The Composition of Simplicity

Richard Taruskin in his Oxford History of Western Music talks about the move toward compositional complexity in several phases, the last of which, in the last half of the 20th century, he calls the "New Complexity" though the phrase was actually coined by Australian music theorist Richard Toop (Oxford History, volume 5, p. 475). Of course the move from simplicity to complexity is one that has seen a number of manifestations. Take, for example, the movement from the simplicity of stile recitativo monody of around 1600 (replacing the complexities of late Renaissance counterpoint) to the complexities of the High Baroque as exemplified in the Art of Fugue by J. S. Bach.

There is a kind of predisposition in historians and theorists toward the valorization of complexity as a musical good. Indeed, the phases in music history when radical simplification occurs are often sold in terms of their innovation. Discussion of Giulio Caccini's expressive monody stresses the new importance of passionate expression. Alongside this we might cite the radical simplification of Philip Glass and Steve Reich. The radical innovation there was the return of a steady rhythmic pulse, something that had nearly vanished from musical composition in the post-WWII avant-garde.

But the truth is that what Caccini (and Monteverdi) were doing and what Glass and Reich were doing was a radical simplification, one of the consequences of which was a new sort of musical language. In other words, the simplification was a necessary prolegomena to the new style. First you simplify, clearing away the underbrush as it were, then you find places to innovate.

The New Simplicity, if I could coin an alternate phase, is much more than what is often called "minimalism"--mistakenly, I believe. Reich calls what he was doing early on, "process" music, which is more accurate. We could add to the list of composers who pursued various kinds of simplification the names Galina Ustvolskaya, Arvo Pärt, John Adams, Sofia Gubaidulina, Morton Feldman and a host of others. These seem to come from different places, traditions and schools, but they all focussed to some extent, in some pieces, on the idea of simplifying the musical texture.

Ever since Beethoven, the business of composition has often been to develop, to expand, to enrich and a variety of other verbs that more or less add up to "make more complicated." This process, by fits and starts, continued throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. We find Schoenberg taking several years just to orchestrate his mammoth Gurre-Lieder cantata. To illustrate the complexity of the pendulum swing between complexity and simplification, he took time off to compose his first, quite brief, atonal piano pieces.

The neo-classical phase in music history, between the World Wars, was another bid for simplicity and an ideal example is Prokofiev's Classical Symphony, an astonishing simplification after the enormous ones by Mahler:

But the next phase of complexification was an intense one: after WWII the total serialists and their successors reached new heights of complexity. A fine example is the score to this piece by Brian Ferneyhough for solo flute:

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I've often thought that the perfect foil to this piece, also written in 1970, is Drumming by Steve Reich, which begins with isolated beats on a small drum. You can't get any more simple than that (though the meter is more complex than it seems).

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Throughout the 70s and 80s and continuing to this day, a whole raft of composers are approaching the act of composition by asking themselves, "what can I take away?" "what can I remove?" This recalls a remark Schoenberg made to a pupil once, pointing to the eraser end of the pencil he said, "this end is more important than the other end."

What comes from experimentation, intuition and improvisation is often a welter of ideas and motifs. Composition these days, for me at least, is partly about finding the underlying simplicity there and organizing it into a musical structure. I sometimes think that Morton Feldman was doing something similar. His very long, but also simple, chamber music from his later years is just being discovered. The Salzburg Festival program (if it goes ahead) has a focus this year on some of Feldman's music. Here is his Triadic Memories from 1981.