James Tenney was born in 1934 in Silver City, New Mexico,
and grew up in Arizona and Colorado, where he received his early
training as a pianist and composer. He attended the University
of Denver, the Juilliard School of
Music, Bennington College (Bachelor’s degree 1958), and the University of Illinois (Master’s degree 1961). His
teachers and mentors have included Eduard Steuermann, Chou Wen-Chung, Lionel
Nowak, Carl Ruggles, Lejaren Hiller, Kenneth Gaburo, Edgard Varèse, Harry
Partch, and John Cage.
A performer as well as a composer and theorist, Tenney was co-founder
and conductor of the Tone Roads Chamber Ensemble in New York City (1963-70). He was a pioneer in
the field of electronic and computer music, working with Max Mathews and others
at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in the early 1960s to develop programs for
computer sound-generation and composition. He has written works for a variety
of media, both instrumental and electronic, many of them using alternative
tuning systems.
Tenney is the author of several articles on musical acoustics, computer
music, and musical form and perception, as well as two books: META + HODOS: A
Phenomenology of 20th-Century Musical Materials and an Approach to the Study of
Form (1961; Frog Peak, 1988) and A History of
‘Consonance’ and ‘Dissonance’ (Excelsior, 1988). He has received grants and
awards from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the
Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council, the American
Academy and Institute of Arts
and Letters, the Fromm Foundation, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst,
and the Jean A. Chalmers Foundation.
Tenney returned to the California Institute of the Arts in the fall of
2000 to take the Roy E. Disney Family Chair in Musical Composition, having
taught there at its beginnings in the early 1970s. He has also been on the
faculties of at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, the University of California
at Santa Cruz and at York
University in Toronto where he was named Distinguished
Research Professor in 1994.
James Tenney’s music is published by Sonic Art Editions
(Baltimore) and the Canadian
Music Centre, and is also distributed by Frog Peak (Lebanon,
New Hampshire). Recordings are
available from Artifact, col legno, CRI, Hat[now]ART, Koch International, Mode,
Musicworks, Nexus, oodiscs, SYR, Toshiba EMI, and New
World, among others. [Bio credit: http://www.plainsound.org/JTbio.html]
The Maxi Music video below gives one a feel for Tenney's love of percussion compositions.
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