Recorded at The Music Gallery, 179 Richmond Street West, Toronto
May 3, 2000
Paul Hodge, audio engineer
This interview was the result of my wish to have a final conversation with Tenney before he and his family left Toronto for California, where he was to resume teaching at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) after an absence of some 25 years. It was aired shortly after recording on the program Radio Music Gallery on CIUT (which I hosted from 1997-2000) and aired again by the late Ron Gaskin on the same program in 2006, after Tenney’s passing. The interview is in places somewhat informal or presumptuous on my part. That said, it also reflects the warm relationship I had developed with my teacher over the years. At the very least, by that time I was quite well informed about his work and was a big fan. The present audio includes the entire conversation, with some pauses edited out.
— Bruce A. Russell
Photo: James Tenney and Lauren Pratt, The Music Gallery, September 1999 (Bruce A. Russell)
TRANSCRIPT
BR: Hi Jim.
JT: Hello Bruce.
BR: Thanks for talking to me today.
JT: It’s my pleasure.
BR: Well, my first question today is regarding the transcriptions for orchestra of Conlon Nancarrow [Five Studies for Player Piano, 2000] that you’re co-conducting on May 30th — the CBC Vancouver Orchestra for MusicCanada 2000. There are five studies that you’ve hand selected?
JT: Yes.
BR: And you also originally had catalogued the numerous studies for player piano of Mr. Nancarrow and as such, you’re more familiar than many with these works. Why did you select the ones you did?
JT: Well, many of the player piano studies would be absolutely impossible. I looked through the whole set searching for ones that I thought it would be feasible to make a transcription for orchestra, and it turned out that five of the earlier ones appeared to be possible to do. There are a few more that could be done, but I was asked to do — I agreed to do five. So once I had chosen those, I knew I had a set to work on.
I got to know Nancarrow’s music very early by just good fortune. I met him in Mexico City in about 1973 and then corresponded with him for many years, and he began sending me scores and tapes. So, I was in a position that virtually no one else in the world was in. I had the material, so I did more than just catalogue it. I analyzed it and wrote about everything that I had.
BR: Right. You went down to his studio there as well.
JT: Yes, a couple of times.
BR: What was that like?
JT: Well, that was wonderful because in his workspace, which was just a big kind barn-like, cinder block building, he had two player pianos at one end of the room turned with their backs facing out because that’s where the soundboard — they’re uprights, and the soundboard radiates the sound. So, to listen to one of the studies you would be located to the rear of the pianos. And it was very amazing to hear it directly like that.
And then he had, of course, his whole collection of rolls, and his worktables, and part of his enormous library of books. I think that’s how he survived in exile down there for so long, was by keeping in touch with what was going on by way of books and journals.
BR: Were there any particular challenges in orchestrating these studies?
JT: Indeed! [laughs] Even to say that these five were possible didn’t mean that they were easy. Quite aside from the decisions that had to be made about instrumentation and so forth, the whole rhythmic problem comes in in all of them. Because what Nancarrow was doing in all of those studies, from the very beginning, was exploring new possibilities of rhythm that the medium enabled him to do.
BR: In a way that maybe wasn’t possible for human beings at the time.
JT: Right, or was extremely difficult. Now, things have changed since his early days. Performers are undertaking more complex rhythms, but still, two out of the five are going to require a second conductor working simultaneously with the first conductor so that we can have two different meters going at the same time.
BR: Yeah, that was something I’d wondered about. Now, what is the size and the composition of the orchestra? Because obviously from an acoustical standpoint, if there’s rhythmic complexity a big orchestra is going to be a great challenge.
JT: Right, it’s a small orchestra. The woodwinds in pairs, and just one each of the brass instruments, two percussion players and a smallish string choir. I think there are only two basses. It’s a chamber orchestra, really, but it is large enough to provide considerable timbral range, variety. But for these, you’re quite right: you not only don’t need, but you wouldn’t want a big, fat orchestra on these because the rhythmic complexities are most often going to have to be dealt with by soloists, right?
BR: Yeah, there’s no question that two people are going to stay together on some of the rhythms.
JT: Right, exactly.
