Category: Articles

Frank J. Oteri Photo by Melissa Richard

I still remember the first time I heard the music of each of the four so-called fathers of minimalism.

Philip Glass came first for me. It was 1979. I was a junior at the High School of Music and Art and an aspiring composer with little knowledge of contemporary music. One of my music teachers suggested I watch a documentary about a new music composer on television that night. Turned out the composer was Glass and the music I heard, excerpts from Einstein On The Beach and North Star, the soundtrack for the film, Mark Di Suvero: Sculptor. That music was unlike anything I had ever heard before that. I still remember my first reaction. This is the happiest music ever made. Yes, it sounded like it wasn’t going anywhere at first, but I didn’t want it to: it was where it should be.

About a year later, I heard a live broadcast of a Steve Reich concert from the Guggenheim Museum on WNYC-FM. I think it was the premiere performance of his Octet. Counterpoint had never made such immediate aural sense. It was also so blissfully and unrepentantly happy. That broadcast made me a crusader of new music on the radio to this day.

Terry Riley’s music I discovered in a record store. The liner notes to the original Columbia Masterworks LP recording of In C were among the most tantalizing pieces of prose I’d ever read. I had to find out what this record sounded like! To this day, these liner notes seem one of the best arguments for why LPs are better evangelists for spreading the word about interesting music than CDs.

La Monte Young’s music was the hardest music to track down and still is. But after reading his name along with the three others in recordings and articles about this music I rummaged through in that first year, I was determined to track it down. Luckily, this was around the time of the great series of Well Tuned Piano concerts La Monte gave at 6 Harrison Street so I was able to have a personal encounter with one of the greatest musical monuments of the 20th century.

But now it’s more than 20 years later and I’ve encountered so much other exciting new music of all different varieties. Yet, minimalist music, which was my initial exposure to new music, still strikes both an emotional and intellectual chord. Of course, it’s been 25 years since the first performances of Einstein On The Beach at the Metropolitan Opera back in November 1976. But, antsy even as a teenager, I would have been far too young to soak in that uninterrupted 4 1/2 hour experience.

Given that the history of minimalism goes back much further than 25 years and is a source of great debate among music historians and even its so-called progenitors, the 25th anniversary of the American premiere of Einstein On The Beach, not even the world premiere which took place earlier that year in Europe, seems an arbitrary excuse to reflect on the relevance of minimalism today. But those performances, in an opera house that rarely acknowledges the music of our time, were a public awareness catalyst that led to American composers once again being in the consciousness of a great many people outside the narrow confines of new music connoisseurs. So this month seemed an appropriate time to talk with Philip Glass about how the landscape of new music fundamentally changed in the 1970s and where it is today.

To put Glass’s reflections in context, we’ve asked Kyle Gann to examine the history of minimalism and the result is arguably the most-maximalist HyperHistory ever to appear in NewMusicBox! We’ve also asked four younger composers–Randall Woolf, Wendy Mae Chambers, Robert Maggio and Charlie Hoyt (who maintains a Web site for the Advanced Center for Treatment of Philip Glass Addiction)–whether minimalism is still relevant to them. And we ask you to ponder if minimalism will be a driving force in 21st century music and if the important minimalist works of the late 20th century will enter the standard repertoire of classical music.

In the News and Views, Dean Suzuki suggests that composers, minimalists and otherwise, who maintain active dialogues with artists in other disciplines create music that has reached a much wider audience. Molly Sheridan catches up with several composers who are aiming their works at a broader audience — Jennifer Higdon, Michael Hersch, Pierre Jalbert and Tobias Picker— as well as tireless composer-advocate Don Gillespie who recently retired from C.F. Peters following a trailblazing 31-year career. And in her SoundTracks essay, Amanda MacBlane remembers that contemporaneous with the premiere of Einstein On The Beach in 1976 was the TV debut of Family Feud, which inspires a wild musing about the uptown-downtown musical turf wars a generation later.

Indeed, minimalism’s legacy has been hardly minimal.

Greg Sandow

One night about a year ago, Donal Fox sat down at the piano in Merkin Hall and began to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” This was the start of “Transformations, Variations, Improvisations,” a half-concert (someone else shared the program, I can’t remember who) on which Donal played some partly improvised compositions, none of them ever heard in New York before.

