Metaphors on Vision: James Tenney and Stan Brakhage, 1951-1964

On the weekend of December 8-10, 2006, three and a half months after the death of James Tenney, the California Institute of the Arts mounted a festival to celebrate the life and music of their beloved colleague, who had served as the Roy E. Disney Family Chair of Music Composition since 2000.¹ The festival included a musical retrospective consisting of live performances of several of Tenney's compositions, and the screening of nine films, six of which were created by the renowned experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage.² Tenney appears in four of Brakhage's films, and his music is featured in three others, but with the exception of two early films and two early songs, they did not collaborate in the traditional sense, where each contributes to a joint venture. They preferred to create their work independently—almost all of Tenney's music that serves as a soundtrack for Brakhage's films was selected by the filmmaker among his friend's pre-existing music.³

The significance of their relationship, however, goes far beyond a handful of collaborative projects. Tenney and Brakhage were close friends for fifty years, during which time they worked together, exchanged letters, made cross-country trips to visit each other, and spent countless hours discussing art and life. They shared what Brakhage describes as "senses of kinship in the great quests of Art"—their true collaboration consisted of the sharing of experiences and a rich exchange of ideas that profoundly shaped their personal and artistic sensibilities.⁴ Even when their paths diverged, they maintained a mutual admiration that inspired them throughout their creative lives. Tenney declared that Brakhage possessed "the most powerful personality and most brilliant mind I have ever encountered," and Brakhage remarked that his conversations with the composer were "the most important roots of the various aesthetic branches now in either of us."⁵

Their conversations were especially animated in the early 1960s, when both were at key junctures in their creative development. Brakhage was searching for lyrical, nonnarrative alternatives to the surrealist and neorealist traditions that dominated avant-garde cinema in the 1950s. Focusing on the experiential aspect of art, he began to conceive of his films as explorations of the act of seeing. In 1963 he published Metaphors on Vision, a collection of writings that documents his breakthrough to the distinctive style of poetic filmmaking that culminated in his magnum opus Dog Star Man (1961-64).⁶ Tenney, in the meantime, was studying electronic music and information theory at the University of Illinois, where he undertook the investigation of psychoacoustics and phenomenology. In 1961 he completed a treatise called Meta+Hodos, in which he examines the implications of gestalt theory as it relates to the perception of musical form.⁷ Over the next two and a half years, while researching digital synthesis at Bell Laboratories, Tenney produced his first works with the new computer technology that feature his unique brand of stochastic composition. During this period, Brakhage and Tenney sent carefully crafted letters to each other in which they sought correlations between the perceptual processes of sight and sound, and identified phenomenological principles that governed most of their subsequent work.

Although several studies of Brakhage exist, and Tenney and his music are gaining critical attention, the intersection between the filmmaker and composer has largely remained overlooked. The extant literature documenting the relationship between Tenney and Brakhage is comprised almost entirely of brief autobiographical accounts, the most substantial of which are essays they wrote in tribute to each other.⁸ The nature of their association can be gleaned from an examination of their activities and correspondence between 1951 and 1964, from the time they met as impressionable teenagers to when Tenney completed his tenure at Bell Labs and Brakhage finished editing Dog Star Man. Even though they remained in varying degrees of contact until Brakhage's death in 2003, the bulk of their interaction and their most pronounced influence on one another took place during the first decade and a half of their friendship. As Brakhage writes in tribute to Tenney, "it is only with...