A Companion to Slug #13
Frog Peak Newsletter
http://www.frogpeak.org
6 October 2006
We apologize if this message is an intrusion or a duplication.
Email us at fp@frogpeak.org with REMOVE in the subject to be
taken off this list.
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PEAK PICKS (contents)
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New Works from Frog Peak Artists
UNBOUND: text and sound additions
Frog Speak: Larry Polansky on James Tenney (1934 - 2006)
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NEW WORKS FROM FROG
PEAK ARTISTS
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Weve recently received new works from a number of Frog Peak
composers, including Christian Asplund, Michael Byron, Phil Corner, Dan Goode,
Peter Garland, Ilya Monosov, Ezra Sims, and Lois Vierk. Check individual artist pages on the
website for more information.
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UNBOUND: Daniel Goode, Christian Wolff, Ilya Monosav, Jody Diamond
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posted one page pieces
prose pieces
Double Song for JRN and CMAW
No more beer: sing lightly or speak with lilt (something like a
sigh without the final downward fall) each word, beginning with the first
repeated as often as desired, then the second as often as desired, then
likewise the third, all in approximately the rhythm of your respiration.
Fee fie fo fum: at the same time, in the same way, but only on
every second or third or sixth or seventh breath.
At least two singers, in any case a more or less equal number
doing each of the texts, each singer using the rhythms of his own breathing.
Optional accompaniment: no more than one for every five singing
(one may accompany fewer than five) independently playing continuous melodies
(not necessarily characterized outstandingly by pitch, having four or more
alterations of sound, generally quiet) at any time, with any amount of pause
between them, but always beginning together with one of the singers sounds.
sabbath bride
big band music
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FROG SPEAK: Larry Polansky on James Tenney
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A Few Words about Jim Tenney
Larry Polansky
10/4/06
1.
Our sadness at Jim Tenneys 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: theyre by definition fatuous, and its not a
competition. But for Jim Ill make an exception. After Cage, no other composer
so elegantly and beautifully integrated ideas and music. No one elses 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, its 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 Jims. 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
hadnt 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 hed had about harmonic space, gestalt segregation,
fundamental perception, the octave, Webern, cacti. His love of art, the world
and ideas was unfettered. Ive encountered a very few people like that in my
life, and one of the saddest things about his passing is that now theres 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, Varse, Nancarrow, Cage, and Crawford
Seeger (even, at various times in his life, Wagner!) were his colleagues.
Jims 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
Varse).
He sought connections, and had no patience for arbitrary
distinctions. I dont 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, Varse 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.
Jims 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, Whats
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,
DArcy Thompson) until the end. The morphogenesis of his ideas wont 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 Tenneys 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 Laurens 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 Laurens 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, Varse, 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 hed casually show you something like this, his tremendous glee
in solving some smaller compositional or theoretical dilemma was evident.
Hed get a particular kind of grin on his face, like hed 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 Jims techniques reduced you to a kind of dumb, teenage-inflected
how cool is that? grin, wishing youd 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 didnt 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 Jims 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 were looking at
isnt 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 Jims 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!
Jims 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 Jims 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 ones 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
hed 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 hed 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: Thats just the kind of thing Jim would
do!, and was glad that my old friend stopped in to say goodbye. But maybe Jim
didnt pull off that stunt entirely on his own. Perhaps the cosmos, being so
firmly in his debt, was paying him back a little.
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* The current title of the frog peak newsletter is taken from the
text of a Shaker song; "Slug" is one of many Shaker monikers for the
Devil.
________________________________
Frog Peak Music (a composers' collective)
http://www.frogpeak.org
Box 1052, Lebanon, NH 03766 USA
phone/fax: 603 643 9037