Pioneer. Composer. Psychoacoustician?
May 8, 2005
Pioneer. Composer. Psychoacoustician?
By ANNE MIDGETTE
JAMES TENNEY IN NEW YORK
Sunday at 8 p.m. at the Project Room, 619 East Sixth Street, East Village.

A PORTRAIT OF JAMES TENNEY
Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, 120 Park Avenue, at 42nd Street.

JAMES TENNEY is the Zelig of American composition. He has been there for a lot of the big moments. He has known most of the big names. He has been, so to speak, in all the pictures. Yet few people have even heard of him.

This week, two concerts - Sunday and Wednesday - may help change that by offering a cross-section of Mr. Tenney's widely varied work of the last five decades. The sampling includes a tape collage piece made up of tiny fragments of Elvis Presley's "Blue Suede Shoes." It includes "Postal Pieces," written as graphic scores that fit on the backs of postcards. And lest you think Mr. Tenney is purely avant-garde, it includes piano rags. Tonal rags.

Mr. Tenney, you see, resists characterization. You can't define what kind of musician he is. He is called a pioneer of computer music, having created some of the earliest computer pieces during a tenure as resident composer at Bell Laboratories in the early 1960's. At the same time, he is grouped with the Minimalists, having hobnobbed - and performed - with Steve Reich and Philip Glass during the same period.

He is associated with the Fluxus movement, and his first wife was the artist Carolee Schneeman. He was a friend and student of John Cage's and Edgard Varèse's. Yet this "downtown" composer is also a long-time academic and a respected theorist with a couple of important treatises on music to his name. His main musical concern today? Harmony.

In fact, most of the things Mr. Tenney is known for aren't supposed to be able to be done in the same room, let alone by the same person.

Take the two-piano piece "Chromatic Canon," which Mr. Tenney dedicated to Mr. Reich in 1983. The ultimate juxtaposition of opposing elements, it fuses Minimalism with the 12-tone system, starting with a single repeated interval and gradually building it into a tone row.

"Reich went to the concert with me," Mr. Tenney said. "Afterwards he looked at me with a mock glare and said, 'You've put me in bed with Schoenberg.' I said that was the whole point."

Of his desire to reconcile opposing forces, he joked, "It's a personal characteristic that derives from the fact that my parents fought all the time, and I was always trying to bring them together."

Mr. Tenney was speaking by phone from Dartmouth College, where he was visiting last month during the Festival of New Musics. But home is California, where he is in his second stint at California Institute of the Arts (having taught there in the 1970's, he took a post at York University in Toronto and returned after reaching York's mandatory retirement age). He is also in his fourth marriage (to Lauren Pratt, who manages a number of new-music artists, including her husband) and his third or fourth compositional focus.

"The things I was concerned with early on involved timbre, dissonance and complex texture," he said. "Then the focus shifted to form. And after that it shifted to harmony. There's an evolutionary process of harmony in Western music that came to a dead end around 1910. The harmonic resources of equal temperament had really been exhausted." Mr. Tenney's ideas of how to reanimate it involve things like alternative tunings (touching, incidentally, on principles he encountered when he worked with a guru of alternative tuning, Harry Partch).

Even in this area, he has achieved some unlikely reconciliations. He recounted a phone call he got in 1988 from Cage, who, after hearing Mr. Tenney's "Critical Band" at a conference in Miami, told him: "If that's harmony, I take back everything I ever said. I'm all for it."

Mr. Tenney didn't set out to be a composer. Born in Silver City, N.M., in 1934, he went to Juilliard to study piano with Eduard Steuermann, a student of Schoenberg's. He met composers through his roommate, the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who let him tag along to meetings with Cage and Varèse. After a year, Mr. Tenney dropped out to study composition with a student of Varèse's, Chou Wen-Chung. A meeting with the pianist and composer Lionel Nowak led to his entering Bennington, where he also worked with Henry Brant and Carl Ruggles. Somehow it makes sense that a guy as eclectic as Mr. Tenney should graduate from an institution that was, at the time, a women's college.

