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Contemporary Music Review

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James Tenney and the Poetics of Homage

Bob Gilmore Available online: 05 Jun 2008

To cite this article: Bob Gilmore (2008): James Tenney and the Poetics of Homage, Contemporary Music Review, 27:1, 7-21 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494460701671509

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Contemporary Music Review Vol. 27, No. 1, February 2008, pp. 7 21

James Tenney and the Poetics of Homage

Bob Gilmore
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One of the recurrent themes of James Tenneys highly diverse musical output is an engagement with the work of other composers. From QUIET FAN for ERIK SATIE of 1970 through Spectral CANON for CONLON Nancarrow in 1974, all the way to Scend for Scelsi in 1996 and SongnDance for Harry Partch in 1999, Tenneys compositions bear dedications to a wide range of composers whose work he admired. ` Besides those already mentioned, we nd Ives, Varese, Cowell, Ruggles, Crawford, Wolpe, Cage, Xenakis, Feldman and many others. This practice manifests a desire on Tenneys part consciously to link his work to tradition: not merely the American experimental tradition, of which his own work forms so signicant a part, but to aspects of twentiethcentury European music as well. A given piece by Tenney rarely sounds much like the music of the composer invoked in its title; rather, this article argues that Tenneys work embodies an ecology of ideas, where techniques and inventions of other composers are rationalised, restated in different terms and sometimes playfully juxtaposed with ideas of others. Tenney saw himself partly in the role of curator of other peoples ideas; and his work as a whole proposes a particular genealogy of twentieth-century music. This article discusses the nature of Tenneys dedicatory works and explores the possibility that his obsessive need to invoke other composers in the dedications of his works, while clearly on one level an afrmationof heritage, identity and shared musical visionnonetheless conceals a profound anxiety about the whole nature and purpose of musical composition in the second half of the twentieth century. Keywords: James Tenney; Just Intonation; Microtonality; Experimental Music; American Music

One of the recurrent themes of James Tenneys highly diverse musical output is an engagement with the work of other composers. From QUIET FAN for ERIK SATIE of 1970 through Spectral CANON for CONLON Nancarrow in 1974, all the way to Scend for Scelsi in 1996 and SongnDance for Harry Partch in 1999, Tenneys compositions bear dedications to a wide range of composers whose work he admired.
ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/07494460701671509

B. Gilmore

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` Besides those already mentioned we nd Ives, Varese, Cowell, Ruggles, Crawford, Wolpe, Cage, Xenakis, Feldman and many others, most of them receiving more than one such dedication. The full list includes friends and contemporaries (among them Harold Budd, Udo Kasemets, Pauline Oliveros, Nam June Paik, Steve Reich, La ` Monte Young), mentors and teachers (Ruggles, Varese, Partch, Cage), and in a few cases older gures that Tenney himself had never met (Satie, Ives, Crawford). The idea of composers dedicating pieces to other composers is, of course, not in itself particularly unusual. In Tenneys case, however, the practice is so extensive that one begins to suspect that there is something else at play, something that runs much deeper in his whole artistic personality. This practice has been noted by many of those who have written about Tenneys work, but its deeper motivations have not been interrogated at any length. The received view is that these dedications simply show a good-natured sort of collegial conviviality. In his groundbreaking 1983 monograph on the composer, for example, Larry Polansky (1984, p. 125) commented that Tenney
often uses and investigates the act of homage as a kind of aesthetic motif. Not only the titles of many of the pieces, but the particular forms and questions asked in them point to his tremendous sense of musical continuity, both with his contemporaries and with the past. These references are not simple dedications Tenney makes the things he loves into essential, integral parts of his own works.

A given piece by Tenney rarely sounds much like the music of the composer invoked in its title; that supercial sort of homage by imitation was never his intention. Rather, this article argues that Tenneys work embodies an ecology of ideas, where the techniques and inventions of other composers are rationalised, restated in different terms and sometimes playfully juxtaposed with ideas of others. The act of connecting previously disparate musical worlds is part of the essence of his compositional thinking. Tenney, I would suggest, saw himself partly in the role of curator of other peoples ideas. The New York Times once described his music as a responsive sounding board for a whole host of 20th-century experimental ideas (Rockwell, 1978, p. 36). Some of these are expounded and dissected in his theoretical writings on music, but they are expressed just as clearly, and just as meaningfully, in his compositions. It is as though Tenney was attempting, through his work, to construct a particular genealogy of twentieth-century music of which he himself was a part. As such, his compositional activity as a whole seems to me to manifest a strong (we might almost say desperate) need to belong, to assert a particular sort of heritage, or perhaps lineage, in the midst of a confusing and hostile world. The abundant good-natured enthusiasm that radiated from Tenney the man, as from his work, was I believe complemented by a darker, more troubled side that has not been fully understood. This article explores the possibility that Tenneys obsessive (might we even say pathological?) need to invoke other composers in the dedications of his works, while clearly on one level an afrmationof heritage, identity and shared musical visionnonetheless conceals a profound anxiety about the whole nature