BR: Over the years, the names of the dedicatees of your pieces, often those of former mentors or colleagues, have appeared as in or as the titles themselves. Now, with Song’n’Dance for Harry Partch (1999), recently premièred at the Donaueschingen Festival, you’ve actually used the instruments of the dedicatee, Mr. Partch himself. For someone who could be considered revolutionary in your approach to composition you seem to have a great affinity with the musical community from which you came. Where did the idea for this commission come from?
JT: Well, it was not my idea originally. A former student of mine who now works for CBC Vancouver, Jon Siddall, called me one day and he said, “Would you be interested in a commission to make orchestral transcriptions of some of Nancarrow’s player piano studies?” And, I don’t think it would have ever occurred to me to try to do such a thing, if it hadn’t been requested like that. So, that’s wonderful. Oh, you were asking about the Partch, weren’t you?
BR: Well, both.
JT: The same is true of the Partch, and that’s why I confused the question a little bit. In both cases, the idea came from someone else. In the case of Song’n’Dance for Harry Partch, the idea seemed to have been initiated by the director of the Donaueschingen music festival, who seems to be a fan of mine. It’s the third commission I’ve received from them, all his doing. His name is Armin Köhler.
BR: Well, congratulations, it’s not bad to have a friend in those kinds of places.
JT: Yes, indeed! But it was his idea and somehow Betty Freeman was brought into it and in fact the money for the commission came from her — the same Freeman that gave the name to Cage’s Freeman Etudes, right?
Now, it was left somewhat indeterminate which instruments might be used. Because, of course, Partch built, oh, there must be two dozen different instruments, and my decision to write for the Diamond Marimba and the Adapted Viola was partly determined by portability because the instruments are in the United States and they would have to be shipped to Germany. But also, those were two instruments that I was familiar with from having worked with Partch, and I could well imagine writing for them.
As it turned out, although I conceived the part for Adapted Viola it was actually played by another instrument, a different instrument, not one that Partch had built but one that is currently being used as a substitute for the Adapted Viola in performances of Partch’s work.
BR: To the specifications of the adapted viola, the original?
JT: It has the same range, but it’s an instrument designed and built by Carleen Hutchins in New Jersey, who is an acoustician who has for many years been working on the acoustics of string instruments and built a family of, I think, eight different size violins; from one that’s smaller and higher than the regular violin to an enormous bass violin that is so large the player has to stand on a platform to perform.
BR: Wow.
JT: But they’re all acoustically better designed, in terms of the size of the resonant chambers and so forth.
BR: Control over pitch?
JT: Yes, well, dynamics is really the important thing there — dynamics and timbre. Now, the instrument that was actually used is called the tenor violin, but it has the same range as the adapted viola, which is from the G an octave and a half below middle C — the G below the regular viola C. And it’s played like a cello, by a cellist (laughs), but the player had a lot of experience already playing Partch’s music in unusual tunings, so he was extremely good at dealing with the tunings that I was asking for.
BR: I imagine I we’ll be able to hear this piece on a forthcoming Donaueschingen — they have their annual releases.
JT: Yes, they do putout sort of a documentary CD.
BR: On the Col Legno label I believe.
JT: That’s right.
BR: Also, in regards to title — the piece is called Song’n’Dance for Harry Partch — by the way, I guess, the Song’n’Dance — we should talk a bit about that.
JT: OK, well — it’s in two movements, the first of which features the tenor violin. In the first movement, the Diamond Marimba has a kind of an accompanimental part. And the second movement features the Diamond Marimba, and the tenor violin is in an accompanimental roll. The first one is another of my efforts to simulate speech with musical instruments.
BR: In more than just a rhythmic sense.
JT: Yes. It’s related to an earlier work — one of the earliest pieces I did after I moved to Canada called Three Indigenous Songs [1979]. Anyway, it’s based on a text, part of instructions by Harry Partch about how to play the Adapted Viola, so it’s very self-referential. The second one is simply a quick, uptempo, kind of dance-like movement which exploits the pitch and the pitch structure, which itself is also reflected by the physical structure of the Diamond Marimba, an aspect of which is in the name: it’s diamond-shaped. Anyway, that dance could be almost thought of as kind of a demonstration of structure of the Diamond Marimba.
