James Tenney

James Tenney’s compositional career, stretching over more than 50 years, represents a unique and visionary trajectory in twentieth-century music. Guided by a deep fascination with the acoustic properties of sound and the cognitive mechanisms of human hearing, his music explores new approaches to time and material, often eschewing the dramaturgical, narrative discourse inherited from the classical tradition in favour of stochastic, minimalist, or monolithic forms. While his early works are inspired by early-twentieth-century American composers such as Charles Ives and Carl Ruggles, Tenney later integrated concepts and innovations from Edgard Varèse, John Cage, and Harry Partch into a distinctive creative voice. His artistic development in the 1950s and 60s was marked by the Fluxus movement and his close association with visual artists including filmmaker Stan Brakhage and multimedia artist Carolee Schneemann (his first wife and a frequent collaborator). Tenney’s writings on music theory have been an essential contribution to the phenomenology of music and the continuing development of extended just intonation by composers such as Marc Sabat, Chiyoko Szlavnics, and Catherine Lamb. Tenney’s teaching, music, and writings remain a significant influence on experimental composers and sound artists, who continue to draw inspiration from his forthright and probing insights into the nature of sound and listening.

Early electronic and computer music

Tenney described his earliest compositions as reflecting the influence of Satie, Gershwin, Bartók, and Arnold Schoenberg (Wannamaker 2021, 20)—his first major project was Interim (1952), conceived as a musical accompaniment to a silent film by Stan Brakhage (a high-school friend from Denver who would remain a lifelong collaborator). Tenney left Colorado for New York City in 1954 to study piano performance at Juilliard under the supervision of Eduard Steuermann, sharing a Chinatown apartment with Brakhage. Though he abandoned his studies at Juilliard within a year, the move to New York proved to be pivotal in Tenney’s life: he met Edgard Varèse and began lessons with composer Chou Wen-Chung (a former Varèse student), and also began a relationship with his future wife, the artist Carolee Schneemann (Schneemann 2014, Smigel 2017). Under Chou’s tutelage, Tenney completed Seeds I-VI for mixed chamber sextet, a work he would later refer to as his “opus 1.”

Tenney completed a bachelor’s degree at Bennington College in Vermont. The continuation of his studies at the University of Illinois brought Tenney into a hotbed of musical creation—the university had just opened its electronic music studio under the direction of Lejaren Hiller, becoming the first in the United States to offer studies in electronic composition. While at Illinois, Tenney also studied with Kenneth Gaburo and worked with Harry Partch, who was at the university on an artistic fellowship.

At the University of Illinois studio, Tenney completed his first electroacoustic work, Collage #1 (« Blue Suede ») (1961). As the subtitle suggests, the subject and source of this collage is the Elvis Presley song “Blue Suede Shoes” (1956). The opening of the work (Figure 1a) is marked by quick, arrhythmic cuts between unstable pitched and noisy sounds, none conveying a recognizable source. The end of this excerpt is marked by the arrival of a new sonic layer, a high-pitched twittering made up of highly accelerated clips of the Presley song. A third layer appears at 1:17, introducing scrambled but otherwise untransformed fragments of the song—here, the timbre of Presley’s voice, the twang of guitar, and the drumkit are immediately recognizable. As the piece progresses to the end (Figure 1b), the song fragments are gradually covered by the noisy and abstract sounds from the beginning, creating a dense and chaotic texture that ends—like the song—on a ringing guitar chord.

Figure 1a. *Collage #1 (“Blue Suede”)* (1961), spectrogram of 0:00–0:30. https://youtu.be/P9TGvSUUR7s?si=tWO0vxSOUiQu0v8c Figure 1b. *Collage #1 (“Blue Suede”)* (1961), spectrogram of 2:51–3:21.

Analysts have pointed out Tenney’s audacity in applying musique concrète techniques to a pop culture source, making Collage #1 an early precursor to composer John Oswald’s concept of “plunderphonics.” Robert Wannamaker (2021, 36–37) also observes the considerable influence on the work of Schneemann, whose contemporary artworks such as Sir Henry Francis Taylor (1960) were also based on the collage of diverse materials.

