DRAM News

From the 1960s onward, James Tenney (b Silver City, NM, 10 Aug 1934; d 2006) composer, author, and theorist, inhabited and helped to define a rarified niche---that of digitally synthesized music. Tenney, who was born in New Mexico, studied at the Juilliard School and with Varèse, Partch, Ruggles, Cage, Kenneth Gaburo, and Lejaren Hiller. He worked with Harry Partch in the 1950s, and taught some of the leading young composers, including John Luther Adams, Polansky, and Peter Garland. John Cage and György Ligeti considered him one of the most powerful minds in American music.

The 1960s witnessed the unveiling of the youth culture and of computers, and James Tenney was there to sift and filter these---and much more---through his unique musical lens. Tenney, who was part of the minimalist avant-garde, experimented with stochastic processes, random variation, and entropy. But he enlivened the sometimes dry theoretical experimentation by introducing elements that twisted and upended our perception of sound using a variety of digitized and filtering processes, as well as more traditional methods, including variation, (as evident, for example, in Collage #1 (Blue Suede) of 1961). It is perhaps not far-fetched to compare Tenney's computer filtrations of city noises, and of Elvis's "Blue Suede Shoes," with the polytonal variations on American musical standards that are such a recognizable mainstay of Charles Ives, whose music influenced Tenney.

Tenney's Selected Works 1961-1969 (NW80570) with electroacoustic, stochastic and algorithmic samplings, constitutes his first significant and developed oeuvre of computer-composed and synthesized music. Many of these pieces were realized at Bell Telephone Laboratories using the first software system of its kind that would later become available to composers. During this period, Tenney also co-founded and directed the Tone Roads Chamber Ensemble in New York City (1963-70). Tone Roads became an important force in the Charles Ives renaissance, and also gave influential performances of works by Cage, Feldman, Ruggles, and others. Between 1965 and 1971, Tenney composed Postal Pieces (NW80612), eleven short works printed on postcards, each containing a minimally scored work to be performed by instrumentalists. This series focuses on acoustics, form, and isolated performance gestures as described in hyper-abbreviated notes on the back of a postcard. He also experimented with sound passed through filters, both real and perceptual. His work for six electric guitars Water on the Mountain...Fire in Heaven (1985), for example, recorded in Seth Josel: Long Distance (CR697), unravels notions of electric guitars as weapons of acoustical assault, instead creating a gauzy, nuanced, even sensual interlacing of sounds.