FROG SPEAK: Larry Polansky on James Tenney
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A Few Words about Jim Tenney
Larry Polansky
4 October 2006
1.
Our sadness at Jim Tenney’s passing is combined with the awareness that
there is now a hole in the planet. Jim deeply understood something many
of us have trouble with — that there are things “out there” that
deserve our serious attention. Music, ideas, beautiful work, friendship,
even the fate of the human race and the current status of the cosmos —
these things equally concerned and impassioned him. And when Jim gave
something serious attention, he was, well, serious about it. He cared
and thought deeply about what we always hope there will be time to care
and think deeply about. He appeared to do that each day of his life,
every hour of every day. This was his nature.
2.
In my opinion, Jim Tenney was the most important and brilliant
composer/theorist of the second half of the twentieth century. I usually
avoid statements like that: they’re by definition fatuous, and it’s not
a competition. But for Jim I’ll make an exception. After Cage, no other
composer so elegantly and beautifully integrated ideas and music. No one
else’s work, as a whole, is as profound, experimental, wide-ranging,
accomplished, or revolutionary.
Jim wrote more text than most people realize. Starting with Meta + Hodos
and the computer music articles of the early 1960s; through his work on
“timbre,” pitch, and other composers in the late 1960s and early 1970s;
his theoretical articles of the late 1970s (like the few but brilliant
essays in Perspectives… and the Journal of Music Theory); and
culminating with his wide-ranging work on pitch-space, intonation, and
perception in the last 25 years, he left an almost immeasurably broad
and important theoretical, aesthetic, intellectual and musical corpus.
His writing is poorly acknowledged, not widely read, and almost
completely misunderstood. In addition, it’s mostly unavailable — he
intentionally placed much of it in small, non-academic publications.
His ideas delineate and explore the most important musical ideas of the
past 50 years: form, perception, timbre, harmony, and the nature of the
compositional process. When I teach courses in advanced musical theory,
I sometimes have to force myself to use writings by other theorists —
not much other work seems quite as interesting, relevant or important as
Jim’s. He wrote and thought about elementals: form, pitch, cognition and
perception (among other things).
He meant things in a way that few others do, and we should take a lesson
from him in this. He cared little (in fact, not at all) for academic or
intellectual fashion. He was singularly focused on getting it right. He
wanted to know how the ear, the brain, and music worked (and might
work). He was among the first (if not the first) theorist (and composer)
to focus on ideas like the examination of deep musical processes
irrespective of style, the use of cognition and perception as the basis
for music theory, and a phenomenological understanding of our musical
perception. His investigations began at a much deeper level than what
passes for music theory (even today). I think we should revise our
definition: whatever Jim Tenney did, and however he did it, is music
theory.
Jim never advanced an idea until he was convinced he could win an
argument about it with himself. His discussions were deep, brutal, and
lengthy, with the most exacting person he could find (himself).
Sometimes he checked in with a few others lucky enough to have earned a
bit of his confidence, but by then it was unlikely that anyone else
could help much. He did so much homework, and thought so hard, that
there was rarely a new idea, technique, or avenue he hadn’t already
considered and probably discarded.
3.
All his life, Jim taught. As a teacher, he avoided the remedial. He had
little interest in, time (nor, I think, aptitude) for that kind of
pedagogy. As a theorist and composer, he had things to say and
investigate. He pursued ideas at a depth that was usually intimidating,
often a bit scary, always exciting. His teaching sprang from these
investigations, and he taught at a very high level, not some imagined
least common denominator. Jim believed, and acted upon the assumption
that the academy was a place of ideas, of search — an intellectual and
artistic eden where everyone was more or less like him!
Jim was a throwback: an artist and thinker whose love for teaching
emanated directly and completely from a love for ideas. He was happiest
when describing some new insight he’d had about harmonic space, gestalt
segregation, fundamental perception, the octave, Webern, cacti. His love
of art, the world and ideas was unfettered. I’ve encountered a very few
people like that in my life, and one of the saddest things about his
passing is that now there’s one fewer.
4.
I always suspected that some deranged gods had granted Jim the gift of
eight extra clandestine hours a day to work, during which he calmly
entered an alternate dimension, read twenty books and articles (maybe in
Latin or German, languages he taught himself as he was doing research),
filled up several of his ubiquitous graph-paper pads, and returned to
the corporeal plane with what he needed.
5.
Reverent of history, Jim enjoyed it immensely, and was in it. He taught
(maybe “taught” is the wrong word: he inspired) his students to share
his respect and fascination for so many traditions, and to consider them
alive. He showed us that history was fluid, incomplete, not over: there
was work to be done. Schoenberg, Ruggles, Partch, Satie, Var?se,
Nancarrow, Cage, and Crawford Seeger (even, at various times in his
life, Wagner!) were his colleagues.
