There’s something really sophomoric about this music. I own a tam-tam. When I first bought it, I amused myself by making long, slow crescendos from very soft to very loud and back again, just to see how it would sound. Call this brilliant notion “Having Never Written a Note for Percussion” and stipulate that any unpitched instrument can take the part, and you have one of James Tenney’s Postal Pieces. I suppose this is why Tenney is an artist and I am not. Nor would it have occurred to me to stretch the whole silly exercise out to nearly 14 minutes, which I suppose is why Tobias Liebeszeit is a professional percussionist and I am not.
“August Harp”, the most excruciating piece here, takes a colorless four-note arpeggio in slow tempo and stretches it out over more than 42 minutes. “Beast” grinds away at the lowest notes of a double bass for about seven. Three items for mixed ensemble called “Swell Piece” do just that. They swell. “Koan”, for solo viola, sounds like Giacinto Scelsi on a particularly bad day. “A Rose Is a Rose Is a Round” is a vocal canon such as medieval composers wrote to amuse themselves from time to time. At a mere 45 seconds, it’s the best thing on these two discs, and easily contains the most music.
Pretentious notes by an associate of the composer imply that all of this silliness matters. The performances certainly sound committed (how could they not?), while the sonics vary a bit given the different forces involved. I suppose this is what happens when composers never grow up but instead go directly from being student radicals to established academics (Tenney teaches composition at the California Institute of the Arts). Certainly Tenney has done his very best to ensure that his Postal Pieces are as free of musical ideas as they are of compositional talent in realizing them.
