The Music of James Tenney: Volume 1

Contexts and Paradigms

Robert Wannamaker

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780252043673
• eBook ISBN: 9780252052569
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

Parsing the works of the experimental music pioneer

Robert Wannamaker's monumental two-volume study explores the influential music and ideas of American composer, theorist, writer, performer, and educator James Tenney. Delving into the whole of Tenney's far-ranging oeuvre, Wannamaker provides in-depth, aurally grounded analyses of works linked to the artist's revolutionary theories of musical form, timbre, and harmonic perception.

Volume 1, Contexts and Paradigms, chronologically surveys Tenney's creative development and output. Wannamaker begins each section with biographical, aesthetic, and technical context that illuminates a distinct period in Tenney's career. From there, he analyzes a small number of pieces that illuminate the concerns, characteristics, and techniques that emerged in Tenney's music during that time. Wannamaker supplements the text with musical examples, graphs, and diagrams while also drawing on unpublished material and newly available primary sources to flesh out each work and the ideas that shaped it.

A landmark in experimental music scholarship, The Music of James Tenney is a first-of-its-kind consideration of the experimental music titan and his work.  

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

When asked in 1989, “Had you been born 60 years later, … who would you study with today?” John Cage immediately replied, “I think I would study with James Tenney” (Cage and Nancarrow 1989).

Whereas in the 1960s Cage had been a mentor and aesthetic lodestone for the young Tenney, near the end of his life it was Cage who suggested that there was much for young artists to learn from his former protégé. Musicologist Bob Gilmore in turn described Tenney as “the composer who is in a way Cage’s natural successor in the next generation” (2014, 25). Among composers, further expressions of regard for Tenney and his work are not difficult to find. Late in life, Edgard Varèse pronounced Tenney his “only musical heir” (Brakhage 1982).¹ According to composer Anne LeBaron, György Ligeti described Tenney as one of the “greatest American composers living today, in the company of Ives, Partch, and Nancarrow” (2006). For Larry Polansky, “Jim Tenney was the most important and brilliant composer/theorist of the second half of the twentieth century” (2007, 10). John Luther Adams has remarked, “I shudder to think what might have become of me had I not had the extreme good fortune to study with Jim [Tenney], one of the great composers of the twentieth century. … He was one of the most brilliant people I have ever known” (2013). Appreciations of Tenney and his work have furnished the content of four separate Festschriften (Garland 1984; Polansky and Rosenboom 1987; Dibelius et al. 1990; Hasegawa 2008).

Yet although Tenney had been producing significant work since the late 1950s, before 1983 the number of his compositions that had been commercially recorded was a total of two (and those were on obscure out-of-print compilation recordings). In the words of composer and writer Kyle Gann, “No other composer is so revered by fellow composers, and so unknown to the public at large” (1997, 167). In the 1990s, however, the situation began to change. Broader recognition of Tenney’s work first began to grow in Europe after John Cage—following an absence of more than three decades—brought Tenney with him when he returned to teach at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music in Germany. In the following years, Tenney received a steady stream of commissions from European ensembles. In the late 1990s and into the 2000s, recordings of his work began to proliferate and, since the year 2000, North American programming of Tenney’s music both new and old has become common. Among adventurous emerging performers and composers, an enthusiasm for Tenney’s work is today widespread, and rock, techno, and ambient musicians have covered or remixed his music.

As composer, theorist, writer, performer, and educator, Tenney contributed to an extraordinary number of areas in twentieth-century musical culture. His compositions of the early 1960s include significant harbingers of sampling culture and plunderphonics, the first substantial musical applications of computerized sound synthesis, and some of the earliest applications of computer algorithms in the composition of both electronic and instrumental music. He has been described as a Zelig-like figure in 1960s American experimentalism because he seemed to appear in an uncannily far-flung array of contexts not only within but also outside of the domain of music. Tenney’s minimalist process pieces of the early 1970s are some of the most rigorous, elemental, and oft-performed pieces of their sort. His subsequent music of that decade invoked the harmonic series in ways that paralleled, anticipated, or contrasted with the development in Europe of a major style now known as spectral music. Tenney’s harmonic-series pieces were joined in the 1980s by complex large-scale works in nonstandard tuning systems that were concerned with a general renovation of harmonic practice. Although Tenney asserted that “I am first of all a composer and only secondarily and occasionally a theorist” ([1993c/2003] 2015, 380), in conjunction with his compositional work he produced influential original theories concerning the perception of musical form, timbre, and harmony. Finally, his complementary activities as performer, writer, and educator did much to consolidate the influential concept of a particular American experimental music tradition.