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and purpose of musical composition in the second half of the twentieth century. In discussing these diverse aspects of Tenneys work, my aim is to show something of the richness of his overall artistic achievement. The literature of music is full of examples of a composer dedicating a work to a fellow composer. Mozart dedicated a set of six string quartets to Haydn; Schumann dedicated his Fantasy op.17 to Liszt, and Liszt in turn dedicated his B minor Sonata to Schumann; Stravinsky dedicated his Symphonies of Wind Instruments to the memory of Debussy; and so on. Within the American experimental tradition to which Tenney was so devoted there are similar examples, although fewer than one might at rst suppose. (Feldmans series of dedicatory pieces, so prominent a feature of his later output, contain relatively few dedicated to other composers: among the exceptions are For John Cage, For Bunita Marcus, For Christian Wolff and For Stefan Wolpe.) The Appendix to this article gives a full listing of those works of Tenney that bear dedications to other composers, either in the title of the work or simply as an inscription in the score. The list contains some 47 individual items, and represents between a third and a half of Tenneys total oeuvre. Yet the complete list of works that are directly inspired by, or pay homage to, the music of other composers is actually much longer than this. Many of his other pieces have direct and explicit references even if the composer in question is not actually named in the title or dedication of the work. Some examples: in the late 1960s Tenney became interested in the music of Scott Joplin, and in 1969 wrote a set of Three Rags for piano. Although they are not actually dedicated to Joplin, they are idiomatic pieces in the ragtime manner, paying homage to the tradition; in no sense do they satirize it or view it from afar (unlike, say, Stravinskys Ragtime). Likewise, Tenneys early tape piece Collage #1 (Blue Suede) (1961) might legitimately be heard as a tribute to Elvis Presley, whose Blue Suede Shoes it dissects. A somewhat different example is Bridge (1982 1984) for two pianos (eight hands) in a microtonal tuning system, part of the intention of which, as Tenney (in Kasemets, 1984, p. 12) explained, was to create a tangible bridge between the musical world of John Cage and another musical world which, though certainly very different in sound to that of Harry Partch, has some aspects in common with it. Again, in the programme note for the late piano work To Weave (a meditation) (2003), written for the Canadian pianist Eve Egoyan, he wrote: Waves for Eve, wave upon wave, little waves on bigger waves, et cetera, but precisely calibrated to peak at the phi-point of the golden ratio. To weave: a three-voice polyphonic texture in dissonant counterpoint, with a respectful nod in the direction of Carl Ruggles and Ruth Crawford Seeger (Tenney, 2005). If we include such works as these, and the many others that make direct reference to other composers even though the score itself does not explicitly say so, then those pieces that bear no such reference become very few and far between. It is surely reasonable to wonder about the prevalence of this practice in Tenneys output, which has no parallel in the work of any composer before him, and seems to demand some sort of explanation. I shall discuss in turn three aspects of this practice:

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rst, the changing meanings of the practice throughout his life; second, with reference to specic works, the relevance of the practice in his mature compositional output, exploring the idea I proposed above of Tenney as a curator of other peoples ideas; and third, more speculatively, a interpretation of its underlying motivations, exploring what seems to me its roots in anxiety as well as in afrmation. Tenneys engagement with the work of other composers might be said to fall into three broad categories, which succeed one another chronologically and seem to me to be motivated by essentially different impulses. The rst is a sort of homage-byimitation; more than simply pastiche, but compositions that nonetheless stay a bit too respectfully close to the musical worlds of older composers, particularly (as ` Tenney himself often acknowledged) Webern, Ruggles and Varese. Into this category would fall the earliest works in his catalogue, works in which, as with many young composers, inuences are audibly evident rather than fully digested. Examples include Seeds (1956 1961), for small ensemble, an elegant piece with six movements of Webern-like brevity in an atonal idiom using Klangfarbenmelodie, principles of motivic development and other thumbprints of the Viennese post-tonal but preserial music of the 1900s and 1910s; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (1958, originally for tenor and ve instruments); the SONATA for Ten Wind Instruments of 1958 1959, dedicated to Carl Ruggles; and the electronic piece Phases of 1963, ` ` dedicated to Varese, whose tape music (in Deserts and the Poeme Electronique) had deeply impressed Tenney (Tenney, 1978). This phase of his workessentially his student years and a bit beyondcame to an end during his years in New York in the mid- to late 1960s, and gave way to a different sort of connection with other composers work. In the next phase of Tenneys work, roughly 1965 1971, there is a sense of wanting to belong to an artistic community, or more accurately two communities: the rst in New York and the second in California; most of the pieces of these years are dedicated to fellow composers of roughly his own age. These dedications have the sense of acknowledging individuals engaged in making the same kind of experimental work as Tenney himself, work in which, despite individual differences, there is a general feeling of artists engaged in a shared endeavor. Into this category come two groups of works: the performance art pieces made in New York in the mid-1960s (the least-known part of his output today) like CHAMBER MUSIC (dedicated to George Brecht) or For two (gently) (for Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik); and the set of ten postal pieces (which, conversely, are among his best-known works), most of which were done in California in 1971, including KOAN, (night) and Having Never Written a Note for Percussion. Finally and arguably most signicantly is the sense of the composer as curator, as a responsive sounding board for other peoples ideas. There is no composer for whom this is truer than Tenney, and it may well prove to be one of his most enduring contributions to contemporary composition. This phase of his work, in which almost every piece is a homage to one (or more) of his fellow composers, began in 1970 and continued for the rest of his life.

