Musicatlas
News for Tenney
- James Tenney, American composer, is dead
[posted 30 August 2006]On 24 August composer James Tenney died, reportedly of lung cancer. Tenney was a contemporary classical music composer who was better known by his fellow composers than by the public.
[Source: NewMusicBox.org]
Music
In the 1960s James Tenney was a pioneer in electronic and computer-generated music, working in the Bell Telephone laboratories, but his later music is almost all for acoustic instruments.
Life
James Tenney studied at the Juilliard School, Bennington College and the University of Illinois. Among his teachers were Edgard Varèse, Harry Partch, Carl Ruggles and John Cage.
In the early 1970s Tenney was a teacher at the California Institute of the Arts. In 2000 he went back there to take the Roy E. Disney Family Chair in Musical Composition. Other places were he worked are: the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and York University in Toronto.
[Source: www.playbillarts.com]