Description:

James Tenney, from the California Institute of the Arts, talks about his background in composition. He started out as a pianist and began composing before having formal training in the discipline. He explains that his first compositions were naive but that he gradually began to desire composing over the desire to play the piano. He discusses his heroes such as Charles Ives, Edgar Vares, John Cage, plus European composers such as Bartok, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and what he learned from them. He discusses Cage and his ideas about the nature of sound, the hearing process, and aesthetics about the creative process.