I return to these two quotes every now and then over the years, one about form and one about (against) drama in music. I find them relatable and articulate, even though they come from a 1978 interview. James Tenney was interviewed by another composer, Gayle Young.
I think about this when people talk about “sound design”:
I think of form as the same thing, on a larger temporal scale, as what’s called content on a smaller scale. That old form/content dichotomy is, to me, a spurious one, because they involve the same thing at different hierarchical levels of perception. What we take to be the substance or content of some sound — say, a string quartet — is really the result of forms — formal shapes and structures at a microscopic, or “microphonic” level: particular envelopes, wave-forms, and sequences of these — details in the signal. All form is just the same thing at a larger level, involving spans of time over, say, five or ten or twenty minutes or more. It’s precisely the same thing physically. When you begin to see it that way, you can begin to feel it musically. So my interest in form is identical to my interest in sound ( laughs ).
And about drama:
JT: Those pieces have a lot to do with this attitude toward sound, but also with something else, which is the notion of the avoidance of drama. They involve a very high degree of predictability. If the audience can just believe it, after they’ve heard the first twenty seconds of the piece, they can almost determine what’s going to happen the whole rest of the time. When they know that’s the case, they don’t have to worry about it anymore—they don’t have to sit on the edge of their seats. . . .
GY: Waiting for the big bang.
JT: What they can do is begin to really listen to the sounds, get inside them, notice the details, and consider or meditate on the overall shape of the piece, simple as it may be. It’s often interesting how within a simple shape there can be relationships that are surprising. It’s curious—in a way, the result in this highly determinate situation is the same as in an indeterminate one, where things are changing so rapidly and unpredictably that you lose any sense of drama there, too. Now people react to that in two different ways: some are angry about it, because they expect, and demand, meaningful drama. But if you can relax that demand and say “no, this is not drama, this is just ‘change’” (laughs)—then you can listen to the sounds for themselves rather than in relation to what preceded or what will follow.
I read them first in this PDF on ubu.com.