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FIFTY YEARS OF MINIMALISM John Adams: a second-generation minimalist whose opera Nixon in China left minimalism far behind pulsed with a special life, its motoric rhythms, burbling, highly amplified figurations and mournful sustained notes booming out through the huge black windows and filling up the bleak industrial neighbourhood.’ Rockwell describes spontaneous dancing in the streets as the music leaked out of those huge Warhol’s view of painting and those schooled in the European grand tradition could not have been starker. And these pioneering pieces of minimalist music kept European tradition at a comparable distance: this music was as far removed from Brahms or Bruckner as Warhol’s work was from Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. windows – ‘And across the street, silhouetted high up in a window, a lone saxophone player improvised a silent accompaniment like some faded postcard of 1950s Greenwich Village Bohemia. It was a good ‘This music was as far removed from Brahms or Bruckner as Warhol’s work was from Rembrandt’s The Night Watch’ Analogies drawn between this puzzling new music that, in the mid-1960s, had yet to acquire the envelope term ‘minimalism’, and the work of Andy Warhol, was one way that commentators of the time attempted to make sense of Glass, Reich and their compadres. When, 20 years later, secondgeneration minimalist John Adams premiered his opera Nixon in China at Houston Grand Opera, the critic of The New York Times, Donal Henahan, told his readers that ‘Mr Adams does for the arpeggio what McDonald’s did for the hamburger’ – which was not meant to be read as a compliment. Fast food was homogenised and insipid, culinary pornography manufactured for the purposes of instant gastro-satisfaction. By making art out of soup cans, Warhol had abandoned the idealism of abstract expressionist painters like Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Willem de Kooning. The aesthetics of advertising had made an unwelcome incursion into the solemnity of the gallery space – and minimalist composition, too, propped up by nakedly tonal chord sequences and arpeggios, had signed a comparable Faustian pact; a dubious sell-out of purist modernist aesthetics. But Henahan’s sniffy attitude towards minimalism was not shared by his New York Times colleague John Rockwell who, in 1983, wrote an utterly joyful account of encountering Music in Changing Parts, as performed by Philip Glass and His Musicians, in a downtown loft space. ‘The music danced and night to be in New York City.’ Five decades on from its first stirrings – and a full 50 years after a nervous Steve Reich supervised the first performance of It’s Gonna Rain – when the unfolding story of minimalism can often feel like a done deal, those controversies are worth revisiting. History is written by the victors, and there’s no doubt that the minimalist composers consider themselves to have triumphed; where the modernism of Stockhausen, Boulez and Nono had alienated genuine music-lovers, the progress and audience credibility of Western classical music had been rescued by minimalists’ determination to show atonality the red card. Perched somewhere between classical respectability and mass popular culture – Glass’s 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach cracked the Metropolitan Opera, then he collaborated with Patti Smith, David Bowie and Leonard Cohen, while Reich would get down with the kids from Radiohead – minimalism was ideally placed to deal with the challenges and responsibilities dodged by introverted, self-serving Euro-modernism. The inner life of music, though, is hopefully more nuanced, and this official, cannily spun history of minimalism represents only a minimal part of the whole story. Minimalism 12 GRAMOPHONE APRIL 2015 gramophone.co.uk
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A R T S &I C M U S / L E B R E C H T F R E E M A N B E T T Y : P H O T O G R A P H Y enjoys superb PR. Robert Hurwitz, President of Nonesuch Records, the record label of Glass, Reich and Adams, used the booklet-notes he wrote for his 10-disc anthology ‘The John Adams Earbox’ to outline how he repositioned the one-time house label of Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt and George Crumb towards a label that preached the minimalist credo. The problem with Carter’s music was ‘a huge gap between what the music was supposed to be saying, and my gut response to listening to it.’ In Robert Maycock’s uncomfortably laudatory Glass: A Portrait (Sanctuary: 2002), you wait for the inevitable assault on European Modernism and, by page 60, you’re rolling with the punches. Messiaen’s Catholicism, apparently, gave his modernist instincts some soul (and ‘Gershwin-like directness’), while the dreams of Boulez and Stockhausen ‘became corrupted’. And a regrettable false dichotomy opens up, which has solidified into the dominant narrative. Last year Howard Goodall’s BBC television documentary The Story of Music came to the same conclusion: modernism bad, minimalism good. Hints that there might be more to minimalism than this mundane pop history came when I interviewed the pianist, composer and improviser Frederic Rzewski in 2002. During the mid-1960s, Rzewski toured with the Italian composer Sylvano Bussotti and minimalism was a key obsession: ‘except the term “minimalism” hadn’t yet evolved and it was simply another strand of the avant-garde. We performed music by Giuseppe Chiari, who was a master, but never became a cultural icon like Philip Glass. The success of Górecki in the early 1990s opened the door for people to appreciate music by Morton Feldman and Howard Skempton. And yet Chiari remains unfamiliar.’ Rzewski concluded with the thought that Michael Nyman and Gavin Bryars became rich and famous. But what had happened to Chiari – and Thomas Schmitt, Terry Jennings and Eric Anderson? ‘They were major figures involved in the minimalist movement who have since disappeared from view.’ But what hope Chiari when the official minimalist yarn doesn’t know quite where to place two composers who were present right from the start as community organisers and catalysts of big ideas – Terry Riley and La Monte Young? Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain had its first airing, not in New York as is often assumed, but at the San Francisco Tape Music Center at 321 Divisadero on January 27, 1965. Reich has recalled being anxious and depressed about his piece, which he fully expected would be thoroughly disliked before disappearing without trace. Twelve weeks earlier, on November 4, 1964, Reich had been involved in the premiere of another composition that dealt with repeating modules of melody. Terry Riley’s In C feels today like the unruly country cousin of the minimalism that would eventually turn up in New York. Riley handed his musicians 53 melodic fragments arranged on a single sheet of paper which they worked through in sequence, repeating each module at will as they zoned inside the unfolding heterophony of sound, using their instinct to guide them towards moving forwards through the piece. Reich came up with the smart idea of having one musician set the pulse by repeating top C on a keyboard, a role he fulfilled in the first performance. Meanwhile, musicians including the saxophonist Jon Gibson, then a disciple of John Coltrane, and Pauline Oliveros (accordion) and Morton Subotnick (clarinet), who would later become known for their work with electronics, listened and felt their way through Riley’s piece – ensemble music functioning in a way utterly alien to Western concert music. But Riley, 80 this year, had no reason to organise his music after any European model. California born, a student of the gramophone.co.uk FIFTY YEARS OF MINIMALISM FLEURSCAROLYNSAMPSONsopranoJOSEPHMIDDLETONpiano AVAILABLE APRIL 2015 “Carolyn Sampson’s singing is deliciously enjoyable” Gramophone (BISSACD1536) “Carolyn Sampson is one of the wonders of the operatic world” The Independent © Katja and Bernd Hoffmann Marketed and distributed in the UK by Select Music and Video Distribution Ltd, 3 Wells Place, Redhill RH1 3SL T: +44 (0)1737 645 600 E: cds@selectmusic.co.uk Available for download in studio master quality from www.eclassical.com For international distribution see www.bis.se GRAMOPHONE APRIL 2015 13

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FIFTY YEARS OF MINIMALISM

John Adams: a second-generation minimalist whose opera Nixon in China left minimalism far behind pulsed with a special life, its motoric rhythms, burbling, highly amplified figurations and mournful sustained notes booming out through the huge black windows and filling up the bleak industrial neighbourhood.’ Rockwell describes spontaneous dancing in the streets as the music leaked out of those huge

Warhol’s view of painting and those schooled in the European grand tradition could not have been starker. And these pioneering pieces of minimalist music kept European tradition at a comparable distance: this music was as far removed from Brahms or Bruckner as Warhol’s work was from Rembrandt’s The Night Watch.

windows – ‘And across the street, silhouetted high up in a window, a lone saxophone player improvised a silent accompaniment like some faded postcard of 1950s Greenwich Village Bohemia. It was a good

‘This music was as far removed from Brahms or Bruckner as Warhol’s work was from Rembrandt’s The Night Watch’

Analogies drawn between this puzzling new music that, in the mid-1960s, had yet to acquire the envelope term ‘minimalism’, and the work of Andy Warhol, was one way that commentators of the time attempted to make sense of Glass, Reich and their compadres. When, 20 years later, secondgeneration minimalist John Adams premiered his opera Nixon in China at Houston Grand Opera, the critic of The New York Times, Donal Henahan, told his readers that ‘Mr Adams does for the arpeggio what McDonald’s did for the hamburger’ – which was not meant to be read as a compliment. Fast food was homogenised and insipid, culinary pornography manufactured for the purposes of instant gastro-satisfaction. By making art out of soup cans, Warhol had abandoned the idealism of abstract expressionist painters like Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Willem de Kooning. The aesthetics of advertising had made an unwelcome incursion into the solemnity of the gallery space – and minimalist composition, too, propped up by nakedly tonal chord sequences and arpeggios, had signed a comparable Faustian pact; a dubious sell-out of purist modernist aesthetics.

But Henahan’s sniffy attitude towards minimalism was not shared by his New York Times colleague John Rockwell who, in 1983, wrote an utterly joyful account of encountering Music in Changing Parts, as performed by Philip Glass and His Musicians, in a downtown loft space. ‘The music danced and night to be in New York City.’

Five decades on from its first stirrings – and a full 50 years after a nervous Steve Reich supervised the first performance of It’s Gonna Rain – when the unfolding story of minimalism can often feel like a done deal, those controversies are worth revisiting. History is written by the victors, and there’s no doubt that the minimalist composers consider themselves to have triumphed; where the modernism of Stockhausen, Boulez and Nono had alienated genuine music-lovers, the progress and audience credibility of Western classical music had been rescued by minimalists’ determination to show atonality the red card. Perched somewhere between classical respectability and mass popular culture – Glass’s 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach cracked the Metropolitan Opera, then he collaborated with Patti Smith, David Bowie and Leonard Cohen, while Reich would get down with the kids from Radiohead – minimalism was ideally placed to deal with the challenges and responsibilities dodged by introverted, self-serving Euro-modernism.

The inner life of music, though, is hopefully more nuanced, and this official, cannily spun history of minimalism represents only a minimal part of the whole story. Minimalism

12 GRAMOPHONE APRIL 2015

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