Read an extract from James Tenney: Writings And Interviews On Experimental Music
October 2025
Detail from the cover of James Tenney: Writings And Interviews On Experimental Music (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025)
In an extract from a new collection of writings and interviews by James Tenney – edited by Robert Wannamaker, Lauren Pratt and Tashi Wada – Douglas Kahn interviews the US Fluxus composer and theorist in 1999 about his influences and works
DOUGLAS KAHN: Could you tell me about your relationship with George Brecht and Entrance/Exit Music (1962)?
JAMES TENNEY: We met at Fluxus events. George was interested in what I was doing at Bell Labs, and he was one of the people who could understand it easily and quickly. He came to me one day with an idea – it was his idea – and asked me if I could generate a sound that went from a sine tone to white noise. I said yes. It was used as entrance and exit music at a lot of concerts that [Nam June] Paik and Charlotte Moorman did. I forget which way it went.
DK: Wouldn’t it go from white noise to sine tone, and then sine tone to white noise, like bunting at either end of a concert? That would be from the chaos of the world to the order of the performance, although that might not make sense for a Paik and Moorman concert.
JT: Maybe! I just know that Paik and Moorman took it with them on a European tour and every concert was opened and closed with that piece. They sent me the programs. That was one of the pieces that didn’t get on my CD with the Bell Labs pieces.
DK: In a brief interview several years ago during which we discussed Cage and Fluxus, you talked about the general influence upon young artists of the 1950s of Cage’s 4'33" in terms of its theatrical and the conceptual aspects. Was there any influence along these lines evident in your work at Bell Labs?
JT: Probably not with the pieces I did at Bell Labs, but there were some other pieces that were related to 4'33": Metabolic Music (1965), perhaps, but I’m thinking in particular of a piece called Chamber Music (1964), a series of little cards inspired by George Brecht, which was played several times at the Fluxus Symphony Orchestra Concert.
DK: Was that one of the Postal Pieces?
JT: No. I wrote it when I was in New Haven. The idea just came to me. I was waiting for a concert to begin and noticed how much was going on that we generally filter out. We don’t consider it to be what we are there to observe, yet it often is very rich and potentially interesting. In the Fluxus Symphony Orchestra Concert at Carnegie Recital Hall [27 June 1964], for the “Prelude” the orchestra comes out, sits down, tunes up. Then the conductor comes out and gives an upbeat and the lights go off. For the “Interlude”, they are out there in the dark and the lights just kind of flash on and off, with a single sound – BANG!! – from the orchestra. The “Postlude”, the lights come on and no sound occurs. The conductor is just giving the wrap-up; they put their instruments down, etc. It’s an obvious thing, but it was fun.
I made one special copy, this is No 5, Chamber Music With Commentary. For Bob Rauschenberg. The way I remember it, after the Fluxus performance Yvonne Rainer came up and asked me, “What are you trying to do?” Maybe it was Bob who asked me.
DK: What’s the relationship between your Metabolic Music (1965), which uses biofeedback gear, and Alvin Lucier’s Music For Solo Performer, often known as “the brainwave piece”?
JT: It was one of those independent coincidences. I hadn’t heard about Alvin’s piece until after I did my own. Also, it was just a little sketch of an idea. It was never realised in a performance, whereas Alvin’s piece was fully realised.
DK: Were such relationships between art and technology in the air? Certainly there was the activity of Experiments in Art and Technology and other groups at that time.
JT: Of course. But Alvin wasn’t involved with Klüver or EAT. He was just doing his thing, brilliantly. Yet there was something in the air: my work at Bell Labs, Paik’s work with television sets, what George Brecht was doing, Max Neuhaus was beginning to move in the direction of sound installations, Cage with his Variations and Cartridge Music. You may not know about this – I don’t think it has ever been published – but in the mid-1960s at Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press Gallery, which was basically his and Alison’s [Knowles] living room, I gave a series of lectures on computer programming. Let's see, how did it start? Cage had a discussion group about [Buckminster] Fuller, that he invited some of us to and it was at Dick and Alison’s place. I then invited some of the friends who had been involved in that group to learn about programming: Dick and Alison, Nam June Paik, Phil Corner, Steve Reich, Max Neuhaus and two or three others that I can’t remember right now.
DK: When was this? Was it in 1967 when you wrote a letter to Cage about Fuller and politics?
JT: That was my response to the series of meetings that John organised. Fuller had just put out a series of documents, 81⁄2" x 11" soft-bound; I believe they were published by the University of Southern Illinois. They were part of his focused attempt to save the world by design science. I still have them. Cage was very intrigued by this idea and wanted to talk about it with people. We would meet at Dick and Alison’s place once a week, get wildly drunk and talk about Fuller.