I have found that individuals with specific musical interests often know certain facets of Tenney’s wide-ranging work and history but are quite surprised to discover others. With this in mind, the next section optionally furnishes readers with a greatly condensed overview of his history, to be expanded in the coming chapters. It doubles as an outline of volume 1. This is followed in section 1.2 by an orientation to certain fundamental aesthetic and methodological premises that underlie Tenney’s mature music.

1.1 A Summary Chronology

During the first half of his career, significant developments in Tenney’s musical concerns and style roughly correlated with his movements. Changes in his milieu and resources seem to have occasioned new directions or creative renewals. The first of these was a simple change of high school in Denver, Colorado, that brought Tenney into contact with artistically minded peers, including an aspiring poet named Stan Brakhage. Brakhage, tacking from poetry toward film, would eventually become the most celebrated experimental filmmaker of the second half of the twentieth century. In a fateful move, Brakhage in 1951 recruited Tenney, a promising pianist, to score his first film (section 2.1). This project seems to have crystallized Tenney’s identity as a composer, although he would not commit professionally for another two years. Especially during the first decade of their friendship, impassioned dialogue and correspondence between Brakhage and Tenney did much to fortify their artistic identities. They would remain close friends until Brakhage’s death in 2003.

Tenney moved from Colorado to New York in the autumn of 1954 to study piano at the Juilliard School. At this time he made initial acquaintance with the two composers whose music would most influence his own: Edgard Varèse and John Cage. Perhaps the most consequential event in his life during that period, however, was the commencement of a thirteen-year relationship with artist Carolee Schneemann (section 2.2). Still a student at the time, in the coming years she would make groundbreaking and enormously influential contributions to assemblage, performance art, experimental film, multimedia, and feminist art (Filippone 2011). Throughout their partnership, Tenney and Schneemann would live and create closely together, each of them significantly affecting and participating in the other’s work and development (sections 3.3, 4.1, 5.4–5.5; volume 2, sections 4.5–4.6).

Soon abandoning formal piano instruction, Tenney devoted himself to the study of composition—at first privately in New York, subsequently at Bennington College in Vermont, and informally with Varèse until his death in 1965 (sections 2.2–2.3). The primary antecedents that Tenney was digesting in the mid- to late 1950s were those of Anton Webern’s aphoristic nonserial music circa 1910, the music of Varèse, and Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes (1948) for prepared piano. An emphasis in all of these upon the sensuous qualities of timbre would have a powerful and lasting influence on Tenney’s own sensibility. Moreover, Varèse’s deemphasis of thematic working in favor of a process-like accretion of musical materials would have a durable impact on Tenney’s approach to form, while the emphatically dissonant textures of Webern and Varèse would reflect clearly in Tenney’s early music (and again in his late music). Tenney’s unique consolidation of these influences is represented by the pithy suite Seeds (1956/1961; section 2.4), which he considered to be both his earliest mature work and a harbinger of his compositional concerns in years to come (especially in its close attention to timbre).

Concurrently with his undergraduate studies in Vermont (1956–58), Tenney befriended and undertook informal private study nearby with another composer of resolutely dissonant music: Carl Ruggles (section 2.3). The intensely expressive chromatic polyphony of Ruggles’s small but refined oeuvre is representative of an American twentieth-century atonal style that is sometimes referred to as dissonant counterpoint and that is also associated with certain works by composers Henry Cowell and Ruth Crawford, among others. While the immediate influence of his studies with Ruggles would be relatively short-lived, aspects of dissonant counterpoint would unexpectedly resurface in Tenney’s music of the 1990s (section 11.1).