I’d first heard Donal perhaps two years before that, in a friend’s living room, where a white grand piano sat, hardly ever played. But that night Donal was sitting at it, playing the “Moonlight” Sonata with rich, warm, and sensitive authority. I was just about transfixed. From then on, I’d see Donal sometimes, when he visited New York from where he lives in Boston, and our friends might happen to give a party. By then I’d learned a few things about him – that he’s widely respected in Boston, that he’s played jazz with the likes of Oliver Lake and David Murray, that he was composer-in-residence with the St. Louis Symphony in the early 1990s, that he’s recorded with David Murray and others on jazz labels, and that New World Records has released two CDs of his classical compositions. His music sits on the border between jazz and classical – but that, I realize (as I type the words), might be a clichéd and misleading way to describe it. It too quickly suggests “crossover,” a scary label that from long experience suggests (at least to me) that the music might not be very good classical or very good jazz. But Donal is an expert on both sides of this eroding fence, and the music he makes (like Edgar Meyer‘s fusion of classical and bluegrass) simply comes from being who he is. He doesn’t have to break any barriers or prove any points. He’s completely at home in everything he does.

He began the national anthem – or, more precisely, his composition called “Star-Spangled Banner Fractured” – with a whip crack of authority. Some pianists have a big sound. Some are exciting. But rarely do I hear one whose playing, from the very first note, forces me to listen as irresistibly as Donal’s does. I’m reminded (for a long-ago comparison) of Al Carmines, who used to write and play musicals at the Judson Church in the Village. One chord from him and the whole audience sat up. Donal, I think, could bring the entire Pentagon staff to attention, if he played “The Star-Spangled Banner” there.

When the tune got to “the rockets’ red glare,” it dissolved into rumbles. They didn’t come as a surprise; they’d been prepared by the previous phrases, which (after a straight beginning) already had been darkened by heavy pedaling. The obvious comparison here would be with Jimi Hendrix, but Donal’s version was less stark, less weighty with a message (Hendrix played his bruised and fractured anthem at the height of the Vietnam War), and, true to his classical training, more plainly coherent. The music of “the rockets’ red glare” would emerge in later passages, which apparently were improvised, like a soft echo of parts of itself, started but never finished. And at the end, the final cadence of the song emerged suddenly, as if from clouds of smoke. The performance might, of course, have had another meaning now, after the September 11 attacks. A year ago, it seemed partly playful. (More playful then Hendrix, too, whose version was deadly serious.) Though even now I don’t mind the playfulness. There’s also a lot of thought behind the piece, and maybe it catches all the ambiguities of a time when we all feel patriotic but still hope that, as far as possible, no more people will be hurt.

Next came something called Four Chords from TJ’s Intermezzi, which Donal – a most engaging speaker – introduced by explaining its material. This included, no surprise, four chords (he played them; they sounded like a wistful combination of Debussy, Scriabin, and, because of how they were voiced and arpeggiated, Bach). He also introduced us to a forceful major sixth at the high and low extremes of the keyboard, and to the notion of repeated notes. “Variations” was part of the concert’s title; here, Donal said, he’d show himself “working the variation form with select material.” I don’t think it matters that “variation form” suggests variations with a more formal theme. But what’s hard to say is why Donal’s comments sounded so little like dry analysis, or like an elementary music appreciation course, full of information nobody with cultivated ears would need. Instead, Donal, with a wise kind of innocence, seemed honestly fascinated with how his music is constructed. He shared his fascination with us; I doubt anyone in the Merkin audience thought he sounded too didactic.

At the start, as the music outlined the four chords with the Bach-like arpeggiations Donal had demonstrated, I noticed most of all his touch. His phrasing was more romantic, more nuanced than you’ll often hear in Bach (but then the chords are richer, too, than Bach’s, and more chromatic). He made the notes short, distinct from each other, but still blended in a glow of pedal (lighter, this time, than in the fractured anthem). Each note had its own weight; each had its own tale to tell, though always moving forward as part of the whole.

Then the piece got wild. Donal swept up and down the keyboard, apparently enjoying the sheer noise of dissonance, sounding like a man out for a happy romp, though he never played imprecisely (the notes were always clear) or lost sight of his material. The climax of the piece was great fun. The right hand moved upward and the left hand, thumping out a line in octaves, moved downward, both heading toward the extremes of the keyboard. (Was this an echo of the sixth at both extremes?) After that, the music thinned into soft commotion in a single register, medium high. Magically, the arpeggiated chords returned, though the final ending – not expected, necessarily, but inevitable, once we heard it – was that massive, widely separated sixth. In Broadway terms, that would be a “button,” a sharp conclusion designed to make the audience applaud. Here it was a sign both of force and wit.

We all did applaud, of course. “You’re a tough crowd!” Donal said, with wry appreciation. Then he launched into an explanation of the next piece, which bore an oddly academic title: Variations on Schoenberg’s Phantasy for Violin, Op. 47. But the premise (emerging from gen
tle wisecracks about Schoenberg‘s neglected skill as a bluesman) was much more lively: Take the violin part of the Phantasy, which Schoenberg wrote almost as an independent entity, before he wrote the piano part. Add a bass line to it. Make it jazz.

