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FIFTY YEARS OF MINIMALISM Indian vocal master Pandit Pran Nath, an admirer of John Cage and John Coltrane, Riley’s relationship to the idea of a notated score, and the sounds he wanted that score to generate, was necessarily very different. For Riley, notation was not just about reading. He expected his musicians to internalise his melodic modules to the extent that they could not only hear, but feel them. Essentially, they took ownership from Riley, In C building from their sensitive ensemble-listening as a network of overlapping conversations was triggered – questions and answers, no one allowed to dominate the floor or press their point of view too assertively. La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 Number 7 planted the minimalist seed of emotion – Steve Reich and Philip Glass were pedalling this new music that, to those looking in from the outside, fused Wagnerian length with the plainness of Eric Satie. Reich’s Four Organs – one chord gradually increased over a 30-minute duration – caused a Rite of Spring-style fracas at Carnegie Hall in 1973, while Glass’s first recording of Music in Twelve Parts, made in 1975, is a whole sound world away from slick and polished later recordings. The ensemble barely keeps to the equal-tempered straight and narrow. Saxophones and keyboards churn and wail; structural points of demarcation are pointier and brutally cut. This performance satisfies the same constructivist, cerebral pleasures as Stockhausen’s Gruppen or Boulez’s Structures. Minimalism, as Rzewski implies, was a modernism too. And what of those composers Rzewski mentioned? The neglect of Terry Jennings feels especially inexplicable and unjust. A childhood friend of La Monte Young, a Jennings piece is typically understated, serene as it plays coy games with Riley’s point of compositional departure was his realisation that Indian music and Coltrane’s modally anchored jazz, as stylistically distinct as they were, shared one common characteristic: cosmic rhythmic energy flowed over relatively static harmony. His friend La Monte Young – who as a college student had befriended Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy – became Riley’s sounding board; but Young’s own extraordinary path through music was already under way. Having flirted with 12-tone technique and the conceptual, anti-art message of Fluxus (including works requiring a pianist to push his instrument through a wall and, elsewhere, to step inside the genitals of a whale), in 1960 Young’s Composition 1960 Number 7 suggested a future. By instinct Young was a distiller and simplifier who had already created a proto-minimalism with his 1958 Trio for Strings, which slowed down to a crawl, and isolated, corners of 12-tone rows. But the score of Composition 1960 Number 7 showed a B natural and an F sharp suspended on the stave, with the simple instruction: ‘To be held for a very long time’. ‘Minimalism was ideally placed to deal with the responsibilities dodged by introverted, self-serving Euro-modernism’ tonality. The music of Howard Skempton and Laurence Crane is much indebted. Giuseppe Chiari, always on the conceptual margins of minimalism, kept faith in his ideas of music existing in a And this is the moment, surely, that the minimalist seed was planted. That apparently simple instruction, though, was not as simple as it seemed. The perfect fifth encapsulated the most fundamental of all intervallic relationships – that between the tonic root and the dominant fifth – but how should that interval be tuned and, once sounded, what should you do next? Riley and Young came to a mutual understanding that equaltempered tuning was an unpleasant and unnecessary evil: just intonation was their tuning system of choice and much of the music they created during this period – the drones, the leisurely repetitions, the shamanistic intensity of colliding patterns – explore Riley’s idea that ‘Western music is fast because it’s not in tune’. Composition 1960 Number 7 feels like the start of minimalism because all points – from Cage’s 4'33", to Coltrane’s modes and Indian drones – pass through. It was the brave new sound of tomorrow. In New York, the city of Charles Mingus, Elliott Carter, Deborah Harry and Bob Dylan – who all wanted to intensify music, to pack musical structure with more event and polarities hinterland between sound and speech, vocal inflection being altered by carefully choreographed movements of the body. At some point in time, the tendency to strip musical ideas back to minimal means turned into Minimalism: the