Eight Lectures on Experimental Music

1

JAMES TENNEY

April 12, 1989

ALVIN LUCIER

I first came across James Tenney in New York in the 1960s. He, along with Malcolm Goldstein and Philip Corner, had organized the Tone Roads Ensemble (Tone Roads is the title of a set of pieces by Charles Ives) that gave concerts of new music. It was wonderful to go to New York and hear the music of John Cage, Edgard Varèse, Henry Cowell, and Morton Feldman. It was the first time we heard this music. Jim played the piano and conducted the ensemble.

Tenney had already made several electronic pieces when he was still in college. One was called Blue Suede, a tape collage of the Elvis Presley song. In the early ’60s, Jim worked as a resident artist at Bell Labs, in New Jersey, using their computers and making electronic pieces on tape.

In 1967, he gave an influential FORTRAN workshop for a group of composers and Fluxus artists that included Steve Reich, Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins, Jackson Mac Low, Phil Corner, Alison Knowles, and Max Neuhaus. Among his important writings are the seminal Meta (+) Hodos, one of earliest applications of gestalt theory and cognitive science to music, as well as John Cage and the Theory of Harmony. Nearly a quarter of a 657-page volume of the academic journal Perspectives of New Music was devoted to Tenney’s music. He also wrote the in-depth liner notes to the Wergo edition of Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano. (Nancarrow, as a favor, punched the roll for Tenney’s Spectral Canon for Conlon Nancarrow.) Jim has taught at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and York University in Toronto. He currently teaches at CalArts.

Following the talk, there will be a performance of James Tenney’s The Road to Ubud for Javanese gamelan and prepared piano. Both Jim and I deeply appreciate the cooperation of my colleagues Mel Strauss, who is going to conduct; John Barlow, who spent hours preparing the piano and discussing the tunings; Sumarsam, director of the Wesleyan gamelan, who helped us examine the tuning of the gamelan; and also all of the students who have so generously given their time. I am delighted to introduce James Tenney, the first John Spencer Camp lecturer in music.

JAMES TENNEY

When I was asked a month or so ago what I would talk about, I couldn’t come to any clear decision. I thought I might just talk about recent works. But I think that what I would like to do is talk about harmony, using a few examples from pieces of mine as a kind of elaborate preparation for hearing my piece for gamelan and prepared piano.

When I say harmony, I don’t mean what you may think I mean. I don’t mean triadic, diatonic, common-practice harmony, although I would like to think that that could be a subset of what harmony might eventually come to mean for us. That would be one particular manifestation of it. I have felt for some time, in fact, I guess for almost twenty years, that a concern for harmony has been important in the music that I was writing in a variety of different ways, and I’ve also tried to deal with these questions theoretically. Now, it remains to be seen, and we won’t know for some time whether I’ve accomplished anything in this respect, but I have some ideas that I would like to talk with you about before you hear this piece.

One is a view of what’s happened in music in the twentieth century, a sort of historical viewpoint. It seems to me that harmony as a functional part of music was evolving, changing quite noticeably in Western music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From one period to another, we can hear changes in this respect, and I think the notion of an evolution is not unrealistic. But by the end of the nineteenth century, and certainly by about 1910, the first decade of the twentieth century, something strange seems to have happened. It’s as though the more progressive composers got to a point where they felt that the evolution of harmony had reached an impasse, a dead end where, for some reason, it couldn’t evolve any further. Now, being irrepressible, creative musicians weren’t about to stop making music, so what happened is they went off into a number of different directions investigating other aspects of music: rhythm, tone quality, texture, form, even the social function and aesthetics of music. All of these different aspects began to be investigated in a way that has resulted in an incredible body of beautiful exciting music. The legacy of this century is as rich as any previous century in Western history. But, harmony as such, it has seemed to me for a long time, never got beyond the point it had reached in about 1910.

A few years ago, I decided to go back and see if there were some way that we could take that sense of an evolutionary impasse in harmony as a challenge and move with it without simply regressing to some earlier stage. I don’t mean anything neo by this, but I am concerned with can we move on, forward with this? And I hope I have also made it clear that this is in no way a criticism of music that I would maintain was not doing anything with harmony. All right?

One thing that occurred to me was that maybe our very understanding of the word harmony was problematic. It’s very interesting to think about what the word had come to mean and compare it to its earlier historical meaning. Facts arise from that. In early Greece, the meaning of the word that is the root of our word harmony meant something as simple and general as a fitting together of things, like two stones shaped to fit snugly or two pieces of wood pressed together to form a unit. The Pythagoreans adopted the term and extended it to mean things very broadly philosophical and religious, but still it meant the way things relate to one another in the cosmos. And in their application of that concept to music, it is my understanding that what they had in mind was the way in which different pitches related to each other. It had nothing to do with necessarily sounding those pitches together. In fact, there is some question that they ever considered the sounds together. In any case, that was not primarily what they were talking about. They meant the relationships between different pitches.

The Pythagoreans discovered some wonderful things: for example, that certain strings produced tones that were in simple harmonic relationships to each other. Eventually, the meaning of the word got narrowed, restricted more and more. If you look at current dictionary definitions it will be something about the vertical structure of music. It’s even more restricted than that: chords. Even more restricted than that: triads, with maybe a few added notes here and there. It got narrowed down, and to me the epitome of that process of narrowing is something that may not be completely universal terminology in the jazz world, but I have heard it. Certain instruments are melody instruments, others are rhythm instruments or harmony instruments, meaning the obvious thing: a harmony instrument is one that can play more than two pitches at a single time.