Now, your original question had another component to it, which referred to the titles and how other composers’ names are involved in my pieces. And, I guess, it is something that [sighs] is somewhat unique to my sensibility: that I like to celebrate my connections with other music — earlier music, rather than trying to hide ’em. (laughs) I think it’s important — and I’ve felt this way since very early days, in the early 60s and before that — that it’s important to see our own work, to understand our own work, as being part of an ongoing tradition, even if that tradition is anti-traditional in some sense. It’s meant to be experimental, or “making it new,” in Pound’s phrase. Still, no matter how iconoclastic we might be or wish to be, wherever we are is the result of the work by people that came before us. And I like that. I like that connection. So, I’ve never had what, who was it, Alan Bloom or some literary critic referred to as the “anxiety of influence,” (both laugh) implying a kind of Oedipal reaction to kill the father. I don’t relate to that.
BR: Great. The titles also are rarely of a poetic or allusive nature, other than alluding to your influences.
JT: Usually not, but I think you would — if you looked them over — they do often refer to formal aspects of the music. I am much more concerned with the sound itself, including its overall form, rather than its allusive or symbolic or expressive characters. Music can’t help but be expressive in a certain sense, but that’s not what primarily interests me.
BR: We seem to be getting at a different musical paradigm than is traditional with concert composers going back to the time of program music [in the] nineteenth century — a hundred years ago. Care to comment? Do you feel yourself as part of — well, I can see definitely that you are part of a different musical paradigm — and what is it?
JT: Well, I don’t know. The first bit of theoretical writing I did had to do with form: Meta+Hodos. It was about form and formal perception. I don’t know if this is of interest to anybody else, but I’ve always felt that with music where the intention was expressive or even expressionistic I hear it purely as form (laughs). For me, Schoenberg and Webern in their expressionist, pre-twelve-tone period? It’s no more expressive than anything else to me, but I hear it formally. Whether this is just a matter of personal idiosyncratic temperament or not I don’t know what, but that’s the way I relate to things. I wouldn’t presume to say that the way I view things can be thought of as characterizing our time or some new direction that anybody else might be going. But that’s certainly the direction I’ve been going.
BR: The fall at CalArts will be a homecoming of sorts for you since you taught there in the early 1970s. How has the school changed since you were there?
JT: The school looks remarkably like I remember it. Even the students that I see there, and the area has changed, though. It’s much more developed that it was 25-30 years ago. But it’s pleasant. So, a homecoming in a way except that I’ve been here 24 years!
BR: A sort of forced homecoming.
JT: Yes. I definitely feel like Toronto is my home after 24 years, more than a third of my life. In some ways perhaps it includes the most significant, most important years of my career. I have very mixed feelings about leaving and going back to California. There’s all kinds of stuff that’s positive about it, but there is a real sadness about leaving Toronto.
BR: Well, I can say that we’re sad to see you go! You and your family. Will the things you teach there be different from what you taught [here]?
JT: No, it looks like it’s going to be very similar to what I’ve been teaching here at York. Right away, there’s a course that is informally being called “the Jim Tenney course” which is musical acoustics, psychoacoustics and formal perception; the course that I taught at York every two or three years. And then besides that I’ll be teaching composition. So, it’ll be very similar.
BR: Here’s a touchy point, perhaps: what do you think of music education as a whole today in Canada compared to say the US, or Germany, where you lived for a short while?
JT: I lived in Germany a year, but I didn’t really get much of an impression of the music educational situation there because I wasn’t teaching. I don’t see any significant differences in the education systems or situations in Canada vs. the United States. In both places, you’ve got a great range of philosophies, attitudes from very academic and traditional to much more progressive. And York has been very progressive. If I had been teaching here in some other institutions I might not have been nearly as happy.
And CalArts is also very progressive in this respect. I’m not moving into a situation where I’m expected to teach traditional subjects. I can move in my own way and that has been the case at York as well. I would say it’s similar in both places, but the variations within each country are probably greater than the differences between the two countries.
