music

Experimental
Earwaves
Electroacoustic

Music like James Tenney

James Tenney

James Tenney

5/5

James Tenney (August 10, 1934 – August 24, 2006) was an American composer and music theorist. He made significant early musical contributions to plunderphonics, sound synthesis, algorithmic composition, process music, spectral music, microtonal music, and tuning systems including extended just intonation. His theoretical writings variously concern musical form, texture, timbre, consonance and dissonance, and harmonic perception.

James Tenney was born in Silver City, New Mexico, and grew up in Arizona and Colorado. He attended the University of Denver, the Juilliard School of Music, Bennington College (B.A., 1958) and the University of Illinois (M.A., 1961). He studied piano with Eduard Steuermann and composition with Chou Wen-chung, Lionel Nowak, Paul Boepple, Henry Brant, Carl Ruggles, Kenneth Gaburo, John Cage, Harry Partch, and Edgard Varèse. He also studied acoustics, information theory and tape music composition under Lejaren Hiller. In 1961, Tenney completed an influential Masters' thesis entitled Meta (+) Hodos that made one of the earliest applications, if not the earliest application, of gestalt theory and cognitive science to music. His later writings include Tenney, J.; Polansky, L. (1980). "Temporal gestalt perception in music". Journal of Music Theory. 24 (2): 205–241. doi:10.2307/843503. JSTOR 843503. S2CID 53485822., Tenney, J. (1983). "John Cage and the Theory of Harmony". In Kostelanetz, R. (ed.). Writings about John Cage. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press (published 1993). ISBN 9780472103485., and Tenney, J. (1988). A History of Consonance and Dissonance. New York, NY: Excelsior. ISBN 978-0935016994., among others.

Filter by:

Cross-category suggestions

Filter by:

Filter by:

Filter by:

Filter by:

Filter by:

Filter by:

Filter by: