James Tenney – Postal Pieces
James Tenney’s Postal Pieces (1965–71) are a series of short, hand-written scores originally sent to friends and collaborators through the mail. Each piece fits on a postcard — concise, elegant instructions that open vast worlds of sonic and perceptual possibility. Though modest in form, these works embody Tenney’s deep interest in acoustics, tuning systems, and the phenomenology of listening.
In our projects, the Postal Pieces offer a perfect meeting point between composition, installation, and collective experience. Each score is an invitation to listen differently — to attend to the relationships between tones, the resonances of a space, and the ways in which sound unfolds over time. Some pieces, like For Percussion Perhaps, Or… (Night) or Having Never Written a Note for Percussion, consist of a single sustained sound that emerges and fades, revealing the contours of the room. Others, such as Swell Piece or Cellogram, guide performers through processes of gradual transformation, making audible the continuum between stability and change.
We approach the Postal Pieces as an evolving cycle rather than isolated miniatures. Performances often take place in open or unconventional spaces, where the audience can move freely or remain within the sound field. The works are realised using a flexible instrumentation — tuned percussion, strings, winds, voice, electronics — chosen for their capacity to reveal harmonic relationships and subtle changes in colour and resonance. The result is an environment where sound becomes a physical and spatial experience: tones interact, collide, and dissolve, transforming the perception of time and space.
Tenney’s music aligns deeply with the ensemble’s philosophy. His compositional methods are rooted in process and perception rather than display or gesture; they depend on listening, patience, and awareness. In our performances, we treat each Postal Piece as a living score — an open framework shaped by the performers’ collective intuition and the acoustic character of the site. Light, placement, and duration are integral elements: every realisation responds to the moment, creating an atmosphere closer to an installation or a meditation than a traditional concert.
By revisiting Tenney’s Postal Pieces, we continue our exploration of minimal and experimental traditions that foreground the act of listening. These works reveal how a single gesture or instruction can generate infinite variation — how music can be simultaneously rigorous and open, structured and spontaneous. Tenney’s concise postcards, each a self-contained philosophy of sound, remind us that the smallest instructions can unlock profound aesthetic and perceptual experiences.
Performing them as a series, we invite audiences into a shared field of resonance and attention, where silence and tone are equally present. In this sense, the Postal Pieces encapsulate the ensemble’s broader mission: to treat sound as a living system, to make listening an act of discovery, and to reveal music as an unfolding dialogue between performers, space, and audience.
Images