When he saw an advertisement announcing the first class in electronic music, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he and Ms. Schneemann drove there, and Mr. Tenney ended up working with another scientist-composer, Lejaren Hiller. It was there that he also worked briefly for Partch, but Partch fired him, Mr. Tenney said, because he was more interested in provocative conversations than serving as a disciple.

At Bell Labs, Mr. Tenney, though working as a composer, was technically hired to do research in psychoacoustics, which involves sound perception. It wasn't altogether a front; he has a scientific bent. After he left Bell, he was able to support himself by doing technical research at places like the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. Indeed, he approaches many of his pieces as if they were scientific experiments. In "Ain't I a Woman?" (1992), he tries to mimic, with stringed instruments, the speech patterns of a text by Sojourner Truth.

"It involves analysis of the acoustic of speech," Mr. Tenney said, "and an attempt to work with the format of the vowel sounds. It's a process I have tried three times so far in my career. It never works completely. You can't actually understand the speech. But it sounds different from anything else you've ever heard."

Each of his computer pieces in the 1960's was an experiment of sorts. They culminated in 1969 in "For Ann (rising)," which explores something called a Shepard tone, a sound creating the illusion that it is continually getting higher. And with that, Mr. Tenney left computer music altogether. After the birth of his first daughter, he took his first teaching job at CalArts, where the computer equipment ran to Moog synthesizers.

"I'm not a knob-twirler," Mr. Tenney said emphatically. Rather than work with equipment that couldn't do what he wanted, he returned to acoustic instruments - with, it seems, no regrets.

"For the previous decade, there had been ideas for instrumental music that I didn't have time to work on because I was doing so much for computers," he said. "Once that got loose, the floodgates were open. And it's still going."

A scientific approach is evident in other aspects of Mr. Tenney's music, like his desire to remove emotion from the equation. He views music as an object of perception rather than a dramatic narrative. Instead of allowing themes to unfold and develop in the conventional Western sense, he lays out all the elements of a piece clearly at the start, leaving the listener to contemplate their permutations.

"Ergodic music," he calls it, borrowing a term from thermodynamics: music that simply exists as an object. It's like focusing on the sounds of leaves in the forest or waves on the seashore.

"His music is quite delicate," said Jenny Lin, the pianist who organized the two New York concerts. Ms. Lin herself discovered it a year or so ago. While preparing a recording devoted to the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, she encountered a piece Mr. Tenney had dedicated to Crawford Seeger. (Most of his pieces bear dedications, often to other composers. It's one way he establishes that despite being labeled a maverick, he sees himself as solidly inscribed in musical traditions of the past.)

"It wasn't like something incredible hit me," Ms. Lin said. But as she began to learn more, she added, "it started to grow on me."

"I came to the conclusion that he was totally brilliant," she said, "and it dawned on me I had to do something in New York."

Still, Ms. Lin, a musically omnivorous pianist with a taste for the contemporary, had to knock on a lot of doors to find a presenter. Many of the people she talked to hadn't heard of Mr. Tenney, either. Finally she found Boo Froebel and Limor Tomer, past and present curators of performing arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, who both loved the project - and after the Whitney signed on, Ms. Lin had no trouble attracting more interest .

Interest, in fact, is growing everywhere. Mr. Tenney's music has been performed from Aspen, Colo., to New York, from Los Angeles to Donaueschingen, Germany, and he is increasingly well known in Europe. In fact, he is just finishing a commission from the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. "He stands for an all-encompassing thing," Ms. Lin said. "A complete artist. He's someone who remains truthful to tradition, which isn't obvious at first. And he's so curious."

She added: "People give me a hard time: 'How can you play at Tonic one night and the next day do Chopin and Bach?' I say, I don't see a difference. Today, everything is coming together and crossing over. That's what hit me hard about Tenney. He's playing Ives and doing electronic music and film music: there's always something to discover."
- posted by ...lg... @ 13:25