Which worked triumphantly. Surely we’ve all heard transformations of classical music into jazz, like the Swingle Singers‘ Bach or, a couple of generations ago, an amusing jazzy piano piece by Alec Templeton called “Bach Goes to Town.” Usually these come off a little bit like stunts, as if jazz was leading its new classical partner onto the dance floor, with a little smile on its face because it knows the shy classical kid doesn’t dance very well. (Which isn’t to say the Swingle performances aren’t good Bach, or that they don’t swing.) Donal’s Schoenberg, though, reminds me a little of one jazz take on a classical piece that’s really exhilarating, looked at from either side – Ron Carter‘s version of the first movement of the Bach Third Brandenburg Concerto, where a string ensemble plays the music straight while Carter improvises along with Bach on his bass. (To be utterly precise, the strings repeat a couple of bars, to give Carter a little more room to stretch out; you’d have to know the Bach by heart to notice.)

What Donal does, first, is to add an ostinato bass (or ostinato-like bass; I didn’t check to see if the two note pattern literally repeats). It sets up a jazzy rhythm, though, so suddenly the Schoenberg-derived notes above it start to hop. It also creates a strong tonal center. Here we run into a familiar phenomenon of extended 20th-century tonal harmony: Any note in the chromatic scale, played over a tonic pedal, will sound like it belongs somewhere in the key. Simply saying that, however, isn’t quite the same thing as making it work in practice, especially when most of the notes fall outside the center of the key (as defined, let’s say, by the tonic chord, or by a pentatonic scale on the tonic, or in other ways), and, even worse, when the notes themselves wouldn’t suggest the key.

So Donal’s arrangement of them – involving rhythm, repetitions, and other changes from Schoenberg’s original – is crucial to making them swing, which they delightfully do in his composition, and to cajole them into seeming to make some kind of non-12-tone harmonic sense. Here I think Donal is helped by the rich chromatic palette of post-bebop jazz, which goes in for chords just as dense as those in atonal music. In fact, years ago when I was studying at the Yale School of Music, people used to quote a line spoken, evidently in a rich Turkish accent, by Bulent Arel, a composer who’d taught at Yale before I got there. It was easy, Arel supposedly said, to write atonal music: “Take jazz chord. Make strange!” (My apologies if this story, remembered from second-hand accounts after many years, misrepresents Arel’s English.) Donal has, in a way, done the same thing in the opposite direction. “Take atonal chords. Make them jump.” It’s done (to my ear, at least) with rhythmic smoke and mirrors. Take a Schoenberg chord. Play it a couple of times in a jazz rhythm, with the kind of swing you’d get in jazz. Suddenly it is jazz. Magic!

The piece really swings, with an extra brainy kick of verve because we know how much brainy fun Donal is having. One game that doesn’t need any knowledge of Schoenberg involves the ostinato (or ostinato-like) bass. In places, Donal abandons it, sometimes charmingly. The first time is a lovely little musical twist, a sudden brief flowering of quarter-note triplets which sound for just an instant like they’re slowing the rhythm down. The end of the work is cute, too. The bass line, two notes a minor third apart, quietly develops a major third – which, in retrospect, turns out to have been lurking in the harmony all the time. Donal’s music, for reasons like this, is a great diversion for people who like the ways music is constructed, though his dash, wit, and virtuosity (plus his lyricism) leave plenty of room for everybody else.

I won’t talk in such detail about the rest of the concert. Vamping with T.T. was another jazz-like take on twelve-tone music. (“T.T.,” get it?) The row, which Donal demonstrated before he played the piece, naturally falls into sonorous, even juicy chords, with just a hint of melancholy. Donal played the simple series arrestingly, as well – in bare octaves, but with lots of flair, goosing the tempo as he went through all four basic forms of the row. The ending of the piece was striking, taking a path very different from the ending of Four Chords. The music evaporated into low, light, staccato notes, and then faded away into silence, while Donal’s hands still went on playing. Themes from Gone City ended the first half of the program, and was an impressive contrast. It was slow and lyrical. Arpeggiated chords (very carefully voiced, with hints of inner melodies) accompanied a melody high above them – except that the melody seemed to need the accompaniment to flow the way it wanted to. Or, to put it the opposite way, the melody notes might just as well have been part of the texture the accompaniment created. All the elements of the piece melded together much more organically than words like “melody” and “accompaniment” might suggest.