After his studies in Illinois, Tenney was invited by Max Mathews and John R. Pierce to study psychoacoustics and develop the nascent computer music research center at Bell Telephone Laboratories (Bell Labs) in Murray Hill, New Jersey. During this period (1961–64), Tenney split his time between this research work and an increasing involvement in New York’s music and arts scene, particularly the avant-garde circle around composer John Cage. Tenney co-founded the Tone Roads Chamber Ensemble in 1963 with Malcolm Goldstein and Philip Corner and frequently interacted with artists of the Fluxus group. Ideas inspired by Cage became an important part of Tenney’s work at Bell Labs, informing his work with their innovative digital music equipment (Tenney 1963).

Figure 2 shows a spectrogram of the entirety of Analog #1 (Noise Study) (1961), one of the first pieces Tenney composed at Bell Labs. The composer describes his daily commute to the labs through the Holland Tunnel as an inspiration: “When I did, finally, begin to listen, the sounds of the traffic became so interesting that the trip was no longer a thing to be dreaded and gotten through as quickly as possible. From then on, I actually looked forward to it as a source of new perceptual insights” (Tenney [1969] 2015, 98–99). The notion of hearing music in “non-musical” environmental sounds emerged from Tenney’s engagement with the ideas of Cage, and—paired with his enduring curiosity about the nature of aural perception—led Tenney to new musical and technological resources. Unlike the musique concrète tape manipulations of Collage #1 (“Blue Suede”), Analog #1 (Noise Study) is entirely synthesized by computer using Mathews’s MUSIC III. A noise generator allowed Tenney to shape noise sounds (reminiscent of the tunnel traffic) precisely, specifying and adjusting the center frequency and bandwidth. This can be readily seen in the grainy geometric figures of the spectrogram in Figure 2.

Figure 2. *Analog #1 (Noise Study)* (1961), spectrogram. https://youtu.be/m5VaBUy3KZU?si=ZECRndCizmALDxQC

Tenney soon turned from the coin-tossing randomization procedures of Analog #1 (Noise Study) (1961) to entirely computer-based techniques. These underlie the 1963 work Stochastic String Quartet, which, like the electronic piece, relies on random (stochastic) choices of parameter values within carefully predetermined parametric ranges. Tenney was already familiar at this time with the related work of Iannis Xenakis starting in the mid-1950s, which he read with a combination of interest and reservations (Wannamaker 2021, 63)—the term “stochastic” comes from Xenakis, though Tenney’s particular approach to the statistical control of parameters is his own.

Leaving Bell Labs in 1964, Tenney moved away from computer-generated music towards a greater engagement in New York’s burgeoning and interdisciplinary “downtown” art scene. Alongside Schneemann, Tenney participated in Fluxus performances and happenings, as well as co-founding the Tone Roads Chamber Ensemble as organizer, pianist, and/or conductor. Tone Roads offered programs of predominantly American music, drawing connections from Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles, and Edgard Varèse to the “New York School” of John Cage, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff, and then to younger composers such as Philip Glass, Gordon Mumma, and the ensemble leaders (Tenney, Goldstein, Corner) themselves (Wannamaker 2021, 87). Tenney participated in Schneemann’s iconic performance piece
Meat Joy (1964) and her sexually charged experimental film Fuses (1964–67). Works from this period include the open form dance/music hybrid Choreogram—with musicians reading the dancers’ bodies as a score according to particular mappings—and the graphic scores of String Complement (1964) and Instrumental Responses (1964).

Tenney’s continued his work in electronic composition with a return to collage aesthetics in Collage #2 (« Viet Flakes ») (1966), composed as a soundtrack to Schneemann’s antiwar film Viet-Flakes (1967), and Fabric for Ché (1967), which weaves together synthesized voices (from the Bell Labs period) with filtered broadband noise (Wannamaker 2021, 101–109). Several source tracks are mixed together at varying speeds—(as in Analog #1 (Noise Study)—and also with reversals of playback direction. The result, visible in Figure 3, is a form with numerous retrograde symmetries, most notable at the midpoint (4:55) but also at several subsidiary levels throughout the work. The sheer quantity of overlapping glissandi combine with the noisy backdrop to achieve the composer’s goal of a “terrible, incredible turmoil.” While far more abstract in its materials than the contemporaneous Collage #2 (Viet Flakes), the work also emerged from a political impetus: Tenney has described it as a response to the capture and killing of Che Guevara by the Bolivian army in 1967 as well as a statement on the horrors of the Vietnam war. The word “fabric” in the title aptly describes the internal consistency of the work’s soundworld and its recurring patterns—one could imagine the abrupt beginning and ending as “cutting off” a segment of a potentially endless sonic material. The work displays Tenney’s fascination with ergodicity: an ergodic system is one in which the statistical properties of any segment are identical to those of the system as a whole.

