James Tenney

James Tenney is an American composer and influential music theorist. He studied information theory under Lejaren Hiller, and composed stochastic early computer music before turning almost completely to writing for instruments with the occasional tape delay, often using just intonation and alternative tunings. All his work deals simply and artfully with perception (For Ann (rising)), just intonation (Clang), stochastic elements (Music for Player Piano), information theory (Ergodos), and with what he calls swell (Koan: Having Never Written A Note For Percussion (for John Bergamo)), which is basically arch form. His pieces are most often tributes and subtitled as such.

Tenney is the author of the in depth liner notes to Wergo's edition of Conlon Nancarrow's Studies for Player Piano (Nancarrow, as a favor, punched the roll for Tenney's Spectral Canon for Conlon Nancarrow), the seminal Meta (+) Hodos (one of, if not the, earliest applications of gestalt theory and cognitive science to music), the later Hierarchical temporal gestalt perception in music : a metric space model with Larry Polansky, and other works. He currently teaches at the California Institute of Arts.