After intermission came three takes on existing classical works, including one by C.P.E. Bach, another by J.S. Bach (both unspecified), and finally the Prokofiev Toccata, Op. 11. This all gave Donal a chance to end the concert by taking his virtuosity for a ride. The C. P. E. Bach piece married baroque music to stride piano, with great driving energy; the J. S. Bach became a seething surge of rhythm. In his Prokofiev transformation, Donal departed from the original as early as the fifth bar. Prokofiev starts with four measures of pounding 16th-note Ds, alternating between the pianist’s hands. At bar 5, the right hand starts playing C and E for two measures, but Donal kept it going twice as long. But then the whole beginning is pianissimo in Prokofiev, and a lot louder as Donal asserts it, so of course he’s not playing the piece as it’s written. Instead, he uses parts of it as a point of departure for what I take to be improvisation. I suspect that his technique isn’t quite strong enough to play Prokofiev’s original at top speed, but his version brought the concert to an exuberant and thundering conclusion. Right then, I knew I wanted to write about the evening, but I didn’t have the chance; I’m thrilled to do it now. Everybody interested should check out Donal’s two New World CDs (which include some of the pieces I’ve described here). But there’s no substitute for seeing him live. Somebody should book him in New York.

(Full disclosure: I’d never claim to remember music in this much detail a year after I heard it. I worked from a videotape that Donal kindly sent me many months ago.)

Dean Suzuki Photo by Ryan Suzuki

Morton Feldman once said to a group of student composers and their teachers at Darmstadt, “If you don’t have a friend who’s a painter, you’re in trouble.” A more cogent, profound, and brilliant truism would be hard to find. The arts are always a reflection of their culture, their zeitgeist, and the composer who isolates him or herself from their culture risks becoming irrelevant. In the twentieth century, we can see over and over the importance, value, and strength of a diverse but unified arts community. One can also observe the dangers and pitfalls of the secluded composer.

A kind of profound absurdity was resident in the work of Satie and the Dadaists at the same moment in time; the angst and despair of Schoenberg‘s Pierrot lunaire is also found in Robert Wiene‘s classic expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; the controlled chaos of Cage‘s chance operations is analogous to Pollock‘s action drip paintings; the minimalist techniques and processes of Riley, Reich and Glass parallel those of conceptual artists Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra, minimal artists Frank Stella and Donald Judd, structuralist filmmaker Michael Snow, and minimalist choreographer Lucinda Childs. That the confluence of aesthetics for artists working in different disciplines occurred at roughly the same time was no mere coincidence. These individuals were part of a larger arts community. They discussed ideas and their works with each other, as well as the politics, sports and the weather. In other words, they were part of a dynamic culture. They worked together, supporting one another by going to each other’s openings, concerts, and performances. Perhaps LeWitt might design a poster for a performance by one of his friends or Judd would host a concert in his loft. Sometimes they collaborated with one another. John Cage drove a car while Robert Rauschenberg inked the tire which passed over a long strip of paper to make a new kind of painting. Even when they did not work together, they served as a foil or sounding board for each other’s ideas, perhaps acting as a catalyst for a new work or a new concept. What is clear is that these artists were all a part of a larger and vibrant cultural milieu and their work benefited from their involvement in it.

On the other hand, when composers isolate themselves in the world of music, the results can be self-indulgent, self-absorbed, and irrelevant. One can make an argument that ultra-rationalist composers such as Babbitt, Boulez, and Carter cloistered themselves away, missing the riches of a larger artistic environment that might have informed and enhanced their vision and work. While the influence of Cage and Duchamp seems to grow and spread, total serialism is increasingly viewed as mannerist and arcane. Will Babbitt’s All Set ever be embraced? It is difficult to say with certainty, but the likelihood is slim. On the other hand, Debussy, whose work is informed by his engagement with the symbolists and impressionists, never lacks for a following.

Also, too often composers think it is enough to work in a modernist idiom. That may not be the point. A setting of a “modern” poem by Garcia Lorca or Lawrence Ferlinghetti by a young composer today may be no more contemporary than a setting of a sonnet by Shakespeare by the same composer. And while neither may be wrong headed, there is a logic and relevance in working within a truly contemporary idiom or with one’s contemporaries. Feldman set the work of his peers and friends Samuel Beckett and Frank O’Hara, and many of his works were dedicated to artists in his social circle, including painters Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, as well as Beckett and O’Hara, among others. Stravinsky worked with Dylan Thomas, Satie collaborated with Picabia, Picasso, Duchamp, Man Ray, René Clair, and others. Virgil Thomson‘s two great operas were the result of collaborating with Gertrude Stein. The results capture, even define their era, culture, philosophy, and moment, and such works could not have been created were it not for the dialogue that these artists had with one another.