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The rst work that proposes this latter modelcomposition as homageis QUIET FAN for ERIK SATIE for 13 instruments, composed in Santa Barbara in 1970 and slightly revised the following year. The piece is important in Tenneys output in being the rst extended, fully-notated instrumental piece he had written after several years of involvement with electronic music and performance art in New York. Like several of his earlier (and later) works, it is a sort of process piece that yields a simple but elegant formal design. The pitch range of the central four-note motif (a rising minor second followed by a falling minor second) gradually expands outwards (both ascending and descending) to a major tenth, and then contracts back to a semitone, like the opening and closing of a fan. This process occurs several times, and then, towards the end of the piece, the texture breaks up for a brief quotation from Saties Trois Morceaux en forme de poirea mildly surreal moment that passes quickly and we return to the process-led material as though nothing had happened. What, then, is the nature of the Satie connection? The quotation aside (in itself a rare occurrence in Tenneys work), the most Satie-like aspect of QUIET FAN seems to me to be its avoidance of dramatic incident or signicant climactic high point. In addition, as Tenney (1991) noted: The harmonies suggested by successive variants of this motif reminded me of a characteristic feature of the harmonic aspect of Saties stylethe highly unconventional and apparently arbitrary sequences of chords which are themselves quite conventional. There is, then, in this work, a kind of family resemblance, not any literal usage of a specic compositional technique derived from Satie. This is one of the forms of homage we nd in Tenneys mature work, but far from the only one.1 QUIET FAN for ERIK SATIE, we might say, is haunted by Saties presence. The same is true, though with different personnel, of the ve movements of QUINTEXT: FIVE TEXTURES for string quartet and bass, composed in 1972. Here the nature of the individual homages is expanded considerably. The ve movements are: Some Recent THOUGHTS for Morton Feldman, CLOUDS for Iannis Xenakis, A Choir of ANGELS for Carl Ruggles, PARABOLAS and ` HYPERBOLAS for Edgard Varese and SPECTRA for Harry Partch. As the works subtitle indicates, each movement creates and sustains a texture without dramatic change of any kind. Each has, moreover, a particular (and quite straightforward) connection to the work of the composer invoked in its title, although Tenneys homage could never actually be mistaken for the music of the composer concerned. The rst movement is a study in soft, sustained, non-developmental, dissonant vertical harmonies, an obsession in much of Feldmans early work (especially, perhaps, the Vertical Thoughts series, from which Tenney derived his title). However, in Some recent THOUGHTS for Morton Feldman, the harmonies specied are microtonal, in a form of just intonation (using a scale of intervals analogous to the rst 13 odd-number harmonics), one of Tenneys own obsessions, but a concept totally at odds with Feldmans devotion to equal temperament. The second movement is a tapestry of sound and silence, with the sound sections being a homage to the string cluster textures of Xenakiss Metastasis and other