In the 1930s, Varèse had already foretold many of the ways in which technology would in future permit the realization of new musical possibilities with respect to pitch, timbre, rhythm, dynamics, and spatialization. Deeply excited by Varèse’s vision, in 1959 Tenney enrolled in a new master’s program at the University of Illinois, this being the first academic program in the United States focused on electronic music composition (chapter 3). The program was directed by Lejaren Hiller, a chemist who had gravitated to the music department and who had cocreated in the mid-1950s the first substantial example of music composed using a computer algorithm. Tenney’s two years in Illinois afforded him a solid academic training in acoustics, analog electronics, and the techniques of early electronic music, but they also yielded three other outcomes that would prove even more significant.

The first of these was that, in the university’s Electronic Music Studio, Tenney produced a now-classic work of tape music entitled Collage #1 (“Blue Suede”) (1961). In it he took the unprecedented step of manipulating materials recognizably derived from a preexisting pop song: Elvis Presley’s version of “Blue Suede Shoes” (section 3.3). Conceived as an exploration and celebration of the Presley source, Tenney’s “Blue Suede” marked a technical and aesthetic convergence between the cultural insurgence of early rock and roll, the frequent use of quotation in Charles Ives’s music (which Tenney was then practicing at the piano), and the concurrent development of collage technique in Schneemann’s works on canvas. More generally, it furnished a harbinger of sampling culture and the “postmodern” erosion of stylistic boundaries around high art in the coming decades.

Second, Tenney obtained an assistantship with composer, instrument builder, and music theorist Harry Partch, who was resident at the university on a non-teaching fellowship. Partch was the principal progenitor of just intonation in both theory and practice in the twentieth century, and he designed and constructed a substantial number of unique instruments in order to accurately realize the nonstandard tuning of his music. Tenney’s responsibilities included helping to maintain these instruments and performing upon them in Partch’s ensemble. Most consequentially, he digested Partch’s theoretical writings on just intonation. The influence of these would remain dormant in Tenney’s music for more than a decade before significantly informing his own musical and theoretical investigations of harmony.

Finally, near the end of his time in Illinois, Tenney completed his master’s thesis, entitled “Meta/^-Hodos,” which advanced a groundbreaking theory of musical form and texture ([1961] 2015; section 3.4). Earlier music theories had generally been concerned with the description of received practice or—especially with respect to new music—the formulation of style-specific guidelines. In contrast, Tenney sought general perceptual principles that would be applicable across diverse styles, including the contemporary ones with which he was engaged. His approach adapted visual principles from Gestalt psychology to describe factors governing the perceptual grouping of musical elements both in time and polyphonically. He then went further to consider the characteristics of and relationships between such perceived groupings. Despite its very limited availability, over the coming decades “Meta

Hodos” would develop a widespread underground readership among composers and scholars interested in new music. For Tenney himself, it would provide a technical foundation for many compositions scattered throughout his subsequent career.

Following graduation, Tenney accepted a position at Bell Telephone Laboratories (Bell Labs) in New Jersey (chapter 4). Officially, he was employed to conduct psychoacoustic research. According with his keen interest in timbre, Tenney’s scientific research involved the synthesis of musical tone colors, in connection with which he developed a theory of timbre that emphasized the importance of transient and modulatory features in sound. Unofficially, however, Tenney was retained to serve as a musical consultant to engineer Max Mathews, who was developing a pioneering computer music system called MUSIC. MUSIC would become the first widely used program for sound synthesis, and Mathews would go on to make groundbreaking contributions to musician-computer interaction, leading later writers to dub him “the father of computer music.” While at Bell Labs with Mathews, Tenney created some of the very earliest pieces of music synthesized or algorithmically composed with the aid of a computer, including what is, as far as I have ascertained, the first digitally synthesized work produced by a professional composer: Analog #1 (Noise Study) (1961; section 4.6). A number of features added to the system at Tenney’s request became standard in later computer music systems, including audio noise generators, filters, and the capacity to determine musical parameters via compositional algorithms. As both the available technologies and his timbral theories developed, Tenney incorporated them into his computer compositions, which attained a peak of technical and musical sophistication in Phases (1963; section 4.7) and Ergodos II (1964). These works combined control over many sound parameters with complex polyphony and multileveled formal hierarchies, which were algorithmically produced by inverting the analytic procedures of “Meta