I teach in a music department that is part of a larger college of creative arts. The
reality is that each department is an independent entity unto itself while the larger college is an organizational artifice which serves to organize, to house, to create budget limitations. There is almost no incentive to work across disciplines as budgetary constraints, not to mention territorialism, create barriers. Students see such isolation and may assume that it is good and right, especially when they are pushed to hole up in the practice room, studio, or library to practice, compose, research and write. I constantly hear how little time they have to hear concert music, much less make a trip to the museum, see an experimental film, or catch a new play. In truth, they will probably never have as much free time as they do while they are students. We need to encourage them (and each other) to rub shoulders with their contemporaries in other artistic disciplines.

It is up to the artists to be a part of a community and maintain dialogues with those engaged in different disciplines. Of course, certain opportunities make themselves available to composers. Dancers need music which leads to numerous commissions and films require musical scores. Even then, composers think that film work is beneath contempt, a genre which requires the prostituting of one’s art for the sake of the dollar. Even as I write, the Philip Glass Ensemble is on tour performing soundtracks to films scored by the composer. One could hardly accuse Glass of selling out when he produced the score to Koyaanisqatsi. Even as they were wrapping up the mixing of the music to the film just prior to its release, director Godfrey Reggio was convinced that the film would never reach an even modest audience, so experimental was his work.

Glass has devoted much of his career to collaborative efforts in the area of theater, opera, and dance in addition to film. In some instances, as in Koyaanisqatsi, the collaboration was rich and deep. Director Reggio, composer Glass, and director of photography Ron Fricke all made important contributions or suggestions in all areas: music, cinematography, and content. Similarly, when Glass has collaborated with Robert Wilson, the dialogue and exchange has been one of a complete partnership. While such rich and far-reaching collaborations are rare and not always desirable, composers would do well to seek out more such alliances.

Paul Dresher began his career as the music director for George Coates which gave birth to a whole series of experimental music theater pieces with Coates and later operas and other music theater works on his own. Harold Budd has worked with numerous rock musicians, most notably Brian Eno, himself an artist whose work and other collaborations across disciplines including video art. Budd collaborations range from his work with the rock artists such as Cocteau Twins, Bill Nelson, and Jah Wobble, to a fashion show at the post-punk Mudd Club for which he created and performed music, to an installation created with artist Lita Albuquerque and architect Robert Kramer. In each case, the resultant music was informed by the collaborative effort and would not be the same were it not for the partnership with other artists.

So put down your pencil or drag yourself away from your computer, go to an opening at a gallery, and get to know the artist before it’s too late.

Charlie Hoyt

It’s going to be a while before we see people roaming the streets in Steve Reich t-shirts and blasting Górecki from their car stereo systems. However, minimalism seems to be permeating pop-culture at an amazing rate. Keeping in mind that the term ‘minimalism’ is used to define a very broad genre of music, turn on your radio or television and listen to the background music in commercials— minimalist tendencies abound. Notice also the amount of minimalism popping up in our film scores. These outcroppings into mainstream culture seem to be due in part to the influence of cross-genre composers like Philip Glass, and current trends in popular music. Fans of more mainstream genres are being exposed to minimalism in the form of repetition-based popular music like techno, trance, and hip-hop. Perhaps this is a result of overlapping styles of music, or maybe, a revolt against our instantaneous get-it-now way of life and world of dwindling attention spans. It could also be our egos — delving into the world of the avant-garde and experimental seems to give comedians and musical laypeople a credible intellectual boost. My case in point: we’ve seen Philip Glass on South Park!

In any case, it’s apparent to me that minimalism, in one form or another, will be around for a while, at least another 639 years (see the performance of John Cage’s ORGAN_/ASLSP in Halberstadt, Germany), and we won’t soon forget the influence it’s having on popular culture. Us fans sure don’t think it will go away anytime soon, but we’re optimistic. It will stay — but most likely manifest itself in other genres of new music as it fades from its pure form. It’s a great example of the melding cultural landscape that comes with better technology and communication. So take that coffee mug off of your Steve Reich disc — it’s not a coaster yet!

Randall Woolf

What has minimalism meant to me? First of all, because of minimalism, I have the feeling of continuity with an older generation of composers. I find the older American minimalists (Reich, Glass, Riley, and M. Monk) to be the musical parents that the other older composers never were. They seem so much like my composing friends as people and me. They look like us, hear like us, and want the same things for music’s future. They have always been, in my experience, with few exceptions, more kind, generous, and real than the other available musical elders.