JAMES TENNEY: We met at Fluxus events. George was interested in what I was doing at Bell Labs, and he was one of the people who could understand it easily and quickly. He came to me one day with an idea – it was his idea – and asked me if I could generate a sound that went from a sine tone to white noise. I said yes. It was used as entrance and exit music at a lot of concerts that [Nam June] Paik and Charlotte Moorman did. I forget which way it went.
DK: Wouldn’t it go from white noise to sine tone, and then sine tone to white noise, like bunting at either end of a concert? That would be from the chaos of the world to the order of the performance, although that might not make sense for a Paik and Moorman concert.
JT: Maybe! I just know that Paik and Moorman took it with them on a European tour and every concert was opened and closed with that piece. They sent me the programs. That was one of the pieces that didn’t get on my CD with the Bell Labs pieces.
DK: In a brief interview several years ago during which we discussed Cage and Fluxus, you talked about the general influence upon young artists of the 1950s of Cage’s 4'33" in terms of its theatrical and the conceptual aspects. Was there any influence along these lines evident in your work at Bell Labs?
JT: Probably not with the pieces I did at Bell Labs, but there were some other pieces that were related to 4'33": Metabolic Music (1965), perhaps, but I’m thinking in particular of a piece called Chamber Music (1964), a series of little cards inspired by George Brecht, which was played several times at the Fluxus Symphony Orchestra Concert.
DK: Was that one of the Postal Pieces?
JT: No. I wrote it when I was in New Haven. The idea just came to me. I was waiting for a concert to begin and noticed how much was going on that we generally filter out. We don’t consider it to be what we are there to observe, yet it often is very rich and potentially interesting. In the Fluxus Symphony Orchestra Concert at Carnegie Recital Hall [27 June 1964], for the “Prelude” the orchestra comes out, sits down, tunes up. Then the conductor comes out and gives an upbeat and the lights go off. For the “Interlude”, they are out there in the dark and the lights just kind of flash on and off, with a single sound – BANG!! – from the orchestra. The “Postlude”, the lights come on and no sound occurs. The conductor is just giving the wrap-up; they put their instruments down, etc. It’s an obvious thing, but it was fun.
I made one special copy, this is No 5, Chamber Music With Commentary. For Bob Rauschenberg. The way I remember it, after the Fluxus performance Yvonne Rainer came up and asked me, “What are you trying to do?” Maybe it was Bob who asked me.
DK: What’s the relationship between your Metabolic Music (1965), which uses biofeedback gear, and Alvin Lucier’s Music For Solo Performer, often known as “the brainwave piece”?
JT: It was one of those independent coincidences. I hadn’t heard about Alvin’s piece until after I did my own. Also, it was just a little sketch of an idea. It was never realised in a performance, whereas Alvin’s piece was fully realised.
DK: Were such relationships between art and technology in the air? Certainly there was the activity of Experiments in Art and Technology and other groups at that time.
JT: Of course. But Alvin wasn’t involved with Klüver or EAT. He was just doing his thing, brilliantly. Yet there was something in the air: my work at Bell Labs, Paik’s work with television sets, what George Brecht was doing, Max Neuhaus was beginning to move in the direction of sound installations, Cage with his Variations and Cartridge Music. You may not know about this – I don’t think it has ever been published – but in the mid-1960s at Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press Gallery, which was basically his and Alison’s [Knowles] living room, I gave a series of lectures on computer programming. Let's see, how did it start? Cage had a discussion group about [Buckminster] Fuller, that he invited some of us to and it was at Dick and Alison’s place. I then invited some of the friends who had been involved in that group to learn about programming: Dick and Alison, Nam June Paik, Phil Corner, Steve Reich, Max Neuhaus and two or three others that I can’t remember right now.
DK: When was this? Was it in 1967 when you wrote a letter to Cage about Fuller and politics?
JT: That was my response to the series of meetings that John organised. Fuller had just put out a series of documents, 81⁄2" x 11" soft-bound; I believe they were published by the University of Southern Illinois. They were part of his focused attempt to save the world by design science. I still have them. Cage was very intrigued by this idea and wanted to talk about it with people. We would meet at Dick and Alison’s place once a week, get wildly drunk and talk about Fuller.