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works, albeit randomly derived. The third movement is a sort of textural parody of Ruggless Angels, this time involving actual quotations of chords from Ruggless score, though once again in just intonation; it is played sul ponticello throughout, invoking the muted brass of the original. The fourth movement, with its continual but irregular glissandi nally converging around middle C, evokes the parabolas ` and hyperbolas that Varese wanted to create in sound by use of instruments like the siren; again, however, the movement is technically speaking almost antithetical ` to Vareses compositional methods, with its use of graphic notation and consequent degree of randomness. Finally, SPECTRA for Harry Partch proposes yet another sort of homage: in terms of its sonority and its compositional approach the piece is quite far from the sound of Partchs music, yet the complex scordatura that Tenney species for the strings yields music that uses the most complex fabric of just intervals he had so far employed (surpassing in complexity, thanks to its use of intervals derived from prime number partials as high as the thirteenth, the harmonic resources of Partchs own musical language). This last movement is a characteristic form of Tenney homage, and shows him engaging with the materials characteristic of another composers work and extending them further. The Spectral CANON for CONLON Nancarrow of 1974 shows yet another side of Tenneys homage-making. To begin with, in writing a piece for player piano, Tenney is making an affectionate tribute to Nancarrow, the rst composer to make his best work for that instrument, thereby afrming its viability as a medium for serious musical thought.2 Second, the Spectral CANON takes two of the most fundamental technical devices of Nancarrows musicthe use of proportional rhythms between two or more voices, relationships supposedly unplayable by human performers, and the use of canonic techniqueand stretches them to extreme lengths, constructing a 24-voice canon in which each voice is one single pitch, the 24 pitches simulating the rst 24 harmonics of a low A (55 Hz). Each new voice that enters the texture reiterates a pitch in a rhythmic relationship to the previous voice that is the inverse of the relationship of their frequencies. (This aspect of the piece suggests not so much Nancarrow as Henry Cowell, who explored the rhythm-frequency relationship in his book New Musical Resources; the book also gave Nancarrow the idea to compose rhythmically complex music for player piano.) In certain respects, the Spectral CANON out-does Nancarrow at his own game, but only by reducing his musical materials to the point of near-absurdity: whereas Nancarrow composed with melodies and chords, Tenney here composes with single pitches; whereas Nancarrow composes rhythms, Tenney uses reiterations (accelerating or decelerating) of single notes. It is as though the esh and blood of Nancarrows music has been stripped away and only the bare bones are left. The Spectral CANON takes Nancarrows techniques to a logical extreme, and wipes Nancarrow himself out of the picture. In this sense, one might say the piece is an odd sort of homage, but perhaps the best sort: rather as the SPECTRA for Harry Partch had done with Partchs music, the Spectral CANON proposes a radical reinterpretation and extension of Nancarrows musical world.

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The same is true of a quite different piece composed two years later: Harmonium #1 (1976) for variable ensemble, dedicated to Lou Harrison. Unlike the Spectral CANON, there is no similarity to the music of its dedicatee on the level of sonority. Rather, the piece is one of Tenneys early explorations of the chords and intervals possible in just intonation, which Harrison had by then been exploring in his own music for more than twenty years. The piece is a texture of slowly mutating chords built on a sequence of fundamentals that rst descend by (equal-tempered) fths, AD-G-C, then ascend to F, B and nally E. The chords themselves introduce (in varying orders) simulations of the third, fth, seventh, eleventh and seventeenth harmonics, in just intonation, with the fundamental in most cases being the last pitch of the chord to be sounded. This creates a distinctive sort of oblique harmony (to use a term coined by Henry Brant) in which the slowly-forming chords are explained to the ear by the addition of their fundamentals. Harmonium #1, while technically speaking a microtonal piece, has much more in common with a Harrison aesthetic than a Partchian one: the essence of the piece seems to be the enjoyment of the sheer sensuous beauty of the just tuning, and the slow pace of the music gives the ear time to savor the delicious play of consonance and dissonance as it unfolds. Thus Tenney acknowledges one of the distinctive features of the work of a senior colleague with whom his music would otherwise seem to have little in common. Another example of a piece that bridges apparently incompatible musical worlds is the Chromatic Canon for two pianos (1980, revised 1983), dedicated to Steve Reich. Unusually in Tenneys mature music the piece is based on a 12-note row, although one with strong triadic implications: successive groupings of three notes spell out triads of Bb minor, E minor, Ab major and D major. (The row, as Tenney acknowledged, has a structural similarity to that of Weberns Concerto op.24, although the details are different.) The piece, Tenney (in Oteri, 2005) remarked, was a comment not only on minimal music but on serial music. It was meant to be saying something about both of those things. To the ear, the piece is a study in atonal minimalism; it sounds nothing like Webern (or any other serial music, for that matter), yet also sounds not much like Reich. Moreover, the worlds of serialism and minimalism are not the only conceptual reference points in this piece. Tenney allowed for the possibility that the pianos be retuned in just intonation, and proposed two possible tunings of the row in 7-limit just intonation. Heard in this way, some of the keyboard tunings of Terry Riley and La Monte Youngactually quite nonReichian in sonorityspring to mind. From these diverse points of reference, Tenney creates a composition that, intriguingly, does not sound much like any of his other pieces, much less those of Reich or Webern. Of all the composers invoked in the dedications of his works, it was John Cage whose work had the strongest impact on Tenney, surpassing in importance even that ` of earlier mentors like Ruggles or Varese. Again, the nature of Tenneys various homages to Cage varies considerably. The early Ergodos I (1963) and Ergodos II (1964) sound likeand in fact could almost berealizations of some of Cages

