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James Tenney, "Selected Works 1961-1969"
Tenney was the first composer to give a real workout to the computer composition techniques that would dominate the computer music scene from the 60s through to the 90s and that are still widely used today. He did this during two and a half years at Bell Telephone Labs beginning 1961 working closely with Max Mathews, the inventor of the MUSIC series of programming environments.
The first of the pieces realised there, Noise Study, is surprisingly satisfying today for such an early experiment. It has the qualities of ocean or distant aircraft noise as heard through a tunnel getting nearer and farther, more and then less dynamic and complex. Very nicely judged and executed, the piece stands up well in the context of today's experimental music. Noise Study was entirely human composed and translated into sound by the computer functioning as an automated instrument reading a programmed score. But Tenny quickly set about extending the computer's involvement into the compositional process giving it the job of selecting some details of the music using random functions. These techniques closely parallel some of Xenakis' work on stochastic music. While Tenney hasn't achieved the fame or, in my opinion, quite the artistic success of the other, he did manage to produce some remarkable results. By devising ever more elaborate algorithms to take more control of the composition Tenney was able to surprise even himself with the resulting music; Dialogue, Phases and Fabric for Ché being the examples given in this collection, based on stochastic algorithm control of parametric noise/tone generators. Phases is a tense, mostly quiet alien conversation—music of such otherness that its like listening to people talking in Finnish but a hundred fold more baffling. Fabric for Ché is much louder, faster and more dynamic, making heavier use of noise. It manages to achieve some of the power and anger that Xenakis would show later in his works on the UPIC. What is striking is that Tenney, a newcomer to these computer technquies (as were all back then), managed to maintain aesthetic control of the automata he created. While the design of the systems was extremely abstract and technical the music is real music with a coherent personality and by no means merely an intererting experimental result. Other pieces in the collection include a player piano piece that is too random for me; the relatively famous For Ann (rising), a perceptual study using synchronised rising glissandi that is not to my taste at all; and Collage #1 ("Blue Suede") a delightful early tape manipulation piece entirely based on Evis Presley's song about his shoes. Reverential to the king and fully digging the groove of the source material it is not at all post-modern sounding. 
