Alison Bjorkedal, Ellie Choate, Elizabeth Huston - Changes: 64 Studies For 6 Harps

Changes: 64 Studies for 6 Harps (1985) is a large-scale work that combines and connects many of James Tenney�s(1934�2006) most important theoretical and musical ideas, including gestalt segregation principles and complexintonation systems.Composed with the aid of a mainframe computer at York University, the piece also marks a return to computer-aided, algorithmic composition after a long hiatus. It was one of the first pieces Tenney composed with a computer after he left New York City in the late 1960s to teach at the California Institute of the Arts.After Changes, the majority of Tenney�s works involved computer software and formal, algorithmic processes.Tenney was both a prolific composer and theorist but rarely wrote in detail about his own pieces even though his music consistently implemented his theoretical ideas. One exception is his article, �About Changes,� originally published in the journal Perspectives of New Music. �About Changes� is a detailed and exhaustive theoretical companion to and description of the piece that carefully documents his compositional procedures, many of which are highlytechnical and/or mathematical.At the beginning of the article, Tenney writes,�My intentions in this work were both exploratory and didactic. That is, I wanted to investigate the new harmonicresources that have become available through the concept of �harmonic space� much more thoroughly than I had in anyearlier work. At the same time I wanted to explore these harmonic resources within a formal context that would clearlydemonstrate certain theoretical ideas and compositional methods already developed in my computer music of the early 1960s, including the use of stochastic (or constrained-random) processes applied to several holarchical perceptual levels, both monophonically and polyphonically. The references to the I Ching, or Book of Changes, in the titles of the individual studies derive from correlations that were made partly for poetic/philosophical reasons but also�and perhaps more importantly�as a means of ensuring that all possible combination of parametric states would be included in the work as a whole.I must confess that I frequently thought of the twenty-four preludes and fugues of J.S. Bach�s Well-Tempered Clavier as a kind of model for what I wanted to do with the work, although it seems highly unlikely that these studies themselves will ever betray that fact to the listener.