BR: What about the changes over the last quarter century?
JT: Well, I’m not sure I know—that I can say anything about that. There have been changes at York but they don’t have to do with the educational or pedadogical procedures or curriculum. They have to do with lack of financial support. It’s a crime what’s being done to the university system in Ontario and across Canada. It’s really a shame.
BR: I concur. How about the music business? Let’s get onto that.
JT: The business! I don’t know much about the business, but it does raise the whole issue of public support for the arts which is in a very dismal situation right now. With the arts councils being starved for money, and cultural institutions of all kinds being practically starved to death. It’s not a good situation. I’m afraid that what is has to do with is precisely a kind of business philosophy; the free-market philosophy that suddenly with Ronald Reagan became respectable. So, all kinds of right-wing idiots came out of the woodwork, you know? Now they could show their faces and pretend to be respectable human beings, after some years of much more progressive or liberal philosophy in politics. It’s criminal. The government that’s running this province—they all ought to be taken out and shot. (laughs)
BR: (laughing) Well, they’re patting themselves on the back right now, so [I think] it would be a bit of a shock to them.
JT: I know they are! Notice, this new budget got nothing except some building funds for universities; nothing for the homeless; nothing for the arts. It’s scandalous, absolutely scandalous; but with the kind of mentality that people like Harris—these fools from the sticks!—come in and try to run a government. It’s no wonder. But they’re just little imitations; little wannabe Ronald Reagans is all they are.
BR: Let’s move over to Switzerland and talk about Hat Hut, their famous contemporary music label.
JT: Yeah, before I get really worked up! (laughs)
They have released three CDs dedicated to your compositions, and I believe a fourth is in the works at the moment. This is the most extensive and widely available survey of your music on one label to date. How did the relationship with the label begin, and are there any plans for a complete edition of your work to date?
JT: No, not for complete. That doesn’t even seem to me… possible! I’ve written too much. (laughs) I don’t remember how that started, but the man that runs Hat Hut/Hat Art, Werner Uehlinger, just seems to have decided that I’m part of what they’re now calling The New York School.
BR: (laughs) You’re kidding me!
JT: No! I think he thinks… there’s good reason to include me with that. If you look at his catalogue in general, he’s done a lot of Cage and Feldman and Wolff and so forth, in addition to a lot of progressive jazz. It makes me feel very good to be in that stable, as it were. In fact, there are two more in the works.
BR: Aha! I didn’t laugh, because… it’s not preposterous at all that you would be in the New York School, but of course it’s a posthumous label which a record exec can decide to change if he wants.
JT: I don’t know if he even uses that term…
BR: They have three releases called “New York School,” Vol. 1, 2 and 3. But, one of your pieces, Four Forms [Forms 1-4 (1993)], makes reference to that school in an indirect way, because one of each of the pieces is dedicated to Morton Feldman, Edgard Varèse, Stefan Wolpe and John Cage.
JT: Right, each one.
BR: Moving on to the topic of harmony—a big topic, don’t wanna cover too much of it—the Quintext for string quartet, finished in 1972: was that the first piece of yours to use an alternative tuning system?
JT: Yes, it was.
BR: In this case it was the harmonic series?
JT: It was based on the harmonic series although it’s manifested in a variety of ways in the several movements. There are five movements in the set and the last one is explicitly harmonic series based. Two of the movements however, don’t involve specific tuning. One is glissandos, with graphic notation. And the tuning of the other is only approximate. But three of them do have very precise tuning. It was, in fact, maybe the first time that I used the notation that I’m still using, with numbers above a note indicating deviations from tempered tuning in cents.
BR: Much of the harmonic material in the pieces you’ve written over the last quarter century is based on whole number ratios [involving] a fundamental. It’s a way of tuning that is complex in its own way, but much simpler than equal temperament.
