If you listen to much Morton Feldman you will develop a whole new sense of the word "minimal." Take this piece for example, De Kooning from 1963:
Next to that anything by Philip Glass or Steve Reich is going to sound horribly cluttered and "busy." But austere, spare music like this has its unique appeal.
Amongst fellow musicians I am known for being succinct as a composer and yes, I do tend to prefer to use fewer notes where others might use more. But compared to Morton Feldman I feel positively prolix. Some music, like some sauces, is greatly improved by reduction. We are so often tempted by more: more notes, faster tempos, higher notes and louder notes. But given that those have been the trends for a couple of hundred years now, surely there is more to discover on the other end of the spectrum, among the quiet, few, scattered notes. At least, that seems to be the message from Morton Feldman.
Listening to the music of Feldman is like a new kind of ear-training. You find yourself straining to remember exactly what the pitch of that previous note was. And is the new note really a fourth higher?
I was talking to my ex-composition teacher in Montreal a while back who seemed to think that the important figure for contemporary music was Pierre Boulez, and I said, well, my baseline for influence in contemporary music is really Steve Reich! Which rather dampened that conversation.
I think that one of the most important awakenings in my musical odyssey was the first time I heard Drumming, composed in 1970/71. As an undergraduate in music performance at McGill in the mid-70s I liked to go to the listening library if I had a spare period and no urgent need to hit the practice rooms. This was in the days of vinyl and I would go to the stacks and just grab whatever looked interesting. On this occasion I had some pieces by Stockhausen for multiple orchestras, one of which I think was Carré, some Ligeti, maybe some Luigi Nono and so on. I would grab ten or so discs and if nothing grabbed me in the first couple of minutes, it was on to the next one.
Here is Carré, for example:
And here, from Wikipedia, is a description of the structure:
Carré unfolds 101 "moments" with durations varying from 1.5 to 90 seconds, each of which is characterised by one or several notes and chords (Rigoni 1998, 189). However, Stockhausen originally planned 252 sections in his draft form scheme, where eight basic categories of sound are arrayed, each with four levels (Toop 2005, 172):
Type: the four solo instruments used to furnish each of the four orchestras with a characteristic timbre: cimbalom, vibraphone, piano, and harp
Attack: four "attack transient" percussion instruments, also used to differentiate the four orchestras: Indian bells, drums, Alpine cowbells, and cymbals
Gestalt variation: four parameters within which transformations are to occur: rhythm, "height", timbre, and dynamics
Density: number of notes present, from one to four
Register: four principal octave registers
Duration: four generic values from "short" to "as long as possible"
Amplitude: four basic dynamic levels, notated in the sketch (but not the score) with numerals
Colour: four basic timbres: voices, strings, woodwinds, and brass
In contrast to the complex interrelationships of these eight sound categories, the underlying pitch structure of Carré is so simple that Stockhausen was able to write it out on a single sheet of music paper (Toop 2005, 172). The basic pitch series used throughout the work is
E♭ D E C♯ F C F♯ B G B♭ A♭ A.
So, pretty complex. After listening to a few minutes of it, I moved on to some other discs and ended up with Drumming by Steve Reich, which begins like this:
Here is an excerpt from the notes to the recording:
If you are in a context where the complexity of Stockhausen is the norm (or ideal at least), then hearing the astonishing simplicity of the opening of Drumming is, well, very impressive. The basic aesthetic principle of Reich's music is the opposite of that of Stockhausen. What is going on in Stockhausen is anything but evident, no matter how much you listen. But Reich has said that he has no interest in concealing anything from the listener. He wants you to hear exactly what is going on through the whole piece. At the beginning of Drumming, for example, what is going on is that that single beat you hear is NOT the downbeat, which only arrives later. When it does, you have to reorient your whole perception. The whole piece is about your perception of rhythm.
Slowly filling in or reducing the elements of a basic rhythmic pattern is only one of Reich's techniques. He began by working with tape loops and constructing layers that move at slightly different speeds resulting in a phenomenon he calls "phasing". Here is an early example titled "Come Out" from 1966:
He decided that this would only be musically interesting if he could do it with live musicians on acoustic instruments so he wrote a whole series of "phase" pieces such as Piano Phase from 1967:
This takes a remarkably fine control of tempo as what happens is one piano preserves exactly the opening rhythmic pattern at exactly the same tempo while the other piano initially duplicates it and then, very gradually speeds up just enough to move one sixteenth note ahead. Then the process stabilizes before moving on to another sixteenth note ahead and so on for the whole piece. You can hear this process beginning about one and a half minutes into the piece.
