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“For Ann (rising)” was the last electronic piece Tenney wrote before leaving New York City for California, and subsequently Toronto (where he now lives). In fact, to this date, it is his last electronic piece (with the exception of some works involving live performers and delay systems, and a very recent text piece, edited and created with the help of a computer music-editing workstation). Many people associate Tenney most closely with this work, for it seems to embody the most essential aspects of his aesthetic: clear predictable formal procedures; a lack of any kind of narrative structure; a deep interest in acoustical phenomena and their musical and formal manifestations; a sense of humor. “For Ann (rising) is based on a set of “continuously rising tones,” similar to the acoustic illusion sometimes called a Shepard-tone (named after the pioneering experimental psychologist Roger Shepard, a colleague of Tenney’s at Bell Labs). The process is simple: each glissando, separated by some fixed time interval, fades in from it’s lowest note, and fades out as it nears the top of it’s audible range. It’s nearly impossible to follow, aurally, the path of any given glissando, so the effect is that the individual tones never reach their highest pitch. “For Ann (rising)” has at various times been called a classic of American minimalism, process music, or conceptual music. Whatever it is, it clearly represents a landmark in Tenney’s own compositional output, which like the piece, has continued to develop (rise), seemingly without any conceptual end in sight.

Technical Note: The original analog recording of “For Ann (rising)” was first released on “Musicworks” cassette #27. It was later remastered by Tom Erbe, and appeared on “Ear” Magazine’s Absolut Music CD #3. The version on this recording was regenerated by tom Erbe using Barry Vercoe’s Csound composition and synthesis language, according to Tenney’s specifications.


–Larry Polansky, Lebanon, New Hampshire, 1992

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from JAMES TENNEY: SELECTED WORKS 1961 – 1969 (ART 1007, 1992), released January 3, 1992
This recording was generated by Tom Erbe using Barry Vercoe's CSound composition and synthesis language, according to Tenney's specifications.

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Artifact Recordings San Francisco, California

ARTIFACT RECORDINGS is a project of Ubu, Incorporated, an artist-run, non-profit organization supporting experimental and electronic music based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our download and compact disk series is dedicated to representing a living experimental music tradition that continues to thrive in the cracks between the commercial, academic and classical music establishments. ... more

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