Figure 3. *Fabric for Che* (1967), spectrogram. https://youtu.be/Ui8Rr5KY8gQ?si=PjMBivhj-sfcRB9r

Ergodicity, Arches, and Ramps

Significant changes in Tenney’s personal life—a divorce from Schneemann in 1968 and a move to take on a professorial position at the new California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia in 1970—coincide with concomitant changes in his compositional activity. In his article “Form in Twentieth-Century Music” (1969–70), Tenney summarizes a few fundamental musical morphologies or shapes, which may be active at both local and global levels of form. Ergodic (i.e., statistically homogeneous) forms have no inherent internal structuring—their boundaries are externally imposed by an arbitrary start and end. There are two archetypal nonergodic forms: the arch (a form which moves away from a point of departure but then returns to it) and the ramp (a form that moves in one direction until it reaches a limit) (Tenney 2015, 156–165). A common manifestation of the arch in Tenney’s music is a shape which grows in amplitude and complexity to a climax then recedes to its starting point, which Wannamaker refers to a swell (2021, 117).

These theoretical concepts inform many of Tenney’s works from this period. Tenney’s fascination with reducing forms to simple archetypes reflects a broader desire to move away from traditional Western narrative or expressive forms towards more abstract models that leave the listener free to direct their own sonic experience.

Figure 4 is a spectrogram of a 30-second excerpt of the tape composition For Ann (rising) (1969), a prime example of ergodicity. Aside from a short gradual build-up and a final evanescence, the work is static (in a statistical sense) throughout its length of more than 11 minutes. For Ann (Rising) is a variant of the perceptual illusion of the Shepherd-Risset glissando, created by the French composer Jean-Claude Risset in 1968 while working at Bell Labs—in fact, Risset assisted Tenney by synthesizing the basic material on Bell Labs equipment. One by one, identical sine wave glissandi appear, starting at a low A0 (the lowest pitch on a piano) and sweeping upward over 37.8 seconds to a high A9 (two octaves above the piano’s highest A, approaching the upper range of audibility with a frequency of 14,080 Hz). The amplitude of each glissando is ramps up from 0 to full volume over the bottom two octaves, and maintains this value over the central five octaves before falling off again to 0 over the highest two octaves. New glissandi are continuously added every 2.8 seconds, rising in parallel minor sixths below those already present—once the full complement of 13 or 14 glissandi is achieved, the texture is maintained until the final moments when no new glissandi are added and the last ones gradually fade away in the high register (Wannamaker 2021, 118–124). Paradoxically, although the glissandi are constantly rising, the overall texture remains unchanged—new glissandi sneak in from silence to replace the ones that fade away.

Figure 4. *For Ann (Rising)* (1969), spectrogram of 5:00–5:30. https://youtu.be/rzFadAxNKos?si=DAHwynpEQKDEalTe

Tenney’s fascination in the early 1970s with simple, non-narrative forms was also realized in acoustic works. A characteristic of both process pieces and Tenney’s simplified formal archetypes is that a score with relatively little information can nonetheless yield complex sonic results. This is exemplified, for example, in the text scores of the Fluxus movement or La Monte Young’s notorious Compositions 1960, which consists of two whole notes (on B3 and F♯4 with the instruction “to be held for a very long time.” These are important precursors for Tenney’s “Postal Pieces,” a series of eleven minimally notated works composed between 1965 and 1971 and published as postcards (Polansky 1983). The self-imposed constraint of the postcard-sized score led Tenney to conceive these works as clear, easily describable shapes based on his fundamental formal archetypes. For Tenney, the directed predictability of arches and ramps—and the static predictability of ergodic forms—is not a drawback but an essential condition for the aesthetic appreciation of the pieces.