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indeterminate works. In these pieces, Tenney implements the Cagean notion that any event in the piece is as signicant statistically as any other event (this is what Tenney refers to by the term ergodic). Ergodos I, for example, uses two ten-minute monaural tapes that may be played in either direction, alone or together, in any combination. On the other hand, the string trio piece Harmonium #5 (1978), with its gentle consonances and metric rhythms, sounds nothing like Cage (not even the more diatonic side of Cages output, as found in works like In a Landscape or the String Quartet in Four Parts). The connection is, rather, a straightforward technical one as the piece employs the principle that Cage (following Henry Cowell) termed square root form, being structured in eleven sections of eleven bars each. In addition to these works are two in memoriam pieces: Form 2 (1993) for variable ensemble and Ergodos III (1994) for two pianos. Yet Cages impact on Tenney was far more pervasive than these examples suggest. In his paper Computer Music Experiences, 1961 1964, written at the end of his three-year residency at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, he commented that his time there had seen, among other things, a curious history of renunciations of one after another of the traditional attitudes about music, due primarily to a gradually more thorough assimilation of the insights of John Cage (Tenney, 1969). While he does not specify exactly what these renunciations were, it is certainly the case that most of them were not permanent. One such renunciation, however, did remain: following Cage, Tenney had a sense of wanting to remove himselfhis ego, his likes and dislikesfrom his work. This wish, every bit as chimerical in his case as it was in that of Cage, nonetheless remained an obsession. Comparing his attitude to that of Cage, Tenney once remarked that the reason he wanted to remove himself from his work was because Im irrelevant to it . . . except as the nder of it, or the maker of itits not going to happen unless I do it, but its not about me. He elaborated:
It also has to be understood that I dont just set up a random process and accept everything, and I dont select from it either. I set up a constrained random process, constrained one way or anotherthat sometimes includes no constraints at all, but thats a special case of constraintsand I listen to it, or check it out one way or another. And if something happens that dont think is right, I go back to the programme, go back to the constraints and say: now, I havent dened the constraints that I want carefully enough. (Tenney, in Maher, 2000, p. 25)

The largest work to deal explicitly with aspects of Cages thought is Bridge for two pianos of 1982 1984. This work was a conscious attempt to create music that would link two highly diverse and apparently incompatible musical worlds: the ergodic pitch textures characteristic of Cage, with sounds that are free of contextual relationships to other sounds, and the more harmonically organised chords and intervals of a system of just intonation similar to (but simpler than) that of Partch. This does not, however, mean that the piece moves from chaos to harmony: the music of the second part uses a directed random process that is still light years away

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from Partchs own compositional practice. However, in Tenneys mind, the Cageinspired music (the works rst eight minutes) and the Partch-inspired music (the whole of Part 2, lasting twenty minutes) accrued meaning in being brought together.
If they both mean something to me, if theyre both valuable to me, I have this tremendous desire all the time to integrate them. [In Bridge] I intentionally bridge two worlds that some people would see as totally incompatible, including Partch himself. But I dont see it that way. Its a statement. Its saying something that I want to say about the experimental tradition, that heritage, also that eclecticism. If one can listen to this piece with no sense of inconsistency, then I have achieved something, which is to show that these worlds are, in fact, compatible. (Tenney, in Belet, 1990, p. 77)

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We might say that inasmuch as Bridge is an act of homage to Cage and Partch, it is so in bringing something of the essence of their work together (the nonintentionality of Cage and the use of just intonation in Partch). Aspects of the two composers work are appropriated and juxtaposed to see what the result might sound like: indeed, the large scale of the resulting undertaking is itself a sort of homage. We are left with a question: how relevant is this inside information to the listening experience? Would Bridge sound any different to us if we were unaware of these connections to the work of Cage and Partch? Among the different sorts of kinship Tenney struck with the work of fellow composers, some were relatively transient and others were profound and long lasting. In 1993 he produced a set of four pieces entitled Form, each of which was an in memoriam to some composer who was important to me: the four pieces are ` dedicated to Varese, Cage, Stefan Wolpe and Morton Feldman, respectively. They dont in any deep way allude to the styles of those composers or anything like that, ` Tenney (in Oteri, 2005) commented. The one dedicated to Varese is loud and dissonant; the one for Feldman is very soft. But thats a very supercial kind of connection. In these works, Tenney was acknowledging friendships that go back thirty years or more. Some new afrmations were made in the works from the last decade of his lifewith a piece dedicated to Giacinto Scelsi, for example, and with music exploring further the techniques of dissonant counterpoint characteristic of the music of Ruth Crawford Seeger and Charles Seegerand several older kinships were revisited, among them with Ives (in the Essay (after a sonata) for piano, with respect to the Concord Sonata by Charles Ives) and Partch (SongnDance for Harry Partch, for two of Partchs instruments (Adapted Viola and Diamond Marimba) and small orchestra). The title of Tenneys last completed compositionthe string quartet Arbor Vitae (2006)can be seen in part to allude to the network of relationships that sustained a composing life of more than half a century. These, then, are some of the branches of the family tree from which James Tenneys work grew, and some of the works on which his reputation rests.3 There is a curious irony in the fact that Tenneys very centrality in this particular genealogy marks him out as the direct opposite of the stereotypical American pioneer, the loner artist who