As to the music itself, what it has meant to me has always been a changing thing, much like a minimalist piece itself: to the superficial listener, it is always the same, but in reality, it always moves, grows and changes. At first, I hated minimalism. It was the opposite of what I was looking for in a new music, or so I thought. But as I examined and re-examined the sounds that I could not get out of my head, I began to see my values and myself in them. What I first saw as a slap in tradition’s face gradually came to seem the truest extension of the classical music tradition that meant so much to me. What seemed to me so anti-audience, so unfeeling and modernistic was revealed by experience to be a music capable of truly moving listeners, and bringing them back into caring about new classical music. And somehow it took me quite a while to see minimalism as the harvesting of great elements and ideas from rock music and recent jazz.

So I became a fan of minimalism. I saw its circle of influence spread out to include more and more of my composing friends. The term went from being an accusation to being a rallying cry. And as each new composer found a new way to build on it, the depth and scope of the original minimalist composers seemed greater and greater. Did they see their early works as a foundation for a whole new wave of music-making, performance, and audience-building? As ideas from minimalism found their way into my own music, it seemed a relief, a shelter, a degree of assumption that I could make. And that is where my trouble with it began again.

By now, I am good and sick of minimalism in my own music. I have not at all lost interest in the early minimalists…rather, I have moved them in my mind to the shelf of total classics, to be studied and loved forever. I find myself somewhat less interested in minimalism in the works of my peers. It seems so automatic now, a club to be joined, easily-won beauty that loses value every day. But in my own music, I dread falling back into its obvious procedures, the predictable flow of minor surprises, and the directionless kineticism. I hunt in the music of Johann Bach, John Cale, Ligeti, Tom Petty, downtown illbient DJ’s, anywhere and everywhere to find fuel to reach escape velocity from that beautiful vortex of minimalism. But just as Bach and Mozart are inescapable in the music of Wagner and Schumann, music that on the surface seems to rebel strongly against them, I still find that the music I make these days leads back to the first minimalists, in the end.

Wendy Mae Chambers

Minimal music has long preceded western music in the form of chants, particularly in eastern religions. Indeed, these chants were literally a jumping off point for some of the first American minimalist composers. Hinduism is the oldest organized religion that still exists today. Buddha was born a Hindu. Om Mane Padre Om is perhaps the first piece of minimal music. Minimal music has an organic quality. It is patterned and repetitive, beat oriented and tonal. Its newness was its use of constant repetition. Obviously, minimal music will continue to go on as it has in the religious context. There remains much to be explored when one goes back to the origins of minimalism. I believe the music from the first western minimalist music movement will continue to please. I await the neo-minimalist future. The concept of minimalism is fascinating. How it became one with repetition is curious as I find works by Anton Webern and John Cage‘s 4’33” much closer to my understanding of the word minimal. There’s nothing like a well-placed rest in Webern or a performance of Cage’s 4’33”. I might also suggest that Ravel‘s Bolero is a curious precursor to the minimalist movement.

Robert Maggio

Minimalism is definitely relevant today and it will continue to be part of our listening for years to come. I think it will surely influence future generations of composers just as it inspires our current young (and not as young) composers. It is likely to outlive us all!

For the last 40 years in contemporary classical music, minimalism has been arguably the most popular (and internationally recognized) style of composition. Consider the international stature of just a few of the composers whose earliest successes were minimalist works: Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, John Adams, Meredith Monk, Arvo Pärt, Louis Andriessen, Michael Nyman, and Michael Torke. The list goes on and on. My apologies if I stopped short of your name or your favorite. As a composition teacher, I’ve found that many of these composers are the “heroes” of many young composers today. (Their works are prominent in my CD collection, too.)

I think it’s important to note that there are few, if any, contemporary composers writing pieces as minimal as those by minimalism’s pioneers (e.g. La Monte Young‘s Composition 1960 #7, in which an open fifth is to be “held for a long time.”) The only recorded recent examples I can think of that approach this level of simplicity — and these are far, far, far more complex than Composition 1960 #7 — are a couple of David Lang‘s evocative works, Slow Movement and The Passing Measures, in which a chordal sonority is sustained and transformed over a LONG period of time. (By the way, try listening to Lang’s work, and then Schoenberg‘s “Farben” from Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16 — in this context, the Schoenberg sounds a little like a “pre-minimalist” piece!) In any case, these pieces by Lang recapture the early aesthetic of minimalism more convincingly than any other contemporary works I can think of. In addition, the recent successful return of Brian Eno‘s ambient Music for Airports, recorded, then extensively toured by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, points to a continued life for the more austere (though beautifully so) approach to minimalism.