Hodos” into generative ones.

These final pieces completed at Bell Labs also represent the endpoint of Tenney’s gradual digestion of the radically nondramatic, sound-focused aesthetic advanced by composer John Cage. Around 1950, in works such as Music of Changes (1951), Cage had begun overtly using chance procedures to determine certain musical features that traditionally would have been subject to a composer’s discretion, thereby disrupting the customary interpretation of such features as expressing composerly intent. In particular, Cage’s approach shed dramatic large-scale formal shaping in favor of unpredictable and varied local detail. As Tenney, over the course of his time at Bell Labs, deliberately confronted Cage’s aesthetic, the dramatically conceived arch form of Noise Study ceded to the nonnarrative post-Cagean equanimity of Ergodos II, each minute of whose rich sonic tapestry statistically resembles its every other minute. One possibility promoted by Cage’s partial undercutting of authorial intent as a source of musical meaning was a compensatory shift in listeners’ attentions toward their own perceptions and perceptual processes. If Tenney’s output seldom again approached the statistical invariance of Ergodos II, his turn from an expressive conception of music toward a post-Cagean, listener-focused orientation would prove to be lasting.

In the latter half of the 1960s, Tenney held research positions in acoustics, first at Yale University and then at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. Composition was not an aspect of his duties, and his creative output temporarily abated. On the other hand, his activities as performer were vigorous during this period (chapter 5). In 1963 he founded the Tone Roads Chamber Ensemble with performer-composers Malcolm Goldstein and Philip Corner, codirecting it with them until 1969. By programming the music of American experimental composers from preceding generations alongside more recent music, Tone Roads concerts—and Tenney’s activities as performer, composer, writer, and teacher more generally—helped consolidate the critical conception of an American experimental-music tradition extending from Charles Ives through Henry Cowell and Varèse to Cage and later experimentalists (section 5.2).

Tenney’s involvements with avant-garde art movements then burgeoning in New York also deepened in the mid-1960s (section 5.1). In the creative hothouse of downtown Manhattan, a vigorous cross-pollination between artistic disciplines was under way, bringing together emerging artists, musicians, dancers, poets, and filmmakers in a profusion of small venues. Prominent elements included the confluence of artists now known as Fluxus; the Annual Avant Garde Festivals, curated by cellist and performance artist Charlotte Moorman; and the Judson Dance Theater. Tenney was involved with each of these.

Fluxus was a fluid international group of interdisciplinary artists that emerged in the early 1960s. Broadly influenced by Dada and Cage, their performances typically featured indeterminacy, humor, attention to the commonplace, and an economy of means and notation (section 5.3). Although not himself a member, Tenney performed the works of Fluxus artists and alo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Conventions and Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Early Works and Influences (1934–59)
• 3. Tape Music and “Meta/-Hodos” (1959–61)
• 4. Computer Music and Ergodicity (1961–64)
• 5. Performance and the Social (1964–68)
• 6. Process and Continuity (1969–71)
• 7. Interlude: Harmonic Theory
• 8. Canons and the Harmonic Series (1972–79)
• 9. Harmonic Spaces (1980–85) 193
• 10. Transition and Tradition (1986–94)
• 11. Spectra and Diaphony (1994–2006)
• 12. A Tradition of Experimentation
• Appendix A. Acoustics, Sensation, and Logarithmic Models
• Appendix B. Spectrographic Analysis
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Back Cover