genre. Reich and Glass, and later Adams, like to be liked and the backstory of awkward tuning systems and the orgiastic counterpoint of In C become quietly abandoned as minimalism reigns supreme. Personally, disillusionment set in when Reich’s The Four Sections appeared on Nonesuch in 1990 and the project of transferring Reich’s ideas onto an orchestral canvas (the London Symphony Orchestra under Michael Tilson Thomas) made little sense. Drumming and Music for 18 Musicians reconfigured the relationship between harmony and structure. Tiny motivic ideas were made to swim in big ponds. Suddenly a music existed that questioned the certainties of going to a concert hall to hear perfectly formed 20-minute pieces. The sound of Reich’s ensemble – singers vocalising through microphones, the bebop rhythmic bounce of mallets against marimbas and glockenspiel – was lost within the weight of a mass of instruments designed to carry another sort of music. Minimalism began to appear where you least expected it – in The Netherlands, where Louis Andriessen’s music, derived independently of Reich and Glass, becomes known as ‘Dutch minimalism’, while ‘holy minimalism’, the devotional music of Tavener, Górecki and Pärt, becomes a commercial goer. We’re all minimalists now. 14 GRAMOPHONE APRIL 2015 gramophone.co.uk
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/ A L A M Y I C T U R E S PH A Y T H A M : P H O T O G R A P H Y The pulsating tonal shimmer of John Adams’s orchestral music becomes the default soundworld of a whole generation of post-minimalist composers: Joseph Schwantner, Michael Torke, Carter Pann. A minimalist orthodoxy becomes as discernable as those suffocating post-serial tendencies that Reich and Glass are said to have rebelled against in the 1960s. The next generation of minimalist composers have themselves now reached comfortable middle-age. Bang On A Can, which began in 1987 when three New York composers – Julia Wolfe, David Lang and Michael Gordon, then in their twenties – presented a marathon concert of new music inside a downtown art gallery in New York City that kicked off at two in the afternoon and finished 12 hours later, is the most direct descendant of the pioneering work of Reich and Glass. Bang On A Can sounds like the name of a fabled rock album that somehow history never got around to recording. Wolfe once told me, ‘Early minimalist pieces developed over a slow trajectory and I sometimes think we took that idea and condensed it, perhaps re-energising Reich and Glass’s ideas about rhythm with the grooves we’d heard on Jimi Hendrix or Earth, Wind and Fire records.’ But it’s often forgotten that, before ‘minimalism’ became all invasive, ‘process music’ was the preferred term with which to identify the characteristic traits of Glass and Reich. Bang On A Can composers reinvestigated the processes of minimalism and found something fresh therein. But minimalism has also become another way of doing music, another set of rules to be followed – a contemporary sound there for the taking. Is there another 15 minutes of fame left to be plucked from the air? Will the humble and subservient arpeggio live to fight another day? Masterworks produced during the 1960s and ’70s were restorative and optimistic – the stuff of sound cloud dreams – and the composerly instinct to investigate process, to put the theoretically rigorous together with the sensuously immediate, is the overriding legacy of the minimalist ideal. The music is wonderful; the lessons just as important. ESSENTIAL MINIMALISM Four recordings highlighting the range of minimalism Glass How Now. Strung Out Philip Glass org Dorothy PixleyRothschild vn Orange Mountain Music F OMM0093 (6/14) This was our first sighting of Glass on record, indeed this was the first-ever all-Glass concert, consisting of two raucous solo instrumental works – another side of minimalism. Riley In C Riley and musicians Sony Classical F 88697 45368-2 Cut in New York in 1968, this first recording of In C remains striking in its exhilarating, trippy rawness. Reich Four Organs. Phase Patterns Steve Reich and His Musicians Felmay F RDC5018 Philip Glass is on organ, and Reich’s Four Organs remains, depending on your point of view, his most fascinatingly didactic — or utterly infuriating — score. ‘Big Beautiful Dark and Scary’ Bang On A Can All-Stars Cantaloupe Music F CA21074 To celebrate the All-Stars’ 25th anniversary, here’s music by the post-Reich and Glass generation: Lang, Gordon, Wolfe et al. GramophoneHalfPv-ad2015 15/02/15 19:06 Side 1 FIFTY YEARS OF MINIMALISM gramophone.co.uk GRAMOPHONE APRIL 2015 15

