Tennant, like Kappel after him, intended to provide a reference book, explicitly not a method. He can’t help but implicitly discuss how to learn, though.
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He begins with proprioception and exteroception, in their simplest form: touch and release the strings, feeling how it feels to do so. Proprioception is the internal perception of where your hands, arms, legs, and so on are; exteroception is a catch-all term for perception of the outside world. In this case, what exactly are my hands doing, where exactly does my fingertip land, how exactly does it feel, all of this correlated with how exactly does it sound?
Is this learning music? It’s an illustration of the difficulty of separating learning the music and learning the music on or through the guitar. For the player, ‘how the music feels’ has two meanings (at least): figurative, e.g., the emotions, the structures, the textures, how the rhythms and sounds move the body, heart, and mind; and then the literal ‘how my hands and body feel holding the guitar and playing.’ Of course with guitar the most legato musical passages can be very far from ‘legato’ in the finger-gymnastics required to produce the desired music. (Think for instance of the middle arpeggio passages in Clair de Lune, where the feel is of gentle swaying but the RH and LH movements require continuous abrupt leaps with zero-time-between perfect landings.) To play the music one must feel through (‘above’) the physical complexities of performance, but at the same time the hand-feeling must remain clear and precise. (The obvious conclusion from this is that playing guitar is impossible, a perspective that often arises during practice.)
Ultimately, physically feeling music is the essence. Said differently, music is a human interpretation of the human experience of physical vibrations. Tennant begins with the literal physical sensation of producing sound. This, in his view, must be learned at a foundational level.
Consistent with this, Tennant emphasizes awareness. For the physical act of playing, ‘What you do or don’t do between the notes means everything.’ He’s unrelenting in reminding to feel one’s hands. ‘Be totally aware.’
Tennant (with Mathews, Viloteau, and pretty much everyone) advocates anticipation/mental preparation: ‘always visualize the next chord in your mind’s eye before moving there.’
As with others, Tennant recommends decomposition, and demands focus and concentration. It’s a bottom-up model: learn this with one finger on one string, then one finger with string crossing, then one finger with rhythmic variation, and so on, with the notion of mastering each step.
How does this relate to the mereonymy of music? (In philosophy, mereonymy is the study of mutual influence between parts and wholes.) The whole is made of the parts (bottom-up) but the whole determines the parts (top-down). We have two interesting parallels going on: between the music in the parts and the music of the whole playing out over time; and, between the physical performance and the physio-emotional-cognitive effects of the performance. To take just one example, the emotional force of a song emerges from the melody, the tempo, the harmonic structure, the tonal timbres and combined textures, the volume dynamics, the setting and context of what came before, the musical history and aptitude of the listener, and probably a raft of other things. With regard to Tennant’s focus on execution, he consistently discusses intention.
At one point, discussing evenness of tremolo, he troubleshoots by recommending listening closely for the weakest tone, and then practicing strengthening just that tone. Critical, he says, is to feel the tone—‘otherwise, it’s empty practice.’ This seems the essence of Tennant’s perspective on learning: break it down as far as necessary for complete mastery, feel—in all meanings of the word—what it is to play and hear it correctly, and then incrementally assemble this kind of study into larger units, like the studies he includes and one’s performance pieces.
If there’s a thing that sets Tennant apart with regard to learning, it is his emphasis on practicing the proprioceptive and sensual elements of touch. Touch control integrates the brain, the spinal cord, nerves in the joints, and nerves in the muscles, and there are loops at multiple levels. How does string thickness influence your playing? You know through touch.
A surprising absence in Tennant is rest: spacing. Motor learning happens when you’re not doing it. As with general physical fitness, the activity is the stimulus; the adaptation (learning) happens when not doing the activity. Tennant cautions against excessive fatigue, but does not address spacing.
An interesting aspect of Tennant’s emphasis, consistent with being a technique book rather than a method, is the acquisition of automaticity. We may consciously learn the correct way to perform a resonant free-stroke, but our goal is to so fully assimilate this (motor) learning that it ceases to need to be consciously accessible. Our hands have learned what to do, so that we can focus on the musical intention and they will execute it faithfully..
Learning music on guitar 