James Tenney: Selected Works, 1961-1969

James Tenney (Composer) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Composer: James Tenney
• Audio CD (March 25, 2003)
• SPARS Code: DDD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: New World Records
• ASIN: B00008NGH9
• Also Available in: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #413,987 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)
  • #98 in Music > Classical > Instruments > Electronic > Computer

Editorial Reviews

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 1960s. 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 that 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 an 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 Polansky.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars early computer works, August 28, 2003

By 

Mikhail Lewis (Missoula, MT, USofA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: James Tenney: Selected Works, 1961-1969 (Audio CD)

Usually anything by James Tenney would get a 5 star, but this CD is early computer works, most of them Cage influenced aleatoric noise studies based around a dichotomy between highly pitched tones and bands of white noise, or tape pieces. Analog #1: Noise Study is my favorite of these, being influenced by the sounds heard while driving through a tunnel. The contrasting last track, his last computer piece, For Ann (rising) is my favorite part of the disc. It's a minimal piece based around the Shepard tone phenomena, up to twelve slightly unevenly spaced rising tones fade in and out of volume, creating the sensation of an ever rising line, yet at the same time the high number of tones makes it impossible to follow and a glistening sheen is created by the consequent disjointedness.