The composer James (Jim) Tenney was born on this day, 1934 and left us August 24, 2006. 

Jim was a friend and, once, even a collaborator. He was a big creative force in my life, in ways that I am still discovering. 

I met Jim through Stan Brakhage. Jim had composed the music for a couple of his films, the very early Interim, and the later hand-painted Christ Mass Sex Dance, though we (the Innis Film Society gang) had met Tenney before that film was made. 

Jim was, in many ways, the “Brakhage of new music.” He was also a creative and intellectual heir to his teacher, John Cage. According to Wikipedia, Tenney He “made significant early musical contributions to plunderphonics, sound synthesis, algorithmic composition, process music, spectral music, microtonal music, and tuning systems including extended just intonation. His theoretical writings variously concern, texture, timbre, consonance and dissonance, and harmonic perception." I am very far away from being an expert on new music, but I had a number of favorite pieces of Jim’s including Collage #1 (“Blue Suede”), an early exercise in re-mix that Stan used in Christ Mass Sex Dance; Radio Piece, 1963 electronic/magnetic tape work; his various player piano pieces including Spectral CANON for CONLON Nancarrow; the “Viet Flakes” sound collage that his ex-wife Carolee Schneeman used in her great experimental film, Viet Flakes; and Changes: 64 Studies for Six Harps (for Udo Kasamets).

And Jim would revive a piece he wrote in the 1970s for use in my Brakhage film (using an arrangement by Marc Sabat, as performed by Sabat on violin and Stephen Clarke, and
“sampled” by Jim and I sitting in the mixing booth in 1998). I have a huge problem with film scores that are overly “in synch” with the action and the emotions of the film (not always, but usually) so it was great to work with someone whose whole orientation was to the possibilities of the contrapuntal. You can check it out here: https://vimeo.com/94057025. 

Tenney became a regular at our screenings, and a number of us went to concerts of his music, and those of his mentors and mentees. Jim. Jim’s big brain, big ears, big heart (and big voice!) made it easy for musical neophytes like myself to open myself to the range of possibilities that composers were exploring in Toronto and internationally, and from contemporary times back to at least Medieval Europe. 

Jim taught us about Charles Ives, Webern, Stockhausen, Harry Partch, Philip Corner, Malcolm Goldstein. 

Through Jim we met Lauren Pratt, his second wife, and manager at various times for Carolee Schneemann and Pauline Oliveros, two visionary artists who would also change the way I think about everything. Lauren herself did too, in her super mellow, intellectual and highly productive manner. Lauren also managed some of Toronto’s most interesting contemporary musicians and composers. 

When Jim turned 65, we were still living in the kind of province where you had to retire, so he wrapped up his teaching position at York and moved to CalArts to become the Roy Disney Chair in the Music Department there. That was in 1999 or 2000. I never saw him after that and, I’m embarrassed to say, I never saw Lauren either. I need to correct that, because Lauren is an amazing human being. We spent a certain amount of time together on the Music Gallery Board of Directors, but not at all after I resigned in 1998. 

In the 1990s, a number of people started hosting salons of different kinds. I had Friday after work gatherings. Bruce and Kathy Elder had screenings for years at their house (as well as wine tastings and occasionally poetry readings). Jim and Lauren had a social gathering on Sunday afternoons for people in the new music community, including a few interlopers like myself, Kate MacKay, Dave Morris, and Susan Oxtoby. We would eat, drink, listen to music, argue, and then often go out to hear people perform somewhere at night: Harbourfront Centre, the Music Gallery, U of T, etc. Through those gatherings, and other time spent with Jim and Lauren I would meet: the composer Barbara Feldman; Toronto musicians like the late Nic Gotham (who meant a lot to me), Chiyoko Szlavnics, John Oswald, Paul Dutton (I already knew him, but the connection was reinforced with Jim and Lauren), David Mott, Malcolm Goldstein, Alison Cameron (who became an Innis Film Society fellow traveller), Casey Sokol (who I originally new from CCMC), Stephen Clarke, Marc Sabat, and many others I can’t remember. 

Missing you Jim!