency—cannot become expert listeners—when we devote our lives to the study and performance of early music? We will never hear as Renaissance musicians heard, but we can immerse ourselves in their pedagogy, their theory texts, and their music. Peter Schubert has learned to improvise counterpoint (e.g., Schubert 2020). After years of working with music that has never been edited into score, I've learned to audiate fragments of polyphony from partbooks (Van Orden 2015: 4–5; Judd 2000). I've sung with countless musicians whose understanding of Renaissance polyphony was transformed when they learned hexachordal solmization (Smith 2012; Long 2022). Just as we can gain fluency in multiple languages, so can we hold multiple musical grammars in our heads simultaneously.8 And we can identify where the gaps are between our own experience and the potential experiences of period musicians and account for these gaps in our analytical work, even if we are not able to fill them.We may not know how (or even what) Renaissance musicians heard, but under the tonal regime we are under no obligation to know how eighteenth-century musicians heard, because we qualify as those musicians. Their hearing is assumed to be, if not the same as our hearing, at least meaningfully congruent with it. Yet, recent studies of reception history and empirical work testing the limits and opportunities of statistical learning have argued that eighteenth-century listeners heard differently than their nineteenth-century counterparts did, and certainly differently than we do today (Byros 2012; White 2023: 264–72). If we should perhaps be more generous to our own ears when we listen to early music, we should also be more skeptical of our hearings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music. Similarly, Fétis's tonalité moderne posits a "common practice" that groups together widely disparate works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But in emphasizing the similarities among these works, we risk eliding meaningful differences between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century repertoires. Certainly my own pedagogy is guilty of such elision; I teach Bach's Neapolitans alongside Chopin's, even as I intuit meaningful differences between these composers' treatment of this sonority.Our imagined contemporaneity with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music also impacts the analytical models we develop for these repertoires. The specter of "anachronistic" analysis looms over scholars of early music but rarely arises in our study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century repertoire. We apply theoretical models derived from nineteenth-century Formenlehre and Funktionstheorie with no requirement that our analytical work should be legible to the composers. Twentieth-century music theorists can use nineteenth-century tools to theorize eighteenth-century music because of the implicit continuity that the idea of tonality facilitates; this work is our inheritance.9 (Scott Burnham 2002: 904 goes so far as to claim that "the perennial appeal of sonata form speaks to the cultural coherence of the modern period.") Embracing this continuity has been analytically productive. But it also perpetuates Fétis's triumphalist narrative of music history and implicitly upholds the white supremacy that underlies Fétis's project. At the same time, we are missing opportunities to develop analytical models that emphasize how repertoires of the apparent "common" practice are different. Contemporaneous sources provide rich insight that we might otherwise miss. For instance, the recent pedagogical turn in music theory—such as our developing investment in the partimento and solfeggio traditions—has paid rich dividends for our analytical work.10 As Yust argues, it may be worth setting aside Fétis's grand metanarrative on ethical grounds as well as methodological ones—our reliance on his framework increasingly impedes our capacity to make meaningful claims about our objects of study.My experience as a scholar of early music has taught me to be skeptical of my own hearing. As a discipline, we could benefit from being more skeptical of our own capacity to hear eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music, and of the truth claims that we make on the basis of our presumed expertise. At the same time, our study of the inner workings of musical systems will only be enriched as we embrace other forms of musical expertise, whether that is the expertise that comes from years of experience studying and performing early music, or the expertise of tabla players, gospel singers, and the multitude of other musicians whose central question is, How does this stuff work? We have much to learn from one another. Yust argues that we should seek out universals connecting all music making, and suggests that separating out musical parameters like tonal center, macroharmony, and consonance and treating them independently will allow us to be more precise about how musical styles connect to each other across both historical and geographical boundaries. I have made this argument in my own work (Long 2020: 2–3), where I've shown how metrical and melodic frameworks that we associate with eighteenth-century style arise in popular song and dance music in the sixteenth century. But we might also place these apparent universals in dialogue with the pedagogical and speculative practices that surround the repertoires we aim to describe, as scholars of early music have long been obliged to do.On the other hand, our contemporary hearing—whatever our listening context—may lead to valuable insights about any number of repertoires. In a fascinating recent article, Charulatha Mani (2022) has analyzed arias from Monteverdi's L'Orfeo using tools drawn from her expertise in Karnatik vocal music. Mani explains, The objective of this article is not to claim that Karnatik melodic types, or ragas, had any direct influence on Monteverdi. Rather, I argue for the value that insights from South Asian music theory can add to the existing configurations of analytical approaches to Monterverdi's musico-poetic settings and choices, and in doing so present a rationale for considering non-Western musical approaches to analysis as a framework for renewing and reimagining the notion of analysis away from the dominant knowledge regime of analytical truth in the Western sense. (471–72)This is a radical new model of music analysis—one that is unapologetically presentist and personal. But it also productively defamiliarizes my own listening praxis—why should my contemporary hearing of Monteverdi be considered any more legitimate than Mani's? I hear an echo of Fétis in my initial discomfort with Mani's work—the geographical fence he built around tonality includes me but excludes musicians trained in the music of India, just as it includes eighteenth-century music and excludes sixteenth-century music.11 And Mani's invocation of "analytical truth in the Western sense" resonates with James's reference to "'objective' knowledge," quoted above.12 Such is the legacy of Fétis's project. It was always a strategy to link the music of a specific time and place with a specific group of people, whose capacity to make, hear, and study that music was innate, exclusive, and justified. It will be difficult to walk away from the notion of tonality—even as we keep many of its analytical affordances—because it is embedded into our sense of how we listen.