This is so restrictive, especially if this is carried even further, simply to mean triads. If we had to accept that idea, it would surely be the case that there was nowhere to go. I wouldn’t even be interested in harmony in that sense. But I don’t think it is necessary to leave it that restricted. I wouldn’t advocate going back to Pythagorean generalities either. They’re a little too broad. I think it can usefully be defined as having to do with certain types of relations between pitches.

One of the areas that I first began to investigate in my pieces was the acoustical phenomenon that had to do with the harmonic series. You probably all know something about the presence of the harmonic series in sustained tones. I did a number of pieces in which the composition itself was based more or less directly upon the harmonic series. Now I want to play a couple of tapes of short pieces that explore these phenomena. The first one is called Septet. It’s written for six electric guitars and electric bass. You will hear a gradual unfolding, or sort of extension up the harmonic series to a certain point, and then a narrowing down of the range toward the top of that series, at which point it begins to open up again in a different series. It’s all very straightforward, but it’s kind of fun when you hear it on electric guitars.

Now, with the earlier works in the 1970s, I allowed for some pretty casual tunings. But by this time, I made every effort to get precise tunings from the instruments. The fretted strings of guitars had to be adjusted to get the necessary precision. Because the harmonic series, those natural intervals, are noticeably different from tempered intervals, the open strings of the guitars were tuned in such a way that, when they played the frets needed to get those pitches, the pitches were pretty accurate. The same is the case here with the prepared piano.

There’s another work that again uses the harmonic series as a basic feature. No special tuning is involved because I was able to make use of a natural musical phenomenon. It’s a piece for viola, cello, string bass, and a tape delay system. The three instruments produce what are called harmonic glissandi on the strings: simply moving the left hand, the finger touching lightly, up and down the length of the string. In the course of the piece, it’s actually a canon in three voices, you’ll hear the three voices, and if you know it’s a canon, maybe you will hear those relationships. The bass is tuned in fifths an octave below the cello. So it’s a canon at the octave using harmonic glissandi, beginning on the C strings; then moving gradually up with canonic delays to the G, D, and A strings; and then finally cascading back down. So you have that kind of very consonant sounding situation toward the beginning where everything comes from the harmonic series on C. But pretty soon that gets to be a little more complicated. This is the first movement of a longer work. The whole piece is called Glissade, and this movement is called Shimmer.

One can’t go on indefinitely writing pieces based on the harmonic series, but I learned a number of useful things from this work. Some of them are quite obvious. One is that the lower-order harmonics tend to be easily understood by our ears as consonant. The higher we go in the series, particularly with the prime number harmonic partials, the more complex the relationships become—and in some ways the more dissonant the relationships may be perceived to be. I also learned that when various pitches of a given harmonic series, that is, a series over a given fundamental, are heard together, the ear has a remarkable ability to fuse them into a singular, unified percept. This must be the case because virtually every sustained tone we ever hear, including vowels of the singing voice, are actually complex combinations of the individual pitches. It is because they are in this particular relationship that our ears hear them as a singular thing. And it has seemed to me, for some time, that this is an important insight because any theory of harmony, if it’s to be developed, tells us something about how we perceive. It would be a theory of harmonic perception, not of harmonic practice.

Now, this also threw some new light on the historical viewpoint that I was talking about in relation to the evolution of harmony in the nineteenth century and the impasse that was reached in 1910 but by way of another insight, or perhaps a hypothesis. I’ll put it to you as that. I think our ears interpret intervals of any kind as though they were the nearest simple interval in this kind of harmonic series relationship. That is, we even hear even intervals that are out of tune as more or less distorted versions of simple intervals. By simple, I should say also natural, as they occur in the harmonic series. By the way, if we have any part of nature that we can pick to use in our music, that’s it. Everything else is culture, style, and psychology. The harmonic series is physics.

Anyway, my hypothesis is that whatever intervals we hear, we interpret them, more or less, as distorted versions of a certain set of relatively simple intervals. This is the way tempered tuning systems are acceptable to us. It becomes important to understand what the twelve-tone temperament, which we have been living with for so long, is. It was a fairly good approximation of a set of important natural intervals. The deviations, the distortions, were considered to be acceptable and worth the price that one had to pay to achieve certain things like endless modulation and so forth, the ability to repeat the same melodic idea in another key region and not move into impossible regions. The impasse that was reached in 1910 was determined precisely by the fact that the twelve-tone temperament was designed to approximate a certain limited set of harmonic relations. Music had been based on those relations for a couple hundred years, and the evolution of harmony couldn’t go any further with that tuning system. This implies that if we want to keep going, we have to start looking at other tuning systems.

One of the things that was done around that time was the subdivision of the twelve tones into quarter tones or sixth tones. This didn’t get very far, however, because quarter tones don’t really get any closer to those important harmonic relations than semitones do. They didn’t help much. I think what needs to be done is experimenting with a variety of different tuning systems, and if what we’re interested in is harmony, we have to design them to have harmonic effects.

A recent work of mine makes use of another temperament containing equal