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goes his own way regardless and mindless of the work of others. Whether by temperament or from artistic choice, Tenney seems to have been generally unwilling to take a single step along that road without, as it were, a companion, or several, to accompany him. He strove, in his work as well as his life, to understand where these pioneers were leading, and to support them by helping to colonise the new terrain they had uncovered. It is my belief that this particular quality of Tenneys workas coloniser rather than pioneer, as curator as well as creatorlies at the heart of his achievement. He wanted, through his work, to invent a tradition to which he could belong.4 Something of the nature of his particular role, and the constant need for artistic companionship that his work manifests, can, I believe, be explained to a considerable extent by aspects of his biography. In the nal section of this article I would like to offer some speculations on the relationship of Tenneys life, particularly his early life, to his mature artistic practice. Tenney dated the beginnings of his conscious existence quite specically to the summer of 1945. I have a feeling that something turned on when I was eleven, he told an interviewer, and the direction that it took was an interest in science, a kind of very hungry curiosity about the world (Tenney, in Kasemets, 1984, p. 2). Yet this memory was inseparable from another from the same time, a much darker one: reports of the rst atomic bomb tests in New Mexico, followed by the dropping of bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that same summer. Tenney spoke about these bombings and his own early memories of them many times, both in public and in private. Unusually for a composer whose output consists overwhelmingly of abstract instrumental music, he wrote one of his most powerful works about these events: Pika-Don (1991) for percussion quartet and speaking voices on tape, its two movements entitled Alamogordo and Hiroshima. Alamogordo, New Mexico, the site of the atomic bomb test in July 1945, a few weeks before the attacks on Japan, is located close to Tenneys birthplace, Silver City. I was 11 years old the summer it all happened, he remarked in an interview with the composer Peter Garland. I became fascinated by physics as a result of it, and the history of science that led up to it. I feel I almost experienced the test itself, and it burned an indelible image into my consciousness that Ive never been able to forget (Tenney, in Garland, 1991, p. 32). Such an experience, in the mind of an 11 year-old boy, can only have been a deeply traumatizing one. Without wishing to psychoanalyse Tenneys work from the standpoint of this one early experience, I believe that this realisationthat the very place he had been born contained tools that could annihilate the whole planet shaped his mature view of the world. Put crudely, it gave him a feeling of gratitude for being alive, and a curiosity to understand the workings of the world and the whole nature of existence (he used, only half jokingly, to describe himself as an amateur cosmologist). This early traumatic event was accompanied by another: the tensions in his parents marriage. Tenney himself made a link between this aspect of his childhood and the recurrent need in his music to build bridges between different, even apparently incompatible, aesthetic positions. Asked about this tendency by an

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interviewer near the end of his life, he gave a revealing answer that posits a personal psychological motivation for this artistic practice:
I think it goes back to my childhood and my experience with my parents who were always at loggerheads and I was always trying to get them together. I like that idea of seeing that some of these things that we think of as [being] in diametric opposition, are not really. They just may be two ends of what can be conceived as a continuous spectrum. (Tenney, in Oteri, 2005)

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A similar needlike that of the child who needs the love of both warring parents can be seen in Tenneys account of the Tone Roads concert series he helped originate in the early 1960s:
` That rst Tone Roads concert in New York had music by Ives, Ruggles, Varese, Cage and Feldman. This was 1963, and for me, it seemed an utterly natural thing to put music by those ve composers on the same program, and to write program notes for it that connected them with each other. After the concert, three of those ` composers came to the party. Varese, Cage and Feldman were all there and talking to each other! I had this wonderful feeling that, in a way, I had brought about a ` kind of rapprochement between Varese and Cage: that they were talking, and they were being very friendly to each other, and that it was important to them to see themselves, their own work, on the same program. (Tenney, in Garland, 1991, p. 33)

Might it be going too far to suggest that underlying Tenneys work, as a consequence of these traumatic incidentsthe childhood memories of atomic destruction married to a belief in the value of science; the need to connect diametrically opposed individuals, to bring together the various members of a surrogate family, whether living people or ghosts of the recent pastis a fundamental anxiety, that of nding meaning in a post-holocaust world? In this view, Tenneys continual need to invoke other composers in the titles and dedications of his works has the aspect of safety in numbershis way of confronting the fundamental loneliness of the human condition was, as it were, to ll his studio with other people. Seen in these terms Tenney appears as an existentialist rather than as the coolheaded rationalist he is sometimes perceived to be. At the root of his mature work, I believe, is a profoundly existentialist view of the world. Having been thrown into existence without having chosen it, we are obliged, somehow, to make sense of the world. Kierkegaard emphasised the deep anxiety of human existence that recognizes there is nothing at its core; the way to counter this nothingness, he contended, is by embracing existence, making of it something that one can believe in. Kierkegaard regarded rationality as a mechanism that human beings use to counter their existential anxiety in the face of being in the world, and in face of the inevitability of death. At rst glance this might seem an odd view of a composer who seems so deantly rationalist, whose compositional decisions and choices are so susceptible to the light of rational analysis. I have always felt that this interpretation of Tenney is a