Jim’s immediate musical family consisted of composers of the past,
present, and future. He understood, collaborated, and conversed with all
at great length, built on their ideas the way a scientist does. He
never, ever disrespected them. They dwelled in his musical house along
with the rest of us. One learned from Jim how precisely and seriously to
cherish other composers, and all other artists, because he was so
careful, sincere, and active about it. He gave great credence to the
making of art and the life of the idea — everyone who at was at least
nominally a fellow traveler got the benefit of the doubt, often more
than we perhaps deserved.
6.
In Meta + Hodos, and his later writings, Jim redesigned the architecture
of twentieth century music theory. In the Bell Labs pieces (like Phases,
Ergodos, Noise Study), he invented fundamental techniques for using
computers as compositional tools (creating the idea of a compositional
subroutine for synthesis environments). He freely moved between “art”
and “science,” applying his engineering acuity and musical vision to
some of the philosophical insights he gained from his close association
with Cage (and Var?se).
He sought connections, and had no patience for arbitrary distinctions. I
don’t think it ever occurred to Jim that emotion, intellect,
spirituality, science, harmony, creativity, knowledge, curiosity were
all that different. Nor should they be parsimoniously doled out in
support of some strategic artistic agenda. They were all part of being
human, and an artist. His epiphanies often emerged as marriages of
ideas, what he called “bridges.” He sought and found the profound
connections between the work of Hiller, Partch, Cage, Var?se and others.
He created new species from these breeding pairs — not hybrids, but
fertile new organisms that reproduced again and again, evolving with
each generation.
Jim’s ideas were startling in their originality and scope, but because
they were great ideas, they had precursors. Each piece led and could be
traced to other pieces, and always to some fundamental idea. Somewhere,
somehow, Harry Partch led to Quintexts which led to Diapason and
eventually to his final string quartet, Arbor Vitae (which the young
composer Michael Winter helped him finish near the end of his life).
Jim was intensely curious, but not restless. He asked, “What’s next?”
not because he was bored, but because he was hard-wired for forward
motion. He remained in perpetual morphogenesis (to borrow a term roughly
meaning “evolving and changing in shape,” from one of his favorite
writers, D’Arcy Thompson) until the end. The morphogenesis of his ideas
won’t stop because he did: it will increase in strength like some kind
of electro-magnetic resonance — steadily and exponentially.
7.
Over the years, one of my greatest pleasures was listening to Jim
describe seemingly fantastic theoretical speculations, some a little too
strange to talk about publicly, semi-cosmic ideas reserved for close
friends, late at night. Yet even the wackiest of these (his word, not
mine) seemed somehow believable. They were modulated by his intelligence
and refined in the crucible of his impatience with “just making stuff
up!” I always expect to pick up the New York Times Science section some
Tuesday morning and read the headline: “James Tenney’s conjecture about
the cosmos verified by experimental result!”
8.
The homes that Jim and Lauren Pratt made over the past 20 years —
whether in New York City, California, Toronto, or Berlin — were always
full. They were places where art and ideas were welcome, there was no
need for pretense, and there was all the time in the world. Careerism,
gossip, gig-talk, pettiness and the like seemed inappropriate. His home
was a haven for art — a safe and necessary respite from the quotidian.
Anyone and everyone was welcomed: his and Lauren’s idea of the “open
house” (in Toronto) was among the most brilliant ideas he was ever
involved in.
He listened with a singular intensity, imbued personal relationships
with deep gravity. You always felt that he considered you essential,
somehow, to the well being of the planet. You walked in to his and
Lauren’s home, a beer appeared in your hand, and all of a sudden your
life, at least for the next few hours, was really about music.
9.
Like Cage, Partch, Var?se, Hiller, Harrison, Ruggles, and some of the
other composers of his genus, Jim dealt with large ideas, systems of
thought, “embodiments of mind” (a phrase from another of his favorite
authors, Warren McCullough, whose work he was revisiting the last time I
spoke to him). His writings provide the foundation for a remarkable
edifice that we will spend a long time completing.
For me, though, much of the joy in remembering Jim emanates from small,
often very practical notions, which seemed to arise almost incidentally,
like wildflowers. These musical and theoretical “volunteers” delighted
him as much as anything in his life, but he rarely talked about them,
except among friends. I think he thought of this stuff as part and
parcel of being a composer. When he’d casually show you something like
this, his tremendous glee in solving some “smaller” compositional or
theoretical dilemma was evident. He’d get a particular kind of grin on
his face, like he’d just solved a riddle rather than proved a theorem.