They involve a very high degree of predictability. If the audience can just believe it, after they’ve heard the first twenty seconds of the piece, they can almost determine what’s going to happen the whole rest of the time. When they know that’s the case, they don’t have to worry about it anymore… What they can do is begin to really listen to the sounds, get inside them, notice the details, and consider or meditate on the overall shape of the piece, simple as it maybe. (1978 interview with Tenney quoted in Wannamaker 2021, 125–126)

Figures 5 and 6 show selected “Postal Pieces.” Figure 5, Having Never Written a Note for Percussion (1971), is dedicated to percussionist and composer John Bergamo (one of Tenney’s colleagues at Cal Arts). As Tenney observes, the playful title is entirely truthful: his only previous work for percussion was Maximusic (1965), a text-only score, and the score Having Never Written a Note for Percussion is comprised solely of a single note. The crescendo-decrescendo makes this an iconic example of Tenney’s “arch” or “swell” morphology. Most often the work is performed as a continuous roll on a large tam-tam: the slow pace and continuity of the dynamic changes allows the listener to follow the subtle spectral transformations of the instrument’s resonance, rising to a thunderous, inharmonic roar before receding back to pppp.

**Figure 5.** Having Never Written a Note for Percussion (1971). https://youtu.be/WHh7EcRrhtg?si=Yd_vl3aukdTr8M9y (Tobias Liebezeit)

Koan (Figure 6a) is another example of a simply conceived form giving rise to complex perceptual results. In its constant ascent, Koan is a “ramp” which draws close attention to the sonic properties of simultaneously bowed strings. Starting with a slow tremolo between the G and D strings, the violinist gradually shifts the fingered pitch on the G string upwards, by about an eighth of a semitone per bow. The interval thus contracts from the initial perfect fifth to a unison on D, after which the violinist continues the upward rise on the G string until it reaches A. At this moment, the violinist switches to bowing the open D and A strings, starting a repeat of the whole process a perfect fifth higher. In the third final iteration of the process, beginning on the open A and E strings, the violinist continues the upwards shift beyond the open E string to finish an octave higher, simultaneously shifting the bow to the bridge (molto sul ponticello) and replacing the last pitches with noise. The spectrogram in Figure 6b clearly shows the relationship of the gradually rising pitch with the three open strings. A “koan” is a Zen riddle—an often paradoxical question or story that challenges the meditator to break free of conventional thinking towards new discoveries. Tenney’s Koan likewise poses challenges to the listener, drawing attention—in the absence of more conventional musical development—to the phenomenology of listening and particularly the changing perceptual qualities of the minutely expanding and contracting intervals. These pass through qualitatively different states of stability and instability, marked by moments of striking consonance (perfect fourths and fifths) as well as harsh dissonance. (This aspect of intervallic quality is addressed by Tenney in a later piece, Koan for String Quartet (1984), discussed below.)

Figure 6a. *Koan* (1971). https://youtu.be/5iE6CP7D84Y?si=sYbzJSnyejEoya9g (Elisabeth Smalt, adapted version for viola, transposed a perfect fifth lower) Figure 6b. *Koan* (1971), spectrogram (viola version by Elisabeth Smalt).

Clangs and Spectra

The exploration of pitch, interval, and the phenomenology of perception in works like Koan and Beast became Tenney’s central preoccupation throughout the 70s and 80s. In particular, Tenney became fascinated with the exploration of the harmonic series, which he identified as the fundamental structure governing the psychology of harmonic perception. His 1972 orchestral work Clang is the first of his compositions to adopt the “available pitch” approach to ensemble notation which he then used widely in later works. With the exception of a few conventionally notated percussive events and a brief coda, the notation of Clang shows a set of available pitches from which players can select freely: the chosen pitch is to be played in a crescendo from an “almost inaudible” ppp to the notated dynamic of that section, followed by a symmetrical decrescendo back to silence. Attacks between instruments are not synchronized, and the total duration of each crescendo-decrescendo is defined by a single breath in the brass and woodwinds or an upbow-downbow in the strings. These local arch or “swell” shapes (Wannamaker 2021, 117) are mirrored in the large-scale unfolding of the work: there is a gradual expansion in the first half of the piece from a unison E4 outward to a cluster extending across six octaves. The eight pitches available in each octave of the cluster (approximating an octatonic scale) represent the harmonic partials 1, 17, 19, 5, 11, 3, 13, and 7 of an E fundamental.

