Browse by Artist: TENNEY, JAMES

Artist:	TENNEY, JAMES
Title:	Forms 1-4 · In Memoriam Varese, Cage, Wolpe, Feldman
Label:	HAT[NOW]ART (SWITZERLAND)
Format:	2CD
Price:	$23.00
Catalog #:	HAT 127

World Premiere Recordings by musikFabrik. Total time 113.52. Works by: Tenney, Edgar Varese, John Cage, Stefan Wolpe, Morton Feldman. "What James Tenney does have in common with the composers to whom he has dedicated his FORMS, however, is not a specific approach to dynamics, but to sound. And precisely this inquiring interest in sound, both as a physical phenomenon and as regards its perception, was a constant leitmotif that pervaded the whole American avant-garde from its European counterparts, which was more structurally and historically oriented." -- Raoul Mörchen.

Artist:	TENNEY, JAMES
Title:	Melody, Ergodicity and Indeterminacy
Label:	MODE
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	MODE 185CD

Performed by The Barton Workshop, recorded 2007. "James Tenney (1934-2006) was probably the first composer to develop an aesthetic for computer music, realizing that electronic music almost forced the composer to accept noise as 'music' and to abandon the idea of absolute control over a composition. He came to accept Cage's passion for randomness, but from a different angle: computer music can be 'unpredictable' (rather than random). This CD looks at how Tenney persistently asked two questions: 'What if?' and 'How does it work?' Entitled Melody, Ergodicity and Indeterminacy, it brings an understanding of Tenney's exploration of the act of listening and the factors of composition, of how materials can be assembled, how a composer creates musical continuity. It contains tour solos for flute and clarinet which are taken both from some of this earliest works, 'Poem' (1955) and 'Monody' (1959) and from relatively late in his career, 'Seegersong #1 & 2' (1999). The CD features Tenney's 'Ergodos' compositions (forerunners of minimal music or drones) -- instead of a fixed object, the listener hears a process and assembles his own experience from the sounds which have enveloped him. The reel-to-reel source tapes for 'Ergodos I' and 'II' are unique in that they may be played in either direction, beginning and ending at any point and/or with any number of super-impositions of parts (channels). On this CD, both 'Ergodos' tape pieces are presented along with the tape and its 'String Complement,' 'Instrumental Responses' (1O performers) and also with a percussion soloist ('Percussion Response'). Like so many of Tenney's pieces, these works walk a line between the composer's input and the choices of the performers in order to come to fruition. Tenney's conscious inclusion of the performer's input is a consistent characteristic of his music and remains a factor which distinguishes him from many other composers."

Artist:	TENNEY, JAMES
Title:	Selected Works 1961-1969
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80570CD

"The work of James Tenney (b. 1934) as a composer, theorist, performer, and teacher, is of singular importance in American music of the past four decades. He is by nature a quiet, almost publicity-shy musician, but his musical and theoretical works are steadily becoming widely known, despite the fact that few have been published and only a relatively small number, to this date, are readily available on recordings. This recording is a reissue of the 1992 Frog Peak/Artifact CD, the first recorded collection of James Tenney' s music of the 1 960s. Many of the pieces on this CD were realized at Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1961 to 1969, where Tenney used Max Mathews's digital synthesis program, which eventually became Music IV. This software became the model for many of the common computer music environments of the last forty years, and was the first system of its kind available to composers. Tenney's pieces from 1961-64 constitute the first significant and developed body of computer-composed and synthesized music by en American composer. Tenney was a very young composer when he wrote these pieces. He was working with a new medium, a technology that was still being developed, and a new aesthetic. It is perhaps easy to overlook the importance of the latter in the light of the tremendous technical and historical importance of these pieces -- but it is characteristic of Tenney that he was not content just to explore the sonic and technical capabilities of a new technology. To this day, his work from this period remains an important example for composers who work with new technologies: the new world of 'computer music' needed a radically new definition of music itself. The 32-page booklet includes greatly expanded liner notes by composer and former Tenney pupil Larry Polanaky."

Artist:	TENNEY, JAMES
Title:	Postal Pieces
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	2CD
Price:	$30.00
Catalog #:	NW 80612CD

"James Tenney (b. 1934) is one of the most important American composers and theorists of the past fifty years. For a very long time, his work was known mainly to other musicians and its tremendous influence was belied by its obscurity. In the past twenty years, however, as his music and writings have been more and more published, recorded, performed, and studied, his place in the context of American contemporary music has become far better understood. He has pioneered musical fields as diverse as computer music, tuning theory, and integrating ideas from acoustics and music cognition into his work. Tenney has also been important as a teacher, performer, and scholar of other radical American composers. This CD contains recordings of the complete set of his Postal Pieces, written primarily during a very brief tenure at California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970s. These works, although frequently performed over the years, have not been recorded (with a few exceptions). This recording is a natural and important companion to the recent New World reissue of Tenney's computer and electronic music from the 1960s. Both collections represent complete, highly individualistic and essential bodies of work by a major American artist."

Artist:	TENNEY, JAMES
Title:	Spectrum Pieces
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	2CD
Price:	$30.00
Catalog #:	NW 80692CD

"James Tenney (1934-2006) was one of the most versatile figures in contemporary American music. Apart from creating a large, wide-ranging, and fascinating body of compositions, more than a hundred of them, he was one of the key music theorists of the late twentieth century. This CD set offers complete recordings of one of the most important of Tenney's later sets of pieces -- Spectrum Pieces 1-8, the first five of which were written in Toronto in 1995 and the last three in 2001, after he moved to Valencia, California, to teach at the California Institute of the Arts. They offer a summation of much of Tenney's compositional practice and at the same time break open new and fertile territory that he had regrettably little time to explore in subsequent compositions. The eight works were not intended to be listened to sequentially or as a whole set, nor need they be; Tenney thought of them as a 'family' of pieces, with certain shared features, not as a cycle. Collectively they form a body of work in which many of Tenney's musical and theoretical preoccupations converge, interact, and yield music of deep fascination and strange beauty."

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