All of this is in the music, sometimes deeply embedded, sometimes
immediately apparent. I remember the moment the compositional idea of
Chorales for Orchestra clarified itself to me: the vertical was the
horizontal; each was the primes of the harmonic series in a
crypto-palindromic-Jim-homage to the music of Ives, Stravinsky and
Ruggles — and who knows what else!? Understanding Jim’s techniques
reduced you to a kind of dumb, teenage-inflected “how cool is that?”
grin, wishing you’d thought of it yourself.
He seldom published or formally described these intermediate
compositional ideas. Nor were they premeditated: he created them as he
went along; necessary pieces to some larger, cosmic-musical puzzle he
was forever trying to solve. It was as if while busy inventing the
wheel: at some point he realized he needed to come up with the idea of a
spoke, but didn’t think it important enough to mention! It reminded me
of the way brilliant mathematicians sometimes invent entirely new
branches of mathematics en route to solving a theorem. Jim contributed
new concepts with nearly every piece.
These ideas give a sense of Jim’s playfulness and deep commitment to
compositional craft, something I think that is often overlooked when his
work is discussed. I believe that craft was the most important thing to
him, but his conception of it was unique. He loved music too much to
exploit it, enslave it to his own ends. His mode of expression was not
the liberation of himself but of other things — ideas and sound —
which he neither hamstrung to ordinary expectation, nor indentured to
“success.”
In a world increasingly obsessed with the super-saturation of the
immediate, Jim took a different approach. In the early 1960s he was
close to the great experimental psychologist Roger Shepard, who
pioneered a powerful technique called multi-dimensional scaling (MDS)
which allows a set of complex multi-variable differences between even
unrelated objects or concepts to be viewed in a simpler space, like the
plane. An MDS plot of the way a group of listeners perceive differences
between sonic events can illustrate what the most important “dimensions
of similarity” might be. One of the most fascinating concepts associated
with MDS is the idea of stress. If the mathematical reduction of the
complexity of some perceptual space produces too great a stress, it
means that the picture we’re looking at isn’t reliable, that there are
too many important dimensions: the fit is very bad. In this case, the
MDS algorithm automatically adds a dimension (from line to plane to
3-space, etc.) so that the sets of differences will fit more
comfortably, be more meaningful. Jim consciously integrated this idea
into several pieces (like Changes), in which the prime dimensionality of
harmonic space was increased when things got too “ambiguous” at the
“next lower dimension.”
But I think this is a deeper metaphor for Jim’s work. I often feel that
more and more, composers (and regrettably the rest of society) have
become like what mathematicians call fractals, functions which are
extremely complicated, but in a low dimensionality. We have so much
information readily at hand, things move so quickly, decisions are made
with such immediacy, that depth, ambiguity, taking time to explore ideas
is not generally tolerated, much less encouraged. Music is judged
quickly, often after being heard just once! Jim’s music inhabits a very
different world. His ideas are of sufficient richness to be forced into
higher dimensions, and require more complex perceptual and aesthetic
geometries.
10.
In recent years Jim’s work received far more attention than it had over
the previous thirty years. But this was not his goal. As a point of
honor, a measure of integrity, he sought far less attention than he
deserved. He made sure, though, that when someone did pay attention,
they would be rewarded by what was heard. Maybe Jim thought that it was,
in some literal way, good to leave the world in one’s debt, and not vice
versa. He did.
11.
Many of our conversations over the years had little to do with music. In
Toronto, late at night, Jim would pull out a graph-paper pad on which
he’d been working out some odd idea. One night, I think, he showed me a
kind of universal theory of matter that he was considering. He was
trying, in his own way, and by the sheer power of his own deduction and
instinct, to explain “everything,” at least to himself. I remember
nothing of the content of that graph-paper pad, but what I clearly
recall was that somewhere near the end, he said to me, with great
seriousness, that he’d very much like to be remembered as a “composer
and amateur cosmologist.” That is, in fact, how I remember him.
(Coda)
A few days before Jim died, in the hours after which he finally lost
consciousness, something odd happened at home here in New Hampshire,
three thousand miles away.
Early that morning we came outside to find a Great Blue Heron perched on
top of our red minivan. I stood with neighbors for nearly an hour,
watching as the large bird made itself at home. The theory was that
construction on a small bridge over the Mink Brook, just a few yards
away from our house, had disturbed his nest.
When I learned the chronology of his final days from Lauren, I realized
the coincidence and thought: “That’s just the kind of thing Jim would
do!,” and was glad that my old friend stopped in to say goodbye.
But maybe Jim didn’t pull off that stunt entirely on his own. Perhaps
the cosmos, being so firmly in his debt, was paying him back a little.
