James Tenney
James Tenney (1934–2006) was born in Silver City, New Mexico, and grew up in Arizona and Colorado, where he received his early training as a pianist and composer. He studied with Carl Ruggles, John Cage, Harry Partch and Edgard Varèse, and later played in Cage and Partch's ensembles. His 1961 thesis Meta-Hodos was one of the first attempts to describe how music is actually heard. He was a pioneer of computer music, working with Max Mathews at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the early 1960s, and at the same time a member of Fluxus and co-founder of the ensemble Tone Roads.
Postal Pieces 1, 2
** This bundle includes both volumes of James Tenney's "Postal Pieces" on Blume in a green cotton tote bag printed with the names of the suite's eleven dedicatees: - James Tenney "Postal Pieces" (LP, BLUME 022) - James Tenney "Postal Pieces" (LP, BLUME 027). The first volume has been sold out for a long time: the copies in this bundle come from a small return from a distributor and are the last available. **
Between 1965 and 1971, James Tenney wrote eleven short compositions on the backs of post…
Postal Pieces 2
Blume returns to James Tenney's "Postal Pieces" with a second volume: three "Swell Pieces" and "Koan", written for Alison Knowles, Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young and Malcolm Goldstein, on vinyl for the first time from one of the key suites of 20th Century avant-garde music.
Tellus: The Audio Cassette Magazine, Vol. 1
Long before streaming services, podcasts, or even the compact disc, there was Tellus - a radically ambitious publication that imagined recorded sound as an exhibition space. Founded in 1983 in downtown New York, Tellus transformed the humble audio cassette into a magazine, commissioning and publishing new works by musicians, composers, visual artists, poets, writers, choreographers, and performers who were reshaping the boundaries of contemporary art. Each issue invited listeners into a world wh…
Eight Lectures on Experimental Music (Book)
In this brilliant collection, path-breaking figures of American experimental music discuss the meaning of their work at the turn of the twenty-first century. Presented between 1989 and 2002 at Wesleyan University, these captivating lectures provide rare insights by composers whose work has shaped our understanding of what it means to be experimental: Maryanne Amacher, Robert Ashley, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, James Tenney, Christian Wolff, and La Monte Young. Collected here for th…
Strange City / Ville Étrange
1988 release ** Four innovative acoustic works played by the excellent Canadian ensemble Arraymusic. Contains: Claude Vivier Et je reverrai cette ville étrange, James Tenney Harmonium # 5, Henry Kucharzyk Beating, Michael J. Baker Unfinished Business.
Goodbye 20th Century
25th Anniversary Edition. Goodbye 20th Century is a double album of covers of Avant-garde recordings by Sonic Youth and collaborators. SYR4 features works by avant-garde classical composers such as John Cage, Yoko Ono, Steve Reich, and Christian Wolff played by Sonic Youth along with several collaborators from the modern avant-garde music scene, such as Christian Marclay, William Winant, Wharton Tiers, Takehisa Kosugi and others. The album received mixed reviews, but most critics praised the gro…
New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media / Postal Pieces / Vocal Trio (3LP in bundle)
This bundle includes the latest three Blume releases in a tote bag:- Various "New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media" (LP)- James Tenney "Postal Pieces" (LP)- Ben Vida "Vocal Trio" (LP)
Postal Pieces
Marking its first decade of activity, Blume returns with the first ever vinyl release to attend to the seminal American composer James Tenney’s “Postal Pieces”, among the most important suites of 20th Century avant-garde composition.
Fame di Vento
Huge Tip! Fame di Vento is Manuel Zurria's latest work. A triple CD to evoke the many suggestions and projects that have taken place in recent years, full of collaborations, of the Sicilian flautist. Fame Di Vento is also an idealized homage to Alighiero Boetti, a nomad by culture and vocation. In his footsteps, Manuel draws on the most diverse cultures, from the Lithuanian mystics to India and Sicily, from just-intonation to European-style minimalism. As he has already done in the past, Zurria …
Arbor Vitae - Quatuors + Quintettes
The sixth volume of the collection, Arbor Vitæ, pays homage to the Canadian-American composer James Tenney with performances of the complete quartets and quintets. These works were composed over a period of more than 50 years, from the first string quartet, written at 21, to the last, posthumous quartet. Through various acoustic and musical phenomena, Tenney creates broad, open musical spaces, making music that is both rigorous and sensual. We feel privileged and honoured to be associated with t…
From Japan
Robert Carl (b 1954) has long been interested in Japanese music and culture, and in the spring of 2007 he received a grant from the Asian Cultural Council to travel to Japan to interview Japanese composers between the ages of thirty and sixty—his contemporaries, whom he describes as the “post-Takemitsu” generation. The complex interplay of history, culture, and memory has long occupied Carl’s thoughts, and forms the basis of his musical exploration of Japan.
