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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 …