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considerable oversimplication, and that if one pushes below the surface the rationalism is never very sure of itself, is constantly searching for other levels of meaning. In the programme note for the late piano work To weave (a meditation), part of which I quoted earlier, he ends by remarking that the piece is a meditation on the wondrous physicality and inescapable spirituality of all our music-making. How odd to nd such a supposed rationalist creating music that reects upon the inescapable spirituality of music! Or perhaps not, because in a sense one might say that Tenney spent most of his life surrounding himself with spirits. In this existentialist view, I see Tenney as a composer obsessed with the in-between places, the places that we did not know existed until he illuminated them. Tenney drew inspiration from the work of other composers in a quite basic sense as well as a rather particular one. My sense of the stimulus that comes from the important work done in the past, he told an interviewer, is that it in effect gives all of us permission (Tenney, in Kasemets, 1984, p. 4). The achievements of other composerswhether Cages overcoming of intentionality, Nancarrows exploration of proportional rhythms, Partchs and Harrisons use of just intonation, Ruggless and Crawfords exploration of dissonant counterpointall these were a stimulus (or, as he preferred to say, gave him permission) to go further in exploring these domains, but more particular, as we have seen, is Tenneys bringing together of techniques (or, more generally, musical worlds) previously thought to be disparate. I know that my work is probably as idiosyncratic, and singular, and in that sense personal, as anybody elses, he told another interviewer, but I maybe have a different view of how that ts into the larger picture, because I think I have a different view of the larger picture (Tenney, in Maher, 2000, p. 25). In that larger picture, Cage can be brought together ` with Partch, Webern with Reich, and Ives, Cowell and Varese can be brought together (for example through the medium of percussion, as in the THREE PIECES for Drum Quartet of 1974). In the programme notes for two concerts of his music presented under the auspices of the Reich Music Foundation in New York in 1978, Tenney quoted Hexagram 16, YU, from the I Ching, which reads:
Thunder comes resounding out of the earth: The image of ENTHUSIASM. Thus the ancient kings made music In order to honor merit, And offered it with splendor To the Supreme Deity, Inviting their ancestors to be present.

Tenney commented: For me the merit that is honored is that of the ancestors themselves. Who these are should be evident in the numerous dedications in the titles of my pieces . . . . My highest hope right now is that my own enthusiasm might be contagious (Tenney, 1978). We need have no doubt that, through a body of music lled with family resemblances to ancestors and friends, James Tenneys enthusiasm will reach many generations to come.

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[1] It might be noted that, for all his dedicatory zeal, Tenney never went to one of Saties extremes: the score of the Prelude de la Porte Heroque du Ciel of 1894 bears the inscription I dedicate this work to myself. E.S. [2] Curiously, ten years earlier Tenney had written a short piece for the instrument, the Music for Player Piano of 1964; as far as I can determine this was written before his encounter with Nancarrows work, and certainly before he knew it in any detail. [3] It should be stated that there are, of course, quite a few works by Tenney, including several of his nest (Glissade, say, or Critical Band, or Diapason) that bear no dedication at all. [4] It is worth remembering that the idea of an American experimental tradition was not really in the air until the 1960s, and not taken as read until the 1970s or even later. I would contend that Tenneys activities as composer, concert organiser, teacher, scholar and propagandist strongly encouraged this particular reading of twentieth-century American music history, both directly as well as through the activities of his former students.

References
Belet, B. (1990). An Examination of the Theories and Compositions of James Tenney, 1982 1985. DMA thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Garland, P. (1991). James Tenney: American maverick. Ear: Magazine of New Music, 15(10), 30 36. Kasemets, U. (1984). A tradition of experimentation: James Tenney in conversation. Musicworks, 27, 2 20. Maher, C. (2000). A different view of the larger picture: James Tenney on intention, harmony and phenomenology. Musicworks, 77, 25 29. Oteri, F. J. (2005). Postcards from the edge: A talk with James Tenney. Available online at: http:// www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id4247 (accessed 17 March 2007). Polansky, L. (1984). The early works of James Tenney. In Soundings 13: The Music of James Tenney (pp. 114 297). Santa Fe, NM: Soundings Press. Rockwell, J. (1978). Music: By James Tenney. New York Times, 20 December, p. 36. Tenney, J. (1969). Computer music experiences, 1961 1964. Electronic Music Reports 1. Utrecht: Institute of Sonology. Tenney, J. (1978). Programme notes for In Retrospect, two concerts of his music given by Steve Reich and Musicians, New York, December. Tenney, J. (1991). Programme notes for a concert of his music by Essential Music, New York, 2 May. Tenney, J. (2005). Programme note for To Weave (a meditation), in the CD booklet of Weave: Eve Egoyan, EVE0106.

