Seeker of Radical Sounds

How would you describe a composer who has pioneered computer-aided music at the source-code level, who is an heir to the American experimental tradition of John Cage, a former Bell Labs engineer and a revered master teacher and theorist who delves deeply into acoustical arcana with papers like “The Discriminability of Differences in the Rise-Time of a Tone”?

“I just tell people I write unpopular music,” says James Tenney. He laughs--no rancor, no cynicism. “I always have the sense that they understand immediately what I mean.”

Of course, this is also a man who has arranged the Beatles for jazz pianist Aki Takahashi and traditional rags for mandolinist Larry Polansky. His characteristically subversive composition “Having Never Written a Note for Percussion” found its way onto the sublimely gritty “Goodbye 20th Century” album of conceptualist-minimalist classics by the alternative art band Sonic Youth last year.

Other takes on Tenney? “It is my considered opinion that James Tenney is the most talented musician I’ve ever known, and that statement covers a period of 50 years,” American master composer Carl Ruggles said in 1959.

“Gorgeously flowing yet devoid of foreground, vaguely minimalist but harmonically intricate,” is how a recording of his 1990 “Tableaux Vivants” was described in a Village Voice review. “The piece offers a particularly clear example of his complex structural conceptualization beneath a lucid surface.”

“The visceral aspect of music is every bit as important to me as the intellectual,” Tenney says. “Early on, I decided it was OK to be totally eclectic. Charles Ives said, ‘It is every composer’s duty to be eclectic, as a farmer has to sort potatoes to prepare next year’s crop.’ In a letter to Cage, I once wrote, ‘What is needed now is a radical eclecticism.’

“So in effect, I’ve given myself permission to go any direction I feel like, at any time.”

Long ensconced as distinguished research professor at York University in Toronto, Tenney, 66, has just moved into the Roy E. Disney Family Chair in Musical Composition at CalArts--a second coming of sorts, as Tenney also taught at the Valencia school in its infancy in the early 1970s.

“When you talk about senior composers who are also effective teachers, well, the pool is not large. Jim Tenney is one of the few,” says David Rosenboom, dean of the music department at CalArts. “He is stellar, a master teacher.

“I think he is also someone capable of reacting to music of any kind, whatever style our students may be interested in. He is intimately familiar with the American experimental tradition, and his own work blends a very interesting mix of directions, including research into perception and form. He is also a good performer, a pianist and conductor.”

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Tenney may go in any direction he feels like now, but that was not how he started. He began piano lessons when he was 8 years old for the usual reason: His mother told him to. When he was 14 or 15, however, growing up in New Mexico, he became very interested in it, enough to be seriously conflicted when he entered the University of Denver on an engineering scholarship.

“It was very clear to me that I was not going to be happy going in that direction,” he recalls. “So I went to the dean of the engineering department and asked if I could major in music on this scholarship. He said yes, so I shifted.

“Then the next year I went to Juilliard as a student of Edward Steuermann [an illustrious Polish American pianist and early disciple of Arnold Schoenberg]. In the course of that year, there was kind of a cross-fade situation for me. Composing--which I had been doing a little bit of--became more and more compelling for me and I became less interested in becoming a concert pianist.”

And then Tenney’s student career got really complicated. He dropped out of Juilliard after

one year to study composition privately with Chou Wen-Chung, a student of Edgard Varese. He supported himself as a typist and then a music copyist. Through a summer composer’s conference, he connected with Lionel Nowak at Bennington College, then still a women’s college, where he finally got his bachelor’s degree. He was the only man in his graduating class.

Graduate study took him to the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, where scientist-composer Lejaren Hiller was recruiting students for one of the nation’s first electronic music studios.

“I read a little notice in the New York Times that, for the first time ever, there was a class in electronic music. I said to my wife, ‘Let’s go,’ and we just drove out. We checked it out and we ended up staying there--this was my first wife, the painter Carolee Schneemann.”

At Illinois, Tenney did study with Hiller, a kindred spirit who had left a career as a research chemist for full-time composition. Hiller was a founding father of electronic and computer-aided music.

Tenney also connected with another American original at Illinois, becoming the graduate assistant to Harry Partch, instrument inventor, tuning guru and self-taught composer.

“Hiller and Partch were totally different [musically],” Tenney says. “I did not feel any tension studying with both of them, but there was [personal] tension with Partch. He fired me after a while, saying I was arrogant, which I’m sure I was. I used to argue with him when he would put down composers whose music I liked. I would come into work and say, ‘Harry, what do you think of Webern?’ He would grumble something negative, and I just wasn’t diplomatic enough.”

