James Tenney, 72; Bold Experimenter in Musical Sounds

Experimental composer James Tenney -- whose music consistently broke new ground through his fancy for startling sounds and his novel approaches to pitch, harmony and form -- died Aug. 24 in Valencia. He was 72 and the cause of death, according to his wife, Lauren Pratt, was cancer.

Tenney was as close to experimental music royalty as a modern composer could get, having studied or worked with a host of famed American mavericks, including Harry Partch, Edgard Varese, Carl Ruggles and John Cage. He was in on the seminal musical developments of the 1960s: the founding of computer music and Minimalism, the revivals of Charles Ives' music and of ragtime. He participated in the Cage-inspired art movement Fluxus.

A noted musical theorist, virtuoso pianist and professor at CalArts, he was also an archetype of the ruggedly individual American artist. He spent the bulk of his career in cosmopolitan centers, where he worked and taught at high-powered institutions in New York, Toronto and Southern California. But having grown up in New Mexico, he favored informal Western clothes and set off his grizzled face with a goatee.

To some extent, he was the ultimate Western composer. He approached each new piece as an adventure, with the goal of discovering original territory and, if need be, taming some theoretical musical beast or acoustical bugbear.

In one of his best-known scores, "Having Never Written a Note for Percussion," he drew a single note on a postcard. He asked that the note, of no specified pitch, last a long time. It begins at the threshold of hearing, rises in volume to the threshold of pain and returns to near-silence. But the sound can prove astonishingly complex and the effect on a listener is memorable. No instrument is indicated, but if, say, a cymbal is used, the textures grow so thick that the ear becomes all but overwhelmed by their richness and volume.

Tenney was equally the master of the other extreme, writing music that appeared extremely intricate on the page and was terrifically difficult to play. He was not afraid to ask musicians to tune to complex fractions of the normal pitches in the 12-note temperament. The surprise is that even the untrained ear can immediately comprehend the bracing freshness of the resulting sound.

As a composer, Tenney rejected the rhetorical quality of 19th century music, finding no point in music's attempting to convey meaning. "I don't have something to say unless I'm working with text, where I do have something to say, but that's in words," he once explained in an interview.