So here was this group of friends of mine, who knew nothing about what I was doing except from hearing the results of it. I thought they might be interested in learning a few things about computer programming and, in fact, they did get interested. Dick and Alison each did a piece. Alison’s A House Of Dust [computer poetry] was a result of that little series of lectures. I helped her in the programming, but she programmed it. I can’t remember what Dick did; I think it may have been a piece of concrete poetry. Also, you talked about that schism. I didn’t feel it in myself but I knew it existed outside myself, precisely right there among my friends. I think I was trying to make a bridge. I was trying to say that these things might be relevant to you too if you had a way into it. Nam June Paik used to call me his guru! He liked playing with hardware and here I was talking software. He was very interested, but didn’t do anything with it.
***
DK: Could you talk about your composition, Collage #2 (Viet Flakes) (1966), for Carolee [Schneemann]’s film Viet-Flakes?
JT: The whole thing is put together from fragments of a fixed set of pieces of music. I had each of several songs recorded on small reels, the reels were labeled, and I put them on a rod above the tape recorder equipment. I would reel off parts of one, decide how long I wanted it, splice a piece in, listen to it, and then decide what the next one’s going to be. There is a Beatles song in there, and there are several other songs that you hear coming in and out. A good deal of the work in composing that piece was really composing the words, putting together the verbal content of these fragments of the songs.
DK: So there’s a type of ventriloquism going on, in that you were saying things with other people’s disparate words.
JT: Yes. The words of the songs were essential to the continuity of that piece. It ends “life is very short...” That’s the end.
DK: Were there other sounds besides the music?
JT: No, it’s all music. But it included some Western music: a Bach cantata and some harpsichord music, fragments of a Mozart piano concerto, as well as some South East Asian folk music that I took off of Folkways Records, Vietnamese, Cambodian and so forth. There’s noise sometimes on those things, but it is all fragments of music.
DK: During an interview with Carolee several years ago, I remember her telling me that there were sounds of you two making love on a train.
JT: She may be conflating two other tapes. They never became pieces. They were simply materials. There’s one tape that I have of sounds that I recorded while we were making love and another tape of sounds that I recorded in a railroad yard with trains coming in, unhooking and hooking up. There would be a tremendous clamour. Those tapes are probably disintegrated by now. They did not get on to Viet Flakes. Now, wait a minute. Ah yes, I think I used some of these other materials for other parts of the theatre piece which was called Snows. Viet Flakes was just a little segment of the whole work. So, she’s probably right about that, but it was just sound materials that I had never actually put together into what I call a piece.
James Tenney: Writings And Interviews On Experimental Music is published by Bloomsbury Academic. You can read Peter Margasak’s review of the book in The Wire 500. Pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Subscribers can also read the review online via the digital library.
***
DK: Could you talk about your composition, Collage #2 (Viet Flakes) (1966), for Carolee [Schneemann]’s film Viet-Flakes?
JT: The whole thing is put together from fragments of a fixed set of pieces of music. I had each of several songs recorded on small reels, the reels were labeled, and I put them on a rod above the tape recorder equipment. I would reel off parts of one, decide how long I wanted it, splice a piece in, listen to it, and then decide what the next one’s going to be. There is a Beatles song in there, and there are several other songs that you hear coming in and out. A good deal of the work in composing that piece was really composing the words, putting together the verbal content of these fragments of the songs.
DK: So there’s a type of ventriloquism going on, in that you were saying things with other people’s disparate words.
JT: Yes. The words of the songs were essential to the continuity of that piece. It ends “life is very short...” That’s the end.
DK: Were there other sounds besides the music?
JT: No, it’s all music. But it included some Western music: a Bach cantata and some harpsichord music, fragments of a Mozart piano concerto, as well as some South East Asian folk music that I took off of Folkways Records, Vietnamese, Cambodian and so forth. There’s noise sometimes on those things, but it is all fragments of music.
DK: During an interview with Carolee several years ago, I remember her telling me that there were sounds of you two making love on a train.
JT: She may be conflating two other tapes. They never became pieces. They were simply materials. There’s one tape that I have of sounds that I recorded while we were making love and another tape of sounds that I recorded in a railroad yard with trains coming in, unhooking and hooking up. There would be a tremendous clamour. Those tapes are probably disintegrated by now. They did not get on to Viet Flakes. Now, wait a minute. Ah yes, I think I used some of these other materials for other parts of the theatre piece which was called Snows. Viet Flakes was just a little segment of the whole work. So, she’s probably right about that, but it was just sound materials that I had never actually put together into what I call a piece.
James Tenney: Writings And Interviews On Experimental Music is published by Bloomsbury Academic. You can read Peter Margasak’s review of the book in The Wire 500. Pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Subscribers can also read the review online via the digital library.
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