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FIFTY YEARS OF MINIMALISM Indian vocal master Pandit Pran Nath, an admirer of John Cage and John Coltrane, Riley’s relationship to the idea of a notated score, and the sounds he wanted that score to generate, was necessarily very different. For Riley, notation was not just about reading. He expected his musicians to internalise his melodic modules to the extent that they could not only hear, but feel them. Essentially, they took ownership from Riley, In C building from their sensitive ensemble-listening as a network of overlapping conversations was triggered – questions and answers, no one allowed to dominate the floor or press their point of view too assertively.

La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 Number 7 planted the minimalist seed of emotion – Steve Reich and Philip Glass were pedalling this new music that, to those looking in from the outside, fused Wagnerian length with the plainness of Eric Satie. Reich’s Four Organs – one chord gradually increased over a 30-minute duration – caused a Rite of Spring-style fracas at Carnegie Hall in 1973, while Glass’s first recording of Music in Twelve Parts, made in 1975, is a whole sound world away from slick and polished later recordings. The ensemble barely keeps to the equal-tempered straight and narrow. Saxophones and keyboards churn and wail; structural points of demarcation are pointier and brutally cut.

This performance satisfies the same constructivist, cerebral pleasures as Stockhausen’s Gruppen or Boulez’s Structures. Minimalism, as Rzewski implies, was a modernism too.

And what of those composers Rzewski mentioned? The neglect of Terry Jennings feels especially inexplicable and unjust. A childhood friend of La Monte Young, a Jennings piece is typically understated, serene as it plays coy games with

Riley’s point of compositional departure was his realisation that Indian music and Coltrane’s modally anchored jazz, as stylistically distinct as they were, shared one common characteristic: cosmic rhythmic energy flowed over relatively static harmony. His friend La Monte Young – who as a college student had befriended Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy – became Riley’s sounding board; but Young’s own extraordinary path through music was already under way. Having flirted with 12-tone technique and the conceptual, anti-art message of Fluxus (including works requiring a pianist to push his instrument through a wall and, elsewhere, to step inside the genitals of a whale), in 1960 Young’s Composition 1960 Number 7 suggested a future. By instinct Young was a distiller and simplifier who had already created a proto-minimalism with his 1958 Trio for Strings, which slowed down to a crawl, and isolated, corners of 12-tone rows. But the score of Composition 1960 Number 7 showed a B natural and an F sharp suspended on the stave, with the simple instruction: ‘To be held for a very long time’.

‘Minimalism was ideally placed to deal with the responsibilities dodged by introverted, self-serving Euro-modernism’

tonality. The music of Howard Skempton and Laurence Crane is much indebted. Giuseppe Chiari, always on the conceptual margins of minimalism, kept faith in his ideas of music existing in a

And this is the moment, surely, that the minimalist seed was planted. That apparently simple instruction, though, was not as simple as it seemed. The perfect fifth encapsulated the most fundamental of all intervallic relationships – that between the tonic root and the dominant fifth – but how should that interval be tuned and, once sounded, what should you do next? Riley and Young came to a mutual understanding that equaltempered tuning was an unpleasant and unnecessary evil: just intonation was their tuning system of choice and much of the music they created during this period – the drones, the leisurely repetitions, the shamanistic intensity of colliding patterns – explore Riley’s idea that ‘Western music is fast because it’s not in tune’. Composition 1960 Number 7 feels like the start of minimalism because all points – from Cage’s 4'33", to Coltrane’s modes and Indian drones – pass through. It was the brave new sound of tomorrow.

In New York, the city of Charles Mingus, Elliott Carter, Deborah Harry and Bob Dylan – who all wanted to intensify music, to pack musical structure with more event and polarities hinterland between sound and speech, vocal inflection being altered by carefully choreographed movements of the body.

At some point in time, the tendency to strip musical ideas back to minimal means turned into Minimalism: the genre. Reich and Glass, and later Adams, like to be liked and the backstory of awkward tuning systems and the orgiastic counterpoint of In C become quietly abandoned as minimalism reigns supreme. Personally, disillusionment set in when Reich’s The Four Sections appeared on Nonesuch in 1990 and the project of transferring Reich’s ideas onto an orchestral canvas (the London Symphony Orchestra under Michael Tilson Thomas) made little sense. Drumming and Music for 18 Musicians reconfigured the relationship between harmony and structure. Tiny motivic ideas were made to swim in big ponds. Suddenly a music existed that questioned the certainties of going to a concert hall to hear perfectly formed 20-minute pieces. The sound of Reich’s ensemble – singers vocalising through microphones, the bebop rhythmic bounce of mallets against marimbas and glockenspiel – was lost within the weight of a mass of instruments designed to carry another sort of music. Minimalism began to appear where you least expected it – in The Netherlands, where Louis Andriessen’s music, derived independently of Reich and Glass, becomes known as ‘Dutch minimalism’, while ‘holy minimalism’, the devotional music of Tavener, Górecki and Pärt, becomes a commercial goer. We’re all minimalists now.

14 GRAMOPHONE APRIL 2015

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