An interesting read about "Having Never Written a Note for Percussion" (James Tenney) 9:09
About the music
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.
"[Among the pieces we recorded was] James Tenney's Having Never Written a Note for Percussion from his postcard series. [Tenney] had all these compositions for solo instruments that were musical analogs of Zen koans, musical questions to ponder that would bring enlightenment. The one we did was originally for solo percussion, which I orchestrated for the band." ...
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