Kings Place in London presented a concert this week purporting to celebrate the 50th anniversary of 'minimalism' and The Guardian has an article on it that manages to summarize a lot of the errors and misunderstandings about this musical style. First of all, 'minimalism' is not a term liked very much by many of the composers called minimalists--Steve Reich in particular, who prefers the term 'process music'. Let's lay out some historical perspective, which is missing from the article. We can see three major phases in music during the 20th century. First was the inheritance of the 19th century: large, harmonically complex works with rich colors such as the symphonies by Mahler, Nielsen, Sibelius and others. The early music of Schoenberg is in this category. But it was Schoenberg that also, along with his students Berg and Webern, broke with that tradition and founded a new one: Viennese serialism that replaced harmonic structures with atonal ones. Accompanying this was a changed approach to rhythm that was equally important but less discussed. Throughout the 19th century rhythms had become more ponderous and thick. The new atonal composers fragmented rhythm and suppressed a sense of regular pulse. Have a listen to this:
This kind of approach was predominant in the first half of the century and the jagged approach to rhythm increased:
Most listeners were not won over by this kind of music which left the door open for an entirely new approach which began in the 1960s. An early work is Terry Riley's In C, written in 1964:
What makes this such a revolutionary break are two elements: the fixed rhythmic pulse and the return to tonality, hence the title, In C. A few years later Philip Glass began to write similar music:
Coming from a slightly different angle was Steve Reich. With a background in both philosophy and percussion, his early pieces used tape loops:
What is going on here is that a short tape loop is duplicated and the different loops slowly drift away from one another--go out of phase. From this Reich developed the idea of 'phasing', doing the same thing in live performance:
This may seem a bit arid, but it is actually the first genuinely new rhythmic idea to appear in music in a very long time. The inspiration was probably equally due to the mechanism of tape loops and Reich's study of drumming in Ghana. He developed the idea in the large piece Drumming. Here is an excerpt:
The phasing was slowly phased out, but Reich added tonal harmony to the basic idea of pulse:
Melody even started coming back: listen to the lovely bebop-like flute tune starting around 2:14.
Despite what the article in the Guardian says, this really isn't about minimalism at all. What happened in the 1960s and 70s was similar to what happened around 1600: a well-established musical style started to become perceived as too structured, too remote from the kind of expression composers were looking for. So they tossed it out and went back to the fundamental elements of music. In their case they tossed out the complexities of late 16th century counterpoint such as this:
They replaced austere counterpoint with harmonic and expressive immediacy, as in this music:
The collection was even called "le nuove musiche". What is happening in both transitions is inspired by what I call the racinative impulse, the need from time to time to renew music by returning to the most basic fundamentals. I talk about that in this post.
A long-standing model for understanding music history is through progress: the emancipation of the dissonance, the development of new playing techniques or new musical forms. At times the pursuit of progress in music seems to become experimental, almost scientific. But there is an alternative way of seeing history and it is from Jorge Luis Borges, who suggested that artists choose their predecessors. An example of this odd-seeming notion is that after Romantic harmony, say, is developed, then you can go back to Bach and hear places where he has used 'Romantic' harmony. It isn't, of course, because it is just that our perceptions have been altered by later events. My somewhat different idea is that, among the many things that composers are doing, one is being progressive, but the other is being conservative. No, that's not quite right... Let's call it "racinative" from "deracinate" to remove or separate from a native environment. To 'racinate' would be to return to the roots of something, to re-root rather than uproot.
It is the racinative urge, the precise opposite to the progressive urge, that compels Haydn to write fugues as the last movements of his supposedly 'progressive' string quartets op 20:
Pop artists do this all the time: it's called "back to the roots":
So, "racinative" as in, music that refers back to some past music or re-discovers some rooted aspect of music. Historians have ignored this fairly successfully, but I suspect it is an important aspect of music history. Composers are often fascinated with music history, even when they aren't looking to steal an idea. I know a young composer who worked hard to learn how to do a convincing pastiche of the style of Palestrina. Now there's something no-one is clamoring for! But it was important to him because it got him in touch with something important, deeply-rooted. This may also have something to do with Harold Bloom's theory of influence in literature. As Wikipedia says, "Writers find their creative inspiration in previous writers and begin by imitating those writers; in order to develop a poetic voice of their own, however, they must make their own work different from that of their precursors. As a result, Bloom argues, authors of real power must inevitably "misread" their precursors' works in order to make room for fresh imaginings." I don't know about misreading, but I think that composers often look back at those who came before in order to tap into some deep river of the essence of music and to escape the influence of the superficial fashions of the day. That may have been what Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were up to when they all incorporated fugal texture into many compositions. Fugue, at that point in time, was wildly out of fashion, which made it an interesting avenue to pursue. A racinative one, as opposed to a progressive one. I'm talking up using this new term because I think that the racinative impulse is not a conservative one, though it is often mistaken for such. The album Beggar's Banquet by the Rolling Stones, released in 1968, was racinative, not progressive, nor conservative. There had been so much experimenting the years previous with psychedelia, that the most radical act was to return to the old, blues roots.
Perhaps the most famous example of musical racination might be the invention of opera. No-one in Florence just before 1600 was trying to invent anything. What they were trying to do
was an attempt to revive the classical Greek drama, part of the wider revival of antiquity characteristic of the Renaissance. The members of the Camerata considered that the "chorus" parts of Greek dramas were originally sung, and possibly even the entire text of all roles; opera was thus conceived as a way of "restoring" this situation.
A classic example of racination: returning to or the attempt to rediscover the roots of something. Here is part of the very first opera that we have (this is the second one written, the first was lost):
The irony is that, in their attempt to NOT invent something new, but rather re-discover something very old, they did actually invent something entirely new: opera. Funnily enough, those trying earnestly to invent something entirely new often end up by producing something like this:
Incidently, Stravinsky noticed how well racination worked for the Florentine Camerata so he tried it himself:
Alas, I don't think you can perform the same act of racination twice...
