WGBH's Art of the States streams the harsh and beautiful "Having Never Written a Note for Percussion" by James Tenney. Quoting the percussionist William Winant:
[Sonic Youth] and I decided to do work by contemporary avant garde composers that we could all learn together. I chose most of the pieces and had Lee Ranaldo contact some of the composers and collect scores from the various publishers. I knew I'd have to find things that would work with these specific people and their instruments, either as a solo, quartet, quintet, or sextet. I chose graphic scores with open instrumentation and varying degrees of indeterminacy written into them. Plus, between myself, Jim O'Rourke and the composers who were at the session -- Takehisa Kosugi and Christian Wolff -- we were able to explain how the compositions were supposed to work.
See aworks on Steve Reich and James Tenney at the Bang on a Can Festival.
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