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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Theoretical And Formal Continuity In James Tenney's Music, Brian Belet
Theoretical And Formal Continuity In James Tenney's Music, Brian Belet
Faculty Publications
James Tenney created much of his music and theoretical writing as an objective experimenter, observer and codifier. This article examines Tenney's traits of curiosity, experimentation and honest self-evaluation through a subset of his compositions from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Although quite diverse in many ways, these compositions share his mark of intense individuality, integrity and compositional rigor, which creates a macro-unity and formal continuity between works. Perhaps this is his ultimate ‘clang’ and conceptual ‘temporal gestalt-unit’. Each composition grows out of the need to address one or more specific formal questions: each work is indeed an experiment designed to …
John Zorn. The Gift; Songs From The Hermetic Theatre (2001). Chimeras; Masada Guitars (2003). Masada Recital; Magick (2004). Rituals (2005). Astronome; Masada Rock; Moonchild, Christian T. Asplund
John Zorn. The Gift; Songs From The Hermetic Theatre (2001). Chimeras; Masada Guitars (2003). Masada Recital; Magick (2004). Rituals (2005). Astronome; Masada Rock; Moonchild, Christian T. Asplund
Faculty Publications
Once the unruly upstart, John Zorn is now a MacArthur fellow, whose formidable catalog divides easily into early, middle, and late periods. The early period dates from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, when Zorn pioneered the practice of "comprovisation," a term used to describe "the making of new compositions from recordings of improvised material." Ultimately, Zorn's comprovisation blurs the lines between active listener and composer, since both create new works when they impose structure on found sonic material. His early structuralist-modernist approach to comprovisation produced esoteric, often severely pointillist music, and evolved into the game pieces of the late 1970s …