So already in the first few years of his career, Steve Reich made use of two rhythmic ideas that, while perhaps not absolutely novel, certainly were fresh in the context of Western music. But he was far from finished. Another idea, also rhythmically oriented, was to add string and wind instruments that hold long notes underneath the quick-moving percussion instruments. This might remind you of the techniques used in the organum of the 12th century. Yet another was to develop subtle contrapuntal ideas within his characteristic syncopated texture such as in the piece Six Pianos from 1973:
I'll leave you with that to listen to and will continue in a later post with where he went from here.
A commentator asked me to write something about minimalism and within five minutes of starting to do some basic research I discovered several things that I previously didn't know! One is the use of the term "systems" music to refer to some minimalist techniques. Another is that both Steve Reich and Philip Glass were influenced by a street musician in New York known as "Moondog" or "the Viking of 6th Avenue"! Here is a photo:
Moondog recorded quite a lot of music. Here is a short sample:
Moondog reminds me of another eccentric American composer, the West Coast musician Harry Partch. Both led unconventional lives and invented their own musical instruments.
In the earliest stages of what came to be known as "minimalism" composers such as Terry Riley on the West Coast and Steve Reich on the East Coast experimented with tape delay and tape loops. Both of these techniques lead to the idea of repetition. The idea of returning to simplicity seems to have been the impetus to write music that was tonal, or at least tonally static. An early example is Terry Riley's In C dating from 1964. Here is just the first part of the original recording:
Steve Reich moved from overlapping tape loops to trying to reproduce some of the rhythmic effects with musicians. Here is Piano Phase dating from 1967. Just after the one minute mark you can hear one of the pianos "phasing" against the other. The effect is created by very slightly speeding up so the sixteenths "slip" or "phase" against one another until they come into phase again, but one sixteenth apart.
Philip Glass, who studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, so had more of a traditional grounding, was very influenced by hearing Steve Reich's music and began to write his own minimal compositions. Here is the first part of Music in Fifths dating from 1969:
Both Steve Reich and Philip Glass have undergone such huge developments in their composition that it is probably no longer suitable to stick the label "minimalist" on their music. But the experience of paring music down to its most fundamental--minimal--parts and then rebuilding from there has probably given their music a special kind of energy. Steve Reich moved on to complex but repetitive ensemble pieces like his Music for 18 Musicians from 1976. Here is the first part:
Philip Glass has become enormously prolific, writing not only operas and film scores, but also concertos and symphonies. He has described himself as a classicist, though I don't recall where. Now here is an interesting connection: Dennis Russell Davies, the conductor of the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, commissioned Glass' Symphony No. 3. Here is the first movement:
So what is the connection? Dennis Russell Davies and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra are the artists who recorded the complete symphonies of Joseph Haydn that I am currently listening my way through!
After I finish with Haydn, I would really like to take a close look at the symphonies of Philip Glass. In the meantime, enjoy. Here is another movement from the Glass symphony:
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.
Continuing on from my previous post, let's have a closer look at Sibelius' 4th Symphony. A lengthy analysis would be tiresome and, uh, lengthy, not to mention unbloggy! But we can look at just the opening of the 4th Symphony. Alex Ross, in his excellent book The Rest Is Noise writes as follows:
Sibelius finished his first two symphonies in 1899 and 1902 respectively. On the surface, these were typical orchestral dramas of the heroic soul, although Sibelius' habit of breaking down themes into murmuring textures sounded strange to many listeners... In [ ] the Fourth, Sibelius presented his listeners with music as forbidding as anything from the European continent at the time ... The first few bars of the symphony extrapolate a new dimension in musical time. The opening notes, scored darkly for cellos, basses and bassoons, are C, D, F-sharp and E--a harmonically ambiguous whole-tone collection.
"A new dimension in musical time"... wait, doesn't that sound familiar? Haven't some other composers been doing that more recently? Here are those opening bars in my reduction:
(click to enlarge)
Hmm, what do we have here? A pedal that decelerates, moving between the dominant and the raised sixth degrees; rhythmically displaced outlining of the tonic and then dominant minor chords; strong modal feel. You know, these techniques of modified modal harmonies combined with repetitive rhythmic structures sound a lot like what the minimalist composers Steve Reich, Philip Glass and John Adams evolved into after a while. They got tired of the excessively simple harmonies of the early pieces and started writing music that isn't so terribly different from this. Here is the Sibelius 4th Symphony again:
And here is some music by Philip Glass:
I think the main difference between the two is that the Sibelius is more interesting. Here is the opening of Shaker Loops by John Adams:
What do you think? Did composers steer a wide berth around this kind of harmonic writing only to return to it in the 1970s? Was Sibelius doing interesting things rhythmically that would be echoed in music several decades later?
