Monday, May 09, 2005
21 Years Too Late
Anne Midgette's profile of James Tenney in the Times has been deservedly linked all over the blogsphere. Tenney was recently, as mentioned in the article, at Dartmouth College for a residence at the annual Festival of New Musics. I attended two of the concerts (at the time, unfortunately, I was too swamped with day-job work to review them on the main page, but they were good.) and at the after-party for the main event I chatted with Tenney briefly about "Chromatic Cannon," which had been on the concert. I asked if he saw a connection between that piece and Reich's "Piano Phase," since they seemed closely related to me. He said that they were, and that in fact he had premiered "Piano Phase" with Reich, and then told the story Midgette quotes in her piece: "'Reich went to the concert with me,' Mr. Tenney said. 'Afterwards he looked at me with a mock glare and said, 'You've put me in bed with Schoenberg.' I said that was the whole point.'"
At the end of my Masters at NEC last year, I wrote a piano piece as a thank-you to Lee Hyla. Lee's music is fairly downtown, but he has something of an affinity for uptown as well, and used to hang out with the Bang on a Can crew -- and he was more than able to coach me in my downtown aspirations. I oh-so-cleverly called the piece "Two Pages for Lee Hyla," and structurally it's a highly repetitive cycle through a set of chords created by simultaneously adding a new pitch while subtracting an old one. The joke is that the cycle of pitches is one of the more tonal-sounding all-combinatorial sets.
Of course Tenney's 1983 "Chromatic Cannon" is "The ultimate juxtaposition of opposing elements, it fuses Minimalism with the 12-tone system, starting with a single repeated interval and gradually building it into a tone row." Apparently I lose. Although, in my own defense, I was only 3 or 4 years old in 1983.
posted by Galen H. Brown
8:45 PM
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