Music theorist Timothy Johnson wrote an article, “Minimalism: aesthetic, style, or technique?” in Musical Quarterly 78:4 (winter 1994), which provides an excellent framework in which to consider how minimalism has survived its transformation from the highly conceptual early works of La Monte Young to the more recent eclectic minimalist-inflected works of John Adams, Michael Torke, and a host of other successful composers.

Consider also that a new term, post-minimalism, has been invented to describe music that uses minimalist techniques (phasing, processive, unfolding, etc. …) even though its aesthetic (e.g. romanticism, eclecticism, neo-romanticism, neo-neoclassicism, you get the idea) might be at odds with minimalism’s neatly formal structures (e.g. John Adams’ The Chairman Dances). That we can confidently describe a large body of works as post-minimal suggests that minimalism has indeed made its mark on generations of composers.

Like many composers of my generation (and perhaps even the generation before me) I have considered minimalism to be one of many techniques to incorporate in my works, which essentially have an eclectic/romantic aesthetic.

Well, I could go on and on but I’m afraid my time’s up.
I could go on and on but I’m afraid my time’s up.
I could go on and on but I’m afraid my time’s
could go on and on but I’m afraid my time’s
could go on and on but I’m afraid my
go on and on but I’m afraid my
go on and on but I’m afraid
on and on but I’m afraid
on and on but I’m
and on but I’m
and on but
on but
on

On a beautiful summer morning in 1983 two Amtrak trains, one traveling northbound, the other south, were accidentally routed onto the same track just north of Penn Station. Shortly before 9am they collided on the Hell’s Gate bridge some 80 feet over the streets of Queens. I was sitting in my seat waiting for my (to use Nicholson Baker’s charming phrase) now-wife to return from the dining car with some napkins when the impact occurred.

In the 10 or 12 minutes that it took Jessica and I to find each other the sky overhead filled with police and news helicopters and the surrounding rooftops began teeming with TV crews and photographers.

What had happened was just starting to dawn on us when we witnessed a sight that I will remember as long as I live. Into the bright air on both sides of the wrecked trains massive fire-ladders began rising swiftly and silently. New York City Fire and Rescue personnel streamed off the ladders by the dozen, carrying back-boards, oxygen tanks, fire axes and jaws-of-life. While the most seriously injured passengers were treated at the scene the rest of us were escorted a hundred or so yards back to the bridge embankment. There we saw that still more FDNY personnel had brought in a truckload of lumber and BUILT A STAIRCASE through the trees and brush down to the street. One at a time, a fireman led each passenger down this improvised stairway. At street level we were taken to a machine shop that had been turned into a fully staffed field hospital.

I have wondered many times since September 11 how many of the men and women who touched our lives that day have been taken from us. And I have thought long and hard about those left behind, who will live always with the experience of incalculable loss. We owe all of them the very best of what we have to give because that is what they offer to us.

It is good, indeed necessary, for all of us as artists to be thoughtful about what we do and even, at times, to question our ‘relevance’. But we must never let that questioning lead us into silence. Because out in the big world there are women and men who do not for a split-second, in the face of the unimaginable, question the relevance of anyone. They embody the single most awesome dimension of a free society: a social contract that says when you are in the blink of an eye rendered helpless and injured there are people who will walk through fire to be at your side.

This is the opposite of terrorism.

What is an American composer? One who loves America.

Dean Suzuki Photo by Ryan Suzuki

As the academic year gets underway, it serves as a time of reflection for those who are teaching the next generation of musicians and especially composers. What is it that we (I use the rhetorical “we” being a music historian, not a composer) are to pass on to them? What musical or compositional values do we lay out for them? Regarding composition, it is clear that the tradition has been to focus, in some cases, almost exclusively, on formal considerations, i.e. structure and especially pitch relations.

This mindset and bias is underscored and made manifest in courses which are universally called “music theory,” coupled with classes in musicianship or ear training. What we call music theory is really no such thing. Rather, it is a theory of harmony, of pitch relations. There are dozens and dozens of music theory texts and treatises, but the focus is squarely on pitch relations and nothing else. We have no theories of rhythm, timbre, articulation, dynamics, or even orchestration. Orchestration courses and texts abound, but they are not based on any theoretical foundation, rather according to tradition and prevailing taste. Is there anything inherently wrong with scoring for one trombone as Chopin did (and which he has been reviled for) in one of his piano concertos?