The second half of the piece gradually decreases in volume. The pitch procedure is somewhat different: from the midpoint on, the dense cluster is gradually pared away to reveal an harmonic-series chord. The score excerpt in Figure 7 shows an excerpt beginning approximately 80% into the piece’s duration when the cluster has already eroded significantly. The black noteheads indicate pitches that should disappear during each timespan: thus, the passage from Section 11 to Section 12 implies a change in virtual fundamental from E0 to E1 (the bass’s lowest open string, to be held through the end of the piece). Subsequent sections further thin the remaining overtones until only the multiple-octave Es remain.

Figure 7. *Clang* (1972), 12'00"–13'00". https://youtu.be/LitiwoXjpC0?si=RfmbMoaIkeCFyBPB

Scholars of spectral music will recognize a parallel here to the gradual spectral transformations at the beginning of Gérard Grisey’s Partiels (1975), which similarly alters the perceived complexity of harmonic-series chords through addition of pitches and alterations in register. Wannamaker (2008) has suggested that Tenney’s music might be thought of as exemplary of an underdocumented school of “North American spectralism” that shares many of the sonic and theoretical preoccupations of French spectralism but within a very different, post-Cagean musical aesthetic. Tenney’s titles from this period such as “Spectra for Harry Partch” (1972, the fifth movement of Quintext I-V: Five Textures) and Spectral CANON for CONLON Nancarrow (1974) reflect the importance of the frequency spectrum and harmonic series to his musical thought.

The Spectral CANON for CONLON Nancarrow is written for a retuned player piano, in tribute to Conlon Nancarrow’s own player piano studies. Selected strings of the piano are retuned precisely to the first 24 overtones of its low A1, with the highest note an E6—each of these notes is given a separate stave in the score and acts as an independent voice in the canon (Figure 8). The canonic concept is characteristically elegant and minimal: starting with the lowest voice (note), each voice gradually accelerates through the same logarithmic sequence of shortening durations. The highest voice (E6, the 24th partial) enters at the moment that the lowest voice (A1, the fundamental) reaches its maximum speed. From that pivotal point, the lowest voice begins to slow down in a precise retrograde of its accelerando, followed one by one by the upper voices as they similarly reach their peak velocity and then recede. This retrogradation is never completed in all voices, since Tenney chooses to end the canon exactly when the top voice hits its maximum tempo and the lowest voice finishes its retrograde (Wannamaker 2012). Figure 8 shows the timespan from 160 to 180 seconds—at this point in the process, the lowest four voices have already begun to slow down, gradually joined in a precise polyrhythm by voices 5 to 8 while the higher voices continue their acceleration. While this canonic process can be verbalized concisely, the perceptual results are nothing short of astonishing. Though a listener can choose to focus attention on any individual voice, the ear is easily distracted by the spectacular overlapping glissandi that run across the texture, becoming more and more prominent as the canon reaches its climactic ending.

Figure 8. *Spectral CANON for CONLON Nancarrow* (1974), 160"–180". https://youtu.be/tUat4vTOGTI?si=MQR9sIOokNYN3xPT

Another significant overlap with French spectral music is Tenney’s interest in instrumental synthesis (synthèse instrumentale)—that is, the use of an instrumental ensemble to mimic a target sound by playing its constituent overtones. Tenney describes the goal as achieving “a perceptual space… somewhere near the threshold between music and speech”—one might compare this to Grisey’s attempt to create “something hybrid for our perception, no longer really a timbre, without yet being a true chord, a sort of mutant of contemporary music.”¹ An iconic example of this technique is the resynthesis of a trombone note by the ensemble in Grisey’s Périodes (1974) and Partiels (1975); other works such as Clarence Barlow’s Im Januar am Nil (1984) and Jonathan Harvey’s Speakings (2008) use instrumental synthesis to imitate vocal sounds.

