From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory by James Tenney (review)

[Editor’s note: Selected reviews are posted on the Web at http://www.computermusicjournal.org (click on the Reviews tab). In some cases, they are either unpublished in the Journal itself or published in an abbreviated form in the Journal.]

This volume brings together more than 400 pages of theoretical essays by American composer James Tenney (1934–2006), spanning his long and productive career. Tenney belongs to a vital lineage of 20th-century composer-theorists including Milton Babbitt and George Perle, and seminal figures such as Arnold Schoenberg. What makes Tenney distinct in this company—whose members are mostly associated with twelve-tone composition and its offshoots—is a continual fascination with the mechanisms of musical perception and a dedication to explaining music as experienced, not merely in terms of mathematical abstractions. A self-described “unregenerate phenomenologist” (p. 364), Tenney sought to ground both his musical compositions and his discourse about music in the givens of human cognition, starting “from scratch” with the perception of various musical parameters, their role in creating a hierarchical grouping structure (starting with musical gestalts or “clangs”), and the psychoacoustics of tone combinations (in other words, “harmony,” construed in the broadest possible sense).

Tenney’s maturation as a composer took place during a time of enormous change and turmoil in 20th-century music and aesthetics. His early aesthetics were shaped by the music of Schoenberg, Anton von Webern, Edgard Varèse, Charles Ives, and Carl Ruggles. One can sense that his early works, such as Seeds I-VI (1956–1961), are negotiating a middle ground between European modernism and what Michael Broyles has dubbed the “maverick tradition” of American experimental music. As a student, he worked with composers including Ruggles and Harry Partch, as well as briefly pursuing studies in engineering. Tenney’s path was decisively shaped by two formative encounters in the early 1960s: a period spent as a researcher at Bell Laboratories and his discovery of the music of John Cage. This period brought him into contact with a burgeoning performance art scene in New York City, including his partner Carolee Schneemann and members of the Fluxus movement such as Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, and George Brecht.

Readers of Computer Music Journal will find Tenney’s involvement in the early years of computer music particularly interesting. This period is chronicled in chapter 3, “Computer Music Experiences, 1961–1964,” and several other short writings. Tenney began his residency at Bell Laboratories in 1961, working alongside figures such as Max Mathews, John Pierce, and Joan Miller. Tenney was among the first composers invited to work at Bell Labs (David Lewin had preceded him by a year). Soon this group of computer music pioneers would grow to include Gerald Strang, Jean-Claude Risset, and many others. Tenney came to Bell Labs to pursue projects in both research and composition. Many of the topics he explored remain active areas of investigation today: sound analysis and synthesis, independent control of musical parameters, stochastic techniques, and algorithmic composition. Tenney’s publications included “On the Physical Correlates of Timbre” (1965) and “An Experimental Investigation of Timbre—the Violin” (1966). Both explored the spectral structure and temporal modulation of natural sounds through Fourier analysis and resynthesis.

This focus on the timbral dimension in isolation reflects a parametric conceptualization of music, reflecting both the practicalities of computer programming and concomitant trends in European serial thought (inspired in no small part by electronic music techniques). Individual parameters—frequency, amplitude, timbre, duration, etc.—were considered separately in terms of their contribution to an overall perceived form. Parameterization came to play an important role in virtually all of Tenney’s music. Many of the postcard-sized scores of the Postal Pieces (1965–1971) explore a continuous evolution of just one musical parameter, for example, pitch in Koan for solo violin...