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”:
Continue reading “A couple of music quotes I think about”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 ).