Tenney’s first engagement with instrumental synthesis is Three Indigenous Songs (1978), scored for two piccolos, alto flute, bassoon or tuba, and two percussionists (Figure 9). The starting points for the three songs are “No More Good Water” by American country blues singer Jaybird Coleman (original song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TUZVWw3qkA), the poem “Kosmos” by Walt Whitman (as read by Tenney), and “Hey when I sing these 4 songs Hey look what happens” (an Iroquois text translated by poet Jerome Rothenburg), departing from Tenney’s previous 1971 setting for choir. Tenney’s approach to speech synthesis is done “by hand” without computer tools or reference to spectrograms (Polansky 1983). In Figure 9, Tenney has transcribed the fundamental pitches of Jaybird Coleman’s voice as the bassoon/tuba line and indicated the text both in English and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The first three formants associated with each vowel (drawn from published speech research) are assigned to the alto flute and piccolos. Each of these instruments plays a harmonic partial of the bassoon/tuba fundamental that falls within the frequency range of one of the vowel’s formants. Perceptual research on sine-wave speech (Remez et al. 1981) published a few years later would illustrate the surprisingly effective communication of speech features by just three sine waves at the center frequency of the first three vowel formants. Here, the percussion instruments provide approximations of the noise bursts that characterize consonants, including wood blocks for sharp k and p sounds, tom-toms for voiced consonants like d and b, and suspended cymbals for sibilants like th or s (Wannamaker 2021, 189–192). Instrumental synthesis of speech is further explored in later works such as Ain't I A Woman (1992) and Song'n'Dance for Harry Partch (1999).

Figure 9. *Three Indigenous Songs *(1979), 1. “No More Good Water (Jaybird Coleman),” mm. 7–10. https://youtu.be/S-Q-yHjec2E?si=0ZbZFw2TRNdf77NU

Just Intonation

While works like Clang and Three Indigenous Songs accept a relatively loose approximation of the harmonic partials of the overtone series, works of the 1980s demand increasingly precise tuning. Tenney had already met Harry Partch at the University of Illinois in the early 1960s, and Partch’s concept of extended just intonation—using the acoustically consonant frequency ratios of traditional just intonation but with the inclusion of various higher prime numbers—is central to Tenney’s theoretical and compositional work of this period. Tenney’s unique theoretical insights—grounded, like his other musical research, in perception—are presented in articles including “John Cage and the Theory of Harmony” (1983) and “The Several Dimensions of Pitch” (1999), many of which are collected in From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory (2015). Tenney’s stated goal is to develop a cognitively based theory of harmony that is (1) “descriptive—not pre- (or pro-) scriptive—and thus, aesthetically neutral,” (2) “culturally/stylistically general” and not connected to any particular musical style, and (3) quantitative in its methods (Tenney 2015, 281–282). Among the perceptual phenomena Tenney sought to explain were the degrees of consonance/fusion of different combinations of tones, the perceived harmonic distance between pitches, the perception of interval and chord roots, and the categorical recognition of mistuned just intervals within a certain tolerance range (Wannamaker 2021, 139).

Koan for String Quartet (1984) revisits the “Postal Piece” Koan for solo violin (1971) in the new light of Tenney’s developing harmonic theories (Wannamaker 2021, 216–223; Belet 2008, 41–43). In the score excerpt shown in Figure 10, the first violin gradually expands from a slightly wide fourth (520 cents) to a just perfect fifth (702 cents), passing through a precise series of frequency ratio intervals. The first violin part is thus similar to the solo Koan but with the “very slow glissando” replaced by clearly defined intervals. The other strings build four-note sonorities in just intonation with each new violin interval a/b (e.g., 27/20 in the first measure). In each measure, the cello holds the lower A4 of the violin’s dyad (a = 20), the viola plays a frequency of 2b–a (13), and the second violin 2a–b (34). The result, notated above the staff as (13/20/27/34), is a chord which could be conceived as harmonic partials 13, 20, 27, and 34 of an (unplayed) low F0 raised by 14 cents. As the excerpt progresses, the held A is reinterpreted as belonging to harmonic series over different fundamentals, with the other pitches derived through application of the same equations. The arrival of the perfect fifth (3/2) in the violin at the end of the excerpt corresponds with a much simpler harmony, equivalent to partials 1, 2, 3, and 4 of a fundamental A3. Tenney’s application of his harmonic theories allows the logical expansion of the violin’s changing interval into a series of chords, with a concomitant progression of fundamentals and varying levels of harmonic complexity.