JT: In certain respects it is simpler, because it is closer to natural pitch relations as they occur in the sounding of a single complex tone, for example. It was around 1972, or a couple of years earlier, that I began to get interested in this large question of harmony. And not in the sense of wanting to go back to an earlier harmonic style, not at all, but rather the way I’ve conceived of it is to pick up the thread again of the evolution of harmony which seemed to me to have come to a crashing halt around 1910. The reason that it came to a stop (I certainly don’t mean that music came to a stop, but harmony, the evolution of harmony) is because the specifically harmonic resources of the twelve-tone tempered scale had more or less been exhausted. Almost immediately what that meant to me was the necessity to begin to explore other tuning systems. Having worked with Partch was the big, initial inspiration for that kind of thinking, although my music sounds nothing whatsoever like the music of Partch. The idea that one of the first pre-compositional decisions that a composer has to make now is “What tuning system shall I use?” (laughs) It’s just as important as the question, “What instruments should I write for?” or “How long is the piece going to be?” or “What notation shall I use?”
BR: Let me ask you this—do you ever think of writing a piece in equal temperament anymore?
JT: Yes, I do. Because it has properties that can be useful under certain situations. There are occasions when I decide to suspend the whole harmonic aspect of things and work with pure texture, where specific pitches are not that important. It’s what you might call clouds of pitches or clusters of pitches that are creating shapes, movement and forms that is the important idea.
BR: Such as [in] your recent piece Flocking for two pianos [1993].
JT: Yes, Flocking was an example of it, because I was asked to write a piece for a piano duo that played a lot of music for two pianos tuned a quarter tone apart. Quarter tone tuning does not increase in a very clear-cut way the harmonic resources of the tuning system. It does increase the textural aspect. But just dividing those semitones in half doesn’t get us really any closer to those natural intervals, except for one of them: the eleventh harmonic is almost exactly right on. But we’ve skipped over the third, fifth and seventh. So, when I was working on that piece, I thought of it specifically as not involving harmony. So what’s left, if you’re not doing harmony? I call it texture.
BR: Not form.
JT: Well, it’s an aspect of form, absolutely. And a piece I’m working on now is similarly motivated. It’s a piece for the Esprit Orchestra and the Evergreen Club Gamelan. The problems of correlating the tuning systems of those two groups—at first I thought this will be an opportunity to do something interesting with tuning, but the more I got involved with it, the more I finally came to the conclusion that a more interesting way to go would be to treat it as pure texture. I want to completely integrate the two groups, so that there’s no obvious distinction between the roles that they play in the music.
BR: The last time you wrote for the Evergreen Club ensemble was The Road to Ubud, 1986, and just recently recorded and released by them. You did address the issue of harmony because you were working with a prepared piano, and I guess you retuned the piano for that to match their scale.
JT: That’s right. That one I did treat the pitch as a harmonic resource because it was prepared piano, but you’re right it was retuned prepared piano.
BR: You’ve indicated that when you sit down to write a piece that there are any number of ideas or ways of working that might strike you.
JT: Yes.
BR: As far as the—how do I put this?—the amount of systematization in a piece, or how much structure you want to apply to it; I guess if you could just comment generally on how you work that way. Do you always work within a system? Do you sometimes just say, “Let’s be crazy, irrational, or whatever here?”… intuitive?
JT: Most of my work of the last twenty years, I would say, or fifteen anyway, has been within a sort of system of my own devising. I call it stochastic, but I mean something different than what Xenakis meant when he first started using that term. By stochastic I mean a constrained random process. It’s the constraints on the random process that give shape and form to, not only the whole piece, but to its smaller sections or parts. I do a lot with a computer. I’m able to program these processes on the computer and get various kinds of output. The piece I’m working on now is going to be graphic output coming directly from the computer.
BR: Exciting. You’re always working with new notations as well. I guess it’s similar to Stravinsky’s idea that it’s really important to place restrictions on yourself. Those are the most important things, in a way…
JT: Well, in a way, and yet, you know, one of the possible forms—in fact in some sense you could say it’s the ur form—is the formless; the shapeless. The flat surface is in some ways the most basic surface. The straight line in some ways might be thought of as the most basic line. And what I call a stationary process, or ergodic form, is a very important type that I use occasionally. It’s the sort of form that Cage’s music of the fifties and sixties manifests and lot of people complain about that because they don’t understand that there is a point to that, and a certain kind of listening attitude that’s appropriate to it that allows you to get the most out of it. It’s not one where you’re sitting on the edge of your seat waiting for the dramatic action to develop, or trying to understand a narrative line. It is precisely the opposite; it’s more like standing in a forest and listening to the sounds, or standing on the street corner and listening to the sounds of traffic and not expecting them to tell you a story. (laughs)
BR: Observing a phenomenon in nature.