After Illinois, an offer to use the pioneering sound synthesis facilities at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey became an offer of employment. Tenney spent 2 1/2 years there in the early ‘60s. He arrived with a small catalog of instrumental pieces influenced by Webern and Varese and some pieces made by manipulating taped sounds, including a riff on Elvis Presley’s “Blue Suede Shoes.”

He left Bell in 1964 with six new tape pieces, only these featured computer-generated sound and all but the first were composed with the aid of a computer. And, as he later wrote, he also left with “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.”

For the rest of the 1960s, Tenney bounced around various schools in New York, teaching both music and electrical engineering. In 1970, he began his first term at CalArts.

It’s much changed, he says now, indicating the green suburban manicure on the hills outside his new office.

“When I was here then, these were dry, empty hills. The house I just bought was built in 1970, the year I started teaching here. Now it’s got great big trees all around it.

“I really feel good coming back. There are a lot more students now--it has grown quite dramatically, as the physical surroundings have also developed.

“In the beginning, CalArts was really loose and experimental. Then it tightened up, and I understand that they have gone through some difficult times. But the morale now in the music school is very high. I sensed that immediately in my first faculty meeting, and the students are raring to go.”

Happy the return may be, but it was hardly a spontaneous move. York University, where Tenney had landed in 1985 after a decade of stops at various university teaching jobs, has a mandatory retirement policy, so when Tenney turned 65, he found himself out of a job. With three school-age children still at home, he could not afford retirement, so he applied for the CalArts position and transposed family and career across the continent.

Valencia is now home to Tenney, his fourth wife, Lauren Pratt, their 7-year-old, and two of his children, ages 17 and 15, from a previous marriage. An older daughter of his lives in Pacific Palisades with her own family.

Tenney is particularly happy to be back in the West.

“My wife and I took up tennis two years ago, and I have been playing golf since I was 13. On a visit, I was able to play golf here in February--unbelievable in Toronto! I’m certainly happy about that,” Tenney says with a laugh.

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At CalArts, Tenney will be giving individual lessons in composition, moderating a weekly composers’ forum and teaching a course called “Sound, Hearing and Musical Perception.” One of the texts will be his book “Meta (+) Hodos: A Phenomenology of 20th-Century Music and an Approach to the Study of Form,” an influential little tome that began as a paper when he was a student at the University of Illinois.

“The title takes the Greek roots of the English word ‘method,’ ” Tenney says. “It is an attempt to develop a new kind of thinking about music based on principles of gestalt and perceptual psychology. Western music theory is very culture specific. I think we need a more general basis that could apply to any kind of music, in fact, to any kind of auditory perception.”

In his own music of the past quarter-century, Tenney has been most interested in exploring new tuning systems and their attendant harmonic developments. He composed his last piece for computer-generated sounds, “For Ann (rising),” in 1969, although he continues to use the computer in composing. He has a newly upgraded Power Mac in his office, for which he writes all his own software.

“Harmony in Western music--which came to a dead stop about 1910, when the harmonic resources of the 12-tone tempered scale were exhausted--can begin to evolve again. I’m trying to generate some movement in that area. I am interested in doing it with traditional instruments--although I want to be very clear that I don’t use harmony regressively--because it is harder, because the musicians have to learn something new.”

And musicians have been responding to the challenge. The progressive Swiss label Hat Hut, which also champions other idiosyncratic Americans, including Lou Harrison, Morton Feldman and Anthony Braxton, is adding to the modest Tenney discography in a big way. Already out are recordings of Tenney’s music for two pianos (from Erika Radermacher and Manfred Werder), solo percussion (Matthias Kaul), and violin and piano duos (Mark Sabat and Stephen Clarke), with more forthcoming.

“Shape, balance, reference, distance, equilibrium, symmetry, contrast, form. These are the particulars of a creative approach that reconstructs its own relationship to the traditional values of classicism, one which brings a mathematical conscience to free will, explores the transformation from conception to perception, and celebrates the dialectical tension that results.” That is how critic Art Lange describes Tenney’s music on the Hat Hut Web site.

For his part, Tenney says he likes “Cage’s implied definition of music as ‘sounds heard.’ Basically, music is an attitude toward the sounds. What’s interesting is that there is no composer in that definition.

“What I think that does [is bring] to an end a long and exhausting period in music history that began with the rise of opera in 1600 and ends with [Cage’s] ‘Europeras.’ The assumption was that music was correlated with emotion on the part of the composer and generated certain emotions on the part of the listener.

“The crucial part here is returning the focus of the enterprise back to the listener--it invites active listening. At a purely physical level, the human auditory system has to be primed; the neural network actually changes as a result of learning. Tonality is just a habit.”