Daily Inspiration Quote by James Tenney

There is a quiet provocation tucked into Tenney's phrase, because "professional" is doing double duty: it flatters and it polices. In the late-20th-century new-music world Tenney inhabited, the boundary between art, research, teaching, hustling, and outright weirdness was always under negotiation. Saying these people "kept on being" professionals implies endurance, not glamour: they persisted through a scene where the market rarely rewards experimentation, and where legitimacy often arrives in the form of institutional shelter (universities, grants, festivals) rather than broad public demand.

"In the strictest sense" is the sharper edge. Tenney isn't praising celebrity musicianship or chart success. He's pointing to a narrower ethic: composing and performing as a disciplined practice with standards, craft, and responsibility to a tradition - even when the work itself is anti-traditional. The subtext reads like a rebuke to the romantic myth of the avant-garde as pure outsiderhood. Plenty of radicals, Tenney suggests, still show up on time, do the work, learn their tools, and build a life around sound with an almost blue-collar seriousness.

Context matters: Tenney moved between experimental circles (Cage-adjacent aesthetics, psychoacoustics, just intonation) and academic environments that could both enable and domesticate radical ideas. The line functions as a kind of credentialing, but also a defense. If your music sounds like it came from a laboratory or a Zen koan, you still want it understood as labor, not whim. Tenney's intent is to grant dignity to persistence - and to remind us that the avant-garde isn't a pose so much as a long-term job.