JT: A natural phenomenon, yes. Now, some of them do have a kind of quasi-dramatic shape. But mostly when we talk about nature we’re talking about these ongoing, more or less in the large sense, stationary, statistical situations. So that’s one kind of form which I use sometimes. More often I use other sorts of forms that are interesting shapes that I like to play with.
BR: Can you see an evolution of listening in terms of the abilities of performers to realize your music, and also in terms of the audience response? I’m referring to the kind of listening required to distinguish the “new” sounding intervals in your tuning systems.
JT: Well, I do indeed and I believe that we are involved in a kind of evolutionary process all the time. The evolution of our hearing, our musical perception. You know, it’s important to realize the auditory system is not just the ear; not even just the inner ear, but it involves part of the brain, necessarily. And whenever you have circuits in the brain involved, they are changeable. They’re malleable. And they change on the basis of experience. Right? So we are literally changing the way we hear by the experience of the effort to make these new kinds of music. And I definitely see it among performers that I’ve worked with. The interesting thing is, they can all do what I ask them to do, but they’ve never been asked to do it before. In music school, all you’re asked to do is distinguish twelve different pitches in an octave. I asked them to distinguish many more, but in a context in which those distinctions make harmonic sense. And the first thing they discover is they can do it! (laughs)
BR: Surprise, surprise!
JT: Yes, surprise, surprise. And that’s a very wonderful thing. They all realize that there are distinctions that they can make. If they’re decent musicians, they can do it. The same is true with rhythmic perception and rhythmic performance. This is involved in an evolutionary process as well. And that’s very exciting to me.
BR: I think one of the best things about your work—I’m thinking of the first time I heard a piece of yours that involved the harmonic series in a very clear way—perhaps it was Voices [1983/84]. It literally blew my mind (JT laughs), because these intervals; I’ve never heard them before! It’s a very fresh sound and yet you’re connecting right back to a natural phenomenon as you said but you present things in such a clear way.
JT: Well, that’s kind of a formal intention, I guess. I like to think of the form as a kind of object of perception itself, and it can be interesting. It can have some clear relationship to the forms at the smaller levels; what we might call content. And maybe in some cases I have been influenced by Schoenberg’s idea about form, which was that form is a means of ensuring comprehensibility, so that it can be used to clarify content.
BR: Do you think that new technologies—I feel somehow compelled to mention new technologies; we’re in an age where every day in the news you hear about the internet, cyberspace, etc. Do you think that those new technologies are going to—well, how do you think they’re going to change the way in which music is created, performed, accessed? Will it relate in a positive way to what you’re doing?
JT: Oh, I think it will. People are remarkably creative in how they make use of the existing technology. Thirty-five years ago, I was very much involved in the early developments of digital technology in music and you see how ubiquitous that has become.
BR: When I hear any bit of hip hop, I think [about] how you were one of the first people working on digital sampling back in the 60s—early 60s.
JT: But I have not stayed close to the developments in technology. I use the computer but not in very sophisticated new ways. So I don’t really feel like… my work will not involve those technologies, but I see it around me. Younger people are definitely doing interesting things with new technologies and sometimes with funky old technology, too. That’s very important. It was like David Tudor in the 60s and 70s, piling up on one table a whole lot of electronic junk and then connecting it together to see what would happen and inventing these extraordinary networks.
BR: Unique feedback loops.
JT: Yes, right. Or Max Neuhaus in that same period. And my own students have shown this kind of creativity in thinking of ways to work with technology. So I do, you know? It can’t help but happen. The human species is remarkably creative. Although this last century has been one of the most horrendous of all the centuries we know about historically, I would say it’s also been one of the most creative in the arts; in the sciences; and it’s just a manifestation of the extraordinary creativity of the human mind.
