James Tenney and the Poetics of Homage

Abstract

One of the recurrent themes of James Tenney's highly diverse musical output is an engagement with the work of other composers. From QUIET FAN for ERIK SATIE of 1970 through Spectral CANON for CONLON Nancarrow in 1974, all the way to ’Scend for Scelsi in 1996 and Song’n’Dance for Harry Partch in 1999, Tenney's compositions bear dedications to a wide range of composers whose work he admired. Besides those already mentioned, we find Ives, Varèse, Cowell, Ruggles, Crawford, Wolpe, Cage, Xenakis, Feldman and many others. This practice manifests a desire on Tenney's part consciously to link his work to tradition: not merely the American experimental tradition, of which his own work forms so significant a part, but to aspects of twentieth-century European music as well. A given piece by Tenney rarely sounds much like the music of the composer invoked in its title; rather, this article argues that Tenney's work embodies an ecology of ideas, where techniques and inventions of other composers are rationalised, restated in different terms and sometimes playfully juxtaposed with ideas of others. Tenney saw himself partly in the role of curator of other people's ideas; and his work as a whole proposes a particular genealogy of twentieth-century music. This article discusses the nature of Tenney's dedicatory works and explores the possibility that his obsessive need to invoke other composers in the dedications of his works, while clearly on one level an affirmation—of heritage, identity and shared musical vision—nonetheless conceals a profound anxiety about the whole nature and purpose of musical composition in the second half of the twentieth century.