Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup makemicromusic Frog Peak statement on James Tenney

I know most people here are on the distribution list for Frog Peak,
but just in case somebody missed this, I include it here:

=====================================
FROG SPEAK: Larry Polansky on James Tenney
=====================================
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, Varèse,
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 Varèse).

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, Varèse 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, Varèse, 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.

>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).

I went to school with Michael Winter and was very
inspired by him. The first microtonal music I ever
played was a microtonal beat cannon he wrote for 3
saxophones. Along with microtonalism, he introduced
me to Partch, Helmholtz, Tenney, Ligetti and changed
the way I view music. I've been trying to get ahold
of him for awhile - might be a longshot, but if anyone
knows how I can contact him please e-mail me.

--- Joseph Pehrson <jpehrson@...> wrote:

> I know most people here are on the distribution list
> for Frog Peak,
> but just in case somebody missed this, I include it
> here:
>
> =====================================
> FROG SPEAK: Larry Polansky on James Tenney
> =====================================
> 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.
>
=== message truncated ===

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com

Frog Peak statement on James Tenney

🔗Joseph Pehrson <jpehrson@...>

🔗Jon Szanto <jszanto@...>

🔗kevin ryan <bentivi_cdo@...>

🔗Joseph Pehrson <jpehrson@...>