Contemporary Music Review

Vol. 27, No. 1, February 2008, pp. 7 21

James Tenney and the Poetics of

Homage
Bob Gilmore

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 find Ives, Vare`se, 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 significant 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 affirmationof 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

Besides those already mentioned we find Ives, Vare`se, 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, Vare`se, Partch, Cage), and in a few
cases older figures 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 superficial 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 affirmationof heritage, identity and shared
musical visionnonetheless conceals a profound anxiety about the whole nature

Contemporary Music Review

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 first 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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B. Gilmore

first, the changing meanings of the practice throughout his life; second, with
reference to specific 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 affirmation.
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 first 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 Vare`se. Into this category
would fall the earliest works in his catalogue, works in which, as with many young
composers, influences 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 five instruments); the SONATA for Ten Wind Instruments of
1958 1959, dedicated to Carl Ruggles; and the electronic piece Phases of 1963,
dedicated to Vare`se, whose tape music (in Deserts and the Poe`me 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 first 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 significantly 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.

Contemporary Music Review

11

The first 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 first 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 significant 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 specific compositional technique derived from
Satie. This is one of the forms of homage we find 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 five movements of
QUINTEXT: FIVE TEXTURES for string quartet and bass, composed in 1972. Here
the nature of the individual homages is expanded considerably. The five
movements are: Some Recent THOUGHTS for Morton Feldman, CLOUDS for
Iannis Xenakis, A Choir of ANGELS for Carl Ruggles, PARABOLAS and
HYPERBOLAS for Edgard Vare`se 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 first 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
specified are microtonal, in a form of just intonation (using a scale of intervals
analogous to the first 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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B. Gilmore

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 finally converging around middle C, evokes the parabolas
and hyperbolas that Vare`se wanted to create in sound by use of instruments like
the siren; again, however, the movement is technically speaking almost antithetical
to Vare`ses 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
specifies 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 first composer to make his best
work for that instrument, thereby affirming 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
first 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 flesh 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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13

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 first descend by (equal-tempered) fifths, AD-G-C, then ascend to F, B and finally E. The chords themselves introduce (in
varying orders) simulations of the third, fifth, 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 Vare`se. 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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B. Gilmore

indeterminate works. In these pieces, Tenney implements the Cagean notion that any
event in the piece is as significant 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 finder 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 defined 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

Contemporary Music Review

15

from Partchs own compositional practice. However, in Tenneys mind, the Cageinspired music (the works first 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)

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 Vare`se, 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 Vare`se is loud and
dissonant; the one for Feldman is very soft. But thats a very superficial kind of
connection. In these works, Tenney was acknowledging friendships that go back
thirty years or more. Some new affirmations 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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B. Gilmore

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 final 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 specifically 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 first 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

Contemporary Music Review

17

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)

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 first Tone Roads concert in New York had music by Ives, Ruggles, Vare`se,
Cage and Feldman. This was 1963, and for me, it seemed an utterly natural thing to
put music by those five 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. Vare`se, 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 Vare`se 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 finding
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 fill 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 first glance this might seem an odd view of a composer who seems so defiantly
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 oversimplification, 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 find such a supposed rationalist creating music that reflects 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 fits
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 Vare`se 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
filled with family resemblances to ancestors and friends, James Tenneys enthusiasm
will reach many generations to come.

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Notes
[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 finest (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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B. Gilmore

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 flute or alto flute
Edgard Vare`se
Phases (1963) for tape, for Edgard Vare`se
PARABOLAS and HYPERBOLAS for Edgard Vare`se (from QUINTEXT) (1972)
CRYSTAL CANON for Edgard Vare`se (from THREE PIECES for Drum Quartet)
(1974)
Form 1 (1993) for variable ensemble, in memoriam Edgard Vare`se
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