Figure 10. *Koan for String Quartet* (1984), mm. 161–172. https://youtu.be/wZPRD5lRCo0?si=WQqmDrv69FQJzllH (Quatuor Bozzini, excerpt above from 13:39 to 14:40)

Other works following Koan for String Quartet such as Bridge (1984) and Changes: 64 Studies for Harp (1985) also explore just intonation harmonic space, with the global evolution of parameters controlled by statistical processes within time-varying ranges, a refinement of the processes used in 1963 for Stochastic String Quartet (Tenney [1987] 2015; Wannamaker 2021, 249). Frequently, harmonic explorations are paired with minimalist formal concepts like those of the “Postal Pieces.” “Available pitch notation” in combination with the harmonic series is used in both ergodic forms such as In a Large, Open Space (1994) and more directional works like ‘Scend for Scelsi (1996), which also incorporates an improvising soloist.

The Spectrum series (eight works for varied ensembles written in 1995 and 2001) is representative of many the techniques and concepts of Tenney’s later music. Figure 11, from the beginning of Spectrum 8, shows the characteristic proportional notation used throughout the series: each line of the score represents a timespan of 30 seconds, and note attacks are placed spatially in proportion to their position in time. Open noteheads are sustained notes (“elements”) while beamed notes represent quasi-legato phrases (“clangs”). The numbers replacing noteheads in the vibraphone part indicate unpitched percussion instruments to be chosen by the performer. The work uses both the tempered chromatic scale (in the vibraphone and piano) and a microtonally inflected version of the chromatic made up of harmonic partials of a low F (partials 16–22, 24, 25, 26, 28, and 30). The evolving ranges of parameters including clang duration, elements per clang, and dynamics are mapped out by cosine functions, with a computer program choosing values statistically within these ranges. Within each clang, the elements are spaced evenly in time, with pitches chosen according to an algorithm that favours the avoidance of repetition and controls intervals between successive tones.

Figure 11. *Spectrum 8* (2001), 0:00–0:30. https://youtu.be/Z_4DXCvd7GU?si=5nmayOvymYuwaEuH (The Barton Workshop)

Tenney’s enduring commitment to experimentation is evident in Arbor Vitae (2006), completed just two weeks before his death from cancer on August 24, 2006. In comparison to the Spectrum pieces, which cap the number of overtone-derived pitch classes at 12, Arbor Vitae has a considerably more complex pitch structure, with 35 different just intonation pitch classes derived from multiples of the prime numbers 3, 5, 7, and 11. The resultant pitches can be seen as distant branches of the B-flat fundamental which is the ultimate root of this “tree of life.” As in Stochastic String Quartet and the Spectrum series, parametric ranges guide statistical choices made by computer; here, a refinement of the algorithm controls moves between different “branches” of the pitch tree in order to bring together pitches with a related harmonic derivation (Winter 2008; Wannamaker 2021, 250–258).

Legacy and Influence

Tenney’s compositional path from the 1960s into the 2000s traced a unique and compelling trajectory and made a significant impact on subsequent generations of musicians. As a teacher, he inspired students representing a wide range of aesthetic approaches to experimental music—among many others, these include John Luther Adams, Allison Cameron, Raven Chacon, Daniel Corral, Miguel Frasconi, Peter Garland, Douglas Kahn, Catherine Lamb, Andra McCartney, Larry Polansky, Marc Sabat, Chiyoko Szlavnics, and Eric de Visscher. As a theorist of music and music cognition, his groundbreaking research explores the phenomenology of music perception and the structuring potential of extended just intonation (Wannamaker 2022). Tenney’s students, including Marc Sabat and Catherine Lamb, have been particularly active in furthering this just intonation research using a similarly perception-based approach (Sabat 2008). Finally, as a composer, Tenney’s endless fascination with the world of sound and the mysteries of aural perception make him an archetype of the inquiring artist-researcher. His musical legacy challenges us to take time to explore and question our musical experiences, and to follow that curiosity wherever it leads.

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^{1. “Quelque chose d'hybride pour notre perception, plus vraiment un timbre, sans être encore un véritable accord, une sorte de mutant de la musique actuelle” (Grisey 2008, “La musique : le devenir des sons (1982),” 50–51).↩}