James Tenney Retrospective at REDCAT, 11/11/04


This year composer James Tenney turns 70, and REDCAT honored the occasion with a retrospective of his work.  The concert was bookended by a solo and a quartet version of "Koan" from his "Postal Pieces" -- a set of compositions constrained by the stipulation that the entire piece can be specified in the space of a postcard.

Two early pieces were performed toward the beginning: a string quartet in one movement written when he was a 21-year-old student still influenced by Bartok (and which received its premier on this night), and a serialist piece for solo viola written four years later, with more Scheonbergian influences.

These early pieces demonstrate a deep and solid foundation of musical construction and invention, and the context they provided added to an appreciation of Tenney's development moving forward.  I found many of his later works (in an approach that has been called "conceptual minimalism") to be very multilayered in time and motion: very long arcs of evolution (or even long-term stasis), combined with a sense of detailed variety in the immediate moment.

My favorite work from the evening was "Having Never Written a Note for Percussion" -- another work from the Postal Pieces.  This work is performed by a solo percussionist on a tam-tam (a large hanging gong), and consists of an arc of crescendo and decrescendo, from abject silence to powerful explosion and back to nothing over the course of 15 minutes.  I was engaged by a constant evolution of sound over the course of this arc.  The tam-tam is an energetic and complexly-resonating sound source, and it is very difficult to control in a tight, homogenous manner -- its resonances are unpredictable and surprising, and even as percussionist Danny Holt maintained a smooth and consistent increase of steady beating (with soft mallets so the beats themselves were not distinguished as such), the gong danced and fluctuated under his steady stroke like a two-year-old child, with little splashes and explosions as the overall sonic density grew and receded.  The simultaneous overlay of the long arc with the minute variations along the way kept my sense of the passage of time suspended in a kind of double vision.

This music can be trancelike at times, yet simultaneously engaging in the immediate moment itself.  I found my ear satisfied whether paying attention to the arc or the moment -- both levels were complete unto themselves, and their interaction provided a hybrid vision that deepened both.

Tenney currently holds the Roy E. Disney Family Chair in Musical Composition at CalArts.