Barton Workshop
(New World, two CDs)
The Huddersfield festival has started to make an occasional feature out of James Tenney's music in recent years, but otherwise the work of this intriguing American composer and theorist, who died in 2006 at the age of 72, remains virtually unknown on this side of the Atlantic. Tenney's teachers included John Cage, Edgard Var�se and Harry Partch, and in the late 1960s he performed with both Steve Reich and Philip Glass, yet his own music seems distinctly different from any of them. Its uncompromising grittiness seems to hark back to pioneering US composers of the early 20th century such as Carl Ruggles. Towards the end of his life, Tenney worked with different tuning systems and harmonic series, inventing what was effectively his own, more rigorous version of the French spectral techniques, and developed those ideas in the series of eight Spectrum Pieces of 1995. The instrumentation ranges from a trio of flute, cello and piano with tape delay to a 19-piece ensemble, and all are single movements lasting around 15 minutes each. They contain some remarkable textures and ideas, but heard in succession Tenney's monolithic approaches to form become rather wearing; it's undoubtely a set to dip into rather than take in at a single sitting.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/mar/24/tenney-spectrum-pieces-review
Aaliyah Katherine Heigl Lorri Bagley Leslie Bega Maria Sharapova
No comments:
Post a Comment