Appendix. List of selected works by James Tenney, alphabetically by their dedicatee John Bergamo Having Never Written a Note for Percussion (1971), for John Bergamo George Brecht CHAMBER MUSIC (1964) for variable instrumentation, for George Brecht

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Harold Budd (night.) (1971) for percussion or other sound sources, for Harold Budd John Cage Ergodos I (1963) for computer-generated tapes, for John Cage Ergodos II (1964) for computer-generated tape, for John Cage Harmonium #5 (1978) for string trio, for John Cage deus ex machina (1982) for tam-tam and tape delay system (Part II for John Cage and David Tudor) Form 2 (1993) for variable ensemble, in memoriam John Cage Ergodos III (1994) for two pianos, in memoriam John Cage (Fontana) MIX for SIX (Strings) (2001), for two violins, three violas and cello, in memoriam John Cage Philip Corner A Rose is a Rose is a Round (1970), for Philip Corner Henry Cowell HOCKET for Henry Cowell (from THREE PIECES for Drum Quartet) (1974 1975) Ruth Crawford Seeger Diaphonic Toccata (1997) for violin and piano, for Ruth Crawford Seeger Morton Feldman Some recent THOUGHTS for Morton Feldman (from QUINTEXT) (1972) Form 4 (1993) for variable ensemble, in memoriam Morton Feldman Malcolm Goldstein KOAN for solo violin (1971), for Malcolm Goldstein Lou Harrison Harmonium #1 (1976) for variable instrumentation, for Lou Harrison Charles Ives WAKE for Charles Ives (from THREE PIECES for Drum Quartet) (1974 1975) Essay (after a sonata) (2003) for piano, with respect to the Concord Sonata by Charles Ives Udo Kasemets CHANGES: 64 Studies for Six Harps (1985), for Udo Kasemets Alison Knowles Swell Piece (1967) for any sustaining instruments, for Alison Knowles Joan La Barbara/Morton Subotnick Voices (1982) for voice and tape delay system, for Joan La Barbara and Morton Subotnik Alvin Lucier deus ex machina (1982) for tam-tam and tape delay system (Part I for Alvin Lucier) Conlon Nancarrow Spectral CANON for CONLON Nancarrow (1974) for player piano Cognate Canons (1993) for string quartet and percussion, for Conlon Nancarrow

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Max Neuhaus MAXIMUSIC (1965), for Max Neuhaus Lionel Nowak Three Indigenous Songs (1979) for small ensemble, for Lionel Nowak Pauline Oliveros Swell Piece No. 2 (1971), for Pauline Oliveros Nam June Paik/Charlotte Moorman For two (gently) (1965), for Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik Harry Partch SPECTRA for Harry Partch (from QUINTEXT) (1972) Song n Dance for Harry Partch (1999) for Adapted Viola, Diamond Marimba, strings and percussion Steve Reich Chromatic Canon (1980) for two pianos, for Steve Reich David Rosenboom/Jacqueline Humbert Listen . . .! for three sopranos and piano (1981), for Jacqueline Humbert and David Rosenboom Carl Ruggles SONATA for Ten Wind Instruments (1959, rev 83), to Carl Ruggles A Choir of ANGELS for Carl Ruggles (from QUINTEXT) (1972) Erik Satie QUIET FAN for ERIK SATIE (1970 1971) for ensemble Three Pages in the Shape of a Pear (1995) for piano (or . . .), in celebration of Erik Satie Giacinto Scelsi Scend for Scelsi (1996) for chamber ensemble with also saxophone Charles Seeger Seegersong #1 (1999) for clarinet or bass clarinet Seegersong #2 (1999) for ute or alto ute ` Edgard Varese ` Phases (1963) for tape, for Edgard Varese ` PARABOLAS and HYPERBOLAS for Edgard Varese (from QUINTEXT) (1972) ` se (from THREE PIECES for Drum Quartet) CRYSTAL CANON for Edgard Vare (1974) ` Form 1 (1993) for variable ensemble, in memoriam Edgard Varese Stefan Wolpe Form 3 (1993) for variable ensemble, in memoriam Stefan Wolpe Iannis Xenakis CLOUDS for Iannis Xenakis (from QUINTEXT) (1972) La Monte Young Swell Piece No. 3 (1971), for La Monte Young

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