Tenney, James (b. August 10, 1934, Silver City, New Mexico – d. August 24, 2006, Valencia, California). Canadian-American composer of stage, orchestral, chamber, choral, vocal, piano, and electroacoustic works that have been performed throughout the world; he is also active as a scholar.

Prof. Tenney received his early training as a composer and studied engineering at the University of Denver from 1952–54 and piano with Eduard Steuermann at the Juilliard School of Music in 1954–55. He then studied conducting with Paul Boepple and Henry Brant and composition with Lionel Nowak at Bennington College from 1956–58, where he earned his BA, and studied composition with Kenneth Gaburo and electronic music with Lejaren Hiller at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1959–61 and there he earned his MA. He also studied composition privately with John Cage, Chou Wen-chung, Carl Ruggles, and Edgard Varèse. He later received an honorary doctorate from the Dartington College of the Arts in 2000.

He has received awards and grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Fromm Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation, and the Ontario Arts Council.

As a scholar, he has long been active in the fields of computer music and electronic music and worked to develop programs for computer sound-generation and composition with Max V. Mathews and other researchers at the Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1961–64. He is the author of numerous articles on computer music, musical acoustics, musical form, and perception, and the books META/HODOS: A Phenomenology of 20th-Century Musical Materials and an Approach to the Study of Form (1961) and META Meta/Hodos (1975; both were published together by Frog Peak Music, 1988). He also wrote the text A History of 'Consonance' and 'Dissonance' (1988, Excelsior Music Publishing Company).

Prof. Tenney is also active in other positions. He co-founded with Philip Corner and Malcolm Goldstein the new-music group Tone Roads Chamber Ensemble in New York City in 1963 and served as its pianist and occasional conductor from 1963–70. In addition, he performed with the ensembles of John Cage, Philip Glass, Harry Partch, and Steve Reich.

He taught electrical engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn from 1966–70 and musical subjects at the California Institute of the Arts from 1970–75 and the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1975–76. He then taught composition at York University in Toronto from 1976–2000, where he was Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus from 2000–06. He taught as the Roy E. Disney Family Chair in Music Composition at the California Institute of the Arts from 2000–06.

Smith Publications publishes most of his music written between 1956–87 and works from 1987–2006 are published by Frog Peak Music.