Carl’s perspective of the relationshi…
Postcard From Heaven
The harp is a strange and compelling instrument that in its technological ancientness beckons composers and listeners alike to bask in its heavenly aura. Like hand drums and acoustic guitars, the immediacy of a harp's sound production demands an intimate, one-on-one relationship between listener and instrument/performer. This intimacy is why composers of all stripes write music for harp－it strips away habit and affectation. Its limits are challenges that distill the essence of a composer's style…
Spectral Malsconcities
The evolution of the string quartet repertory has accelerated during the last half of the twentieth-century and beyond as composers from both the mainstream and the avant-garde have mined its seemingly inexhaustible creative resources. This CD features the virtually unprecedented combination of string quartet and percussion. It contains three works by prominent American experimentalist composers from several generations exploring the ensemble’s unique sonic resources in diverse stylistic setting…
Again & Again
This is the third and final chapter of a project/research on "minimalisms" that the Italian flutist Manuel Zurria, acclaimed instrumentalist and passionate lover of the more adventurous contemporary music, began in 2007. The double CD include near two and a half hours of music, which reveal how much different the approaches to the beloved "minimalist" verb can be. And how much an inquiring and participatory interpretation can lead to exciting results. In this brilliant collection Zurria not only…
Desert Plants
Facsimile reprint of Walter Zimmermann's book Desert Plants, his interviews with American experimental composers from a 1976 trip to America
From Scratch
**2015 edition. 504 pages big book, edited by Larry Polansky**Essential music-theoretical writings from a giant of avant-garde composing One of the twentieth century's most important musical thinkers, James Tenney did pioneering work in multiple fields, including computer music, tuning theory, and algorithmic and computer-assisted composition. From Scratch arranges, edits, and revises James Tenney's hard-to-find writings into one indispensable collection. Selections focus on his fundamental con…
Changes: 64 Studies for 6 Harps
James Tenney, for almost the entirety of his career, was one of the great, unsung giants of the American musical avant-garde - an artist’s artist, whose towering contribution and influence was everywhere - equal to Feldman and Cage, but who, like Nancarrow and Partch before him, was a maverick - radical to the core, refusing to play by the rules, and thus suffered at that fate’s all too predictable hand. Since his death in 2006, his legacy in devoted hands, recognition has slowly begun to grow, …
Harmonium
Just Asked whether he would describe his music as “Sound for the sake of sound,” James Tenney (1934–2006) replied, “It’s sound for the sake of perceptual insight—some kind of perceptual revelation.” This release aptly demonstrates Tenney’s deep exploratory fascination with the nature and potentialities of aural perception. His attraction to these topics was simultaneously intellectual and sensuous, and its musical products at once invite both sustained reflection and the most immediate of corpor…
Spectrum Pieces
James Tenney (1934-2006) was one of the most versatile figures in contemporary American music. Apart from creating a large, wide-ranging, and fascinating body of compositions, more than a hundred of them, he was one of the key music theorists of the late twentieth century. This CD set offers complete recordings of one of the most important of Tenney's later sets of pieces-Spectrum Pieces 1-8, the first five of which were written in Toronto in 1995 and the last three in 2001, after he moved to Va…
Having Never Written a Note for Percussion
Rrose (Sandwell District, Eaux, Stroboscopic Artefacts) has found her own niche in the American techno underground. Her hypnotic tracks incorporate ideas from ambient and minimalist music as prominently as they do the history of dance music, operating in the same fruitful cross-section between techno and the abstract as many other Further Records releases. Rrose's debt to experimental music has never been more obvious than on September 20, 2012, when he performed legendary composer and el…