Of course, the teaching, learning, and understanding of the basics of music is foundational and important. We think of the many great composers who studied with master teachers, always learning the ins and outs, the mysteries of musical construction. Arnold Schoenberg analyzed the works of the great masters, tearing apart the note relations in search of the genius behind the music. Nadia Boulanger, whose memory lives in infamy as a harsh task master, put her charges through the paces, often in a brutal and humiliating fashion, as they struggled to learn the rules and finer points of harmony and counterpoint. After suffering through her courses, students such as Aaron Copland, Lou Harrison, Elliott Carter, and Philip Glass had a thorough, even flawless understanding of harmonic procedures that served them very well indeed.

As we all know, the great artists almost always have a firm grasp of the fundamentals. While much of Picasso‘s work looks as though executed with a childish and untrained hand, or the monochromatic, nearly industrial minimalist planes of Ellsworth Kelly seem devoid of technical ability, both artists were highly skilled draftsmen. Technique was not a problem for them and it undoubtedly was of value in the creation of their work. However, neither was it the focus of their work.

On the other hand, Schoenberg declared to his student John Cage the following: “In order to write music you must have a feeling for harmony.” Cage told his teacher that he had no feeling for harmony. In response, Schoenberg warned that a failure to learn and embrace harmony would set up a musical roadblock, a virtual wall through which he would never be able pass. Cage retorted, “In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.” Of course, Cage did not “devote his life to beating his head against the wall.” He simply went around the “wall.” Harmony remained of no interest and no use to Cage.

Cage’s concept of the creation of music was not bound by tradition and rules. Morton Feldman recalls his first meeting with Cage:

I brought John a string quartet. He looked at it a long time and then said, “How did you make this? I thought of my constant quarrels with Wolpe and also that, just a week before, after showing a composition of mine to Milton Babbitt and answering his questions as intelligently as I could, he said to me, “Morton, I don’t understand a word you’re saying.” And so, in a very weak voice, I answered John, “I don’t know how I made it.” The response to this was startling. John jumped up and down and, with a kind of high monkey squeal, screeched, “Isn’t that marvelous. Isn’t that wonderful. It’s so beautiful, and he doesn’t know how he made it.” Quite frankly, I sometimes wonder how my music would have turned out if John had not given me those early permissions to have confidence in my instincts.

We teach our students, but do we give them permission, indeed, do we encourage them to follow their muse? Or do we shuttle them in the direction of our own preferences and biases? We teach them about techniques, the craft of composition, but do we teach them about the art of music making? Perhaps we would do well to consider this morsel by Feldman: “Yes, remember, my definition of skill is to do exactly what you want.” Carl Ruggles may have had a more refined or extrapolated version of Feldman’s maxim. After pounding out a chord which he was considering for use in one of his compositions over and over for more than an hour, he replied to Henry Cowell‘s inquiry as to what he was doing:

“I’m trying this damned chord to see whether it still sounds superb after so many hearings.” “Oh,” I [Cowell] said tritely, “time will surely tell whether the chord has lasting value.” “The hell with time!” Carl replied. “I’ll give this chord the test of time right now. If I find I still like it after trying it over several thousand times, it’ll stand the test of time, all right!”

Thus, Ruggles brought together his skills as a composer, followed his instincts, and finally evaluated the product. Technique was not the standard, rather it was art which set the standard and technique was a means of achieving his goal.

In addition to teaching the fundamentals of music to our students, we must also give them license to discover their artistic muse, rather than stifle and suffocate it under the iron fist of the rules and regulations of proper voice leading, pitch relations, or some other mechanical process of relating one note to the next. In fact, as Claudio Monteverdi concluded and subsequently argued so well in his polemical exchange with Artusi, the rules of yesterday may not apply to the aesthetics of today. We cannot and must not judge new work according to the criteria and values of older work, however recent.

Until very recently, I had not seen music by Cage included in any music history score or recorded anthology aimed at music majors. And even then, it was limited to his prepared piano work. It is easy enough to describe the prepared piano, reducing Cage to mere gimmickry. Yet a quandary remains: how and why would a teacher pass along the concept and me
aning behind chance operations to his/her student? In reality, the question might properly be, how can we not teach chance operations? Is composition a form of math or a form of art? Should not ideas about the meaning of music and art be at least broached by the instructor?

Composition is not merely a process of assembling a series of formulae, no matter how sophisticated, complex, and elegant. There is more to creating music than gaining a command of musical syntax. Syntax may be a means to an end, but end is the semantics of music, its content, its meaning. Just as we all know that virtuosity and chops are no substitute for insightful interpretation in the making of great music in performance, so too is music more than its syntax. Too often, somehow, composers, teachers, and students confuse musical syntax with musical semantics.

If Cage was correct and the purpose of music is to (1) quiet and sober the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences and (2) imitate nature in her operation, why then all the fuss over technique, or better, why not more fuss over the art of music?