BR: Many of your ideas are open ended, for example the use of the harmonic series itself. The harmonic series is infinite in the sense that a fundamental could have any number of partials, it’s only limited by the number of whole numbers which are infinite. So, in a sense there’s a revolution which could occur people working with the harmonic series as they get to become more familiar with these intervals, you could get more and more complex. There’s really no limit, there’s only a human limit.
JT: There’s a human limit; there’s also practical limits. You know, any length of string is going to have a certain limit to the number of harmonics you can actually elicit on it. Because you get down to shorter and shorter segments of string; pretty soon there’s not like strings anymore; they’re like columns. There’s stiff, relatively, and they won’t vibrate in higher and higher harmonics. The same thing is true with any pipe or the human voice; any actual acoustical, physical sound producing object or device will have its practical limits. And you can think of a sort of endless proliferation of new types of intervals but at a certain point, you begin duplicating or so newly duplicating pitches that you already have in the system that there’s a way in which it’s self-limiting there, too. So, although theoretically it’s infinite, in a practical sense, it’s finite. But it’s very much larger than the small set of relationships that we’re used to working with in traditional harmony and in our traditional tuning system.
BR: Even with what you’re doing now, you’re up to dozens of harmonics, and we’re assuming of course that we’re always going to be using physical means of producing sound. Let’s speculate that perhaps in a century or two there might be ways of hearing music that don’t involve air—the vibration of air.
JT: I don’t know (laughs). I can’t imagine it, but maybe.
BR: That’s why I’m referring to the possibility of things getting pretty far out, but of course, infinite… hmm.
JT: Yes, if you’re talking about electronic generation of course. It’s not limited in that way.
BR: Neural electronic, maybe, but that’s only a flight of fancy.
JT: Right.
BR: The other thing about the open-ended possibility of your music: some of the forms such as the Harmonia pieces work with a structure which is akin to the harmonic series, in arithmetic series that are created in the rhythms. You sort of stop the pieces off at a certain point, and they could get much more complex. They do hit a certain level of complexity, but perhaps at some point…
JT: Well, an example of it is Spectral CANON for CONLON Nancarrow [1974]
BR: A player piano piece.
JT: Yes, the piece of mine for player piano in which the piano is retuned so that notes corresponding to the first 24 harmonics are actually tuned on the piano. Those harmonics—when you get up to 24, they’re getting so close together that pretty soon you run outta keys (laughs), right? So, it seemed like that kind of provided me with a natural stopping point, although I’ve thought it would be interesting to have an electronically generated version of it that goes higher.
The thing about the harmonic series is, it’s virtually the only thing that is given to us by nature, rather than culture. I guess the other thing that one could say is given to us by nature is numbers. (laughs)
BR: Numbers don’t lie! (laughs)
JT: Just about everything else that determines of our musical material has been given culturally. So, maybe that says something about my long-term fascination with it. It’s also just a beautiful—it’s beautiful! I like the sound of it! (laughs)
BR: So do I, I think it’s very beautiful. Jim, how do you feel Canada has been to you?
JT: Oh, very good. Very good. Before I moved here, I had received one small arts grant and one small co-commission for this work that I did with a sound sculptor. I’d never been commissioned to do a new piece for a performing ensemble. Since I came to Canada—I don’t know, I’ve been here 24 years and I think I must have been commissioned almost that many times. So, it’s been a tremendous advantage to me. Teaching at York has been good in spite of the financial problems that I don’t blame people at York for—have to blame politicians for that. And also, there’s a very lively, active new music scene here in Toronto that lots of young people, many of ’em ex-students of mine, and I like being involved in that way with the ongoing new music activities here. So, it’s a very lively scene, I think I’m gonna miss it. I don’t expect to have anything quite like that in California.
BR: Well, in turn we’re going to miss you. I can’t imagine what the music scene would be like without you, or would have been like without you; or my education of course, as you’ve been my teacher. Sorry to see you go. I hope you come back soon and regularly to visit us.
JT: Thank you Bruce.
BR: And thanks for doing this interview.
JT: OK.
BR: OK, talk to you soon.
JT: Right. Bye.
