music of the wide-open landscape—the microtonal chords of power lines, the harsh tones of drills and lathes, the wailing of far-off trains, the buzzing songs of grasshoppers, the sound of the wind moving over Utah Lake and whistling through the cracks of his parents’ log cabin.Read more at location 9328
Composition 1960 #10: Draw a straight line and follow it. Composition 1960 #15: This piece is little whirl pools out in the middle of the ocean. Piano Piece for David Tudor #3: Most of them were very old grasshoppers.Read more at location 9353
Young curated a series of concerts at the downtown loft of the expatriate Japanese artist Yoko Ono,Read more at location 9359
(His guru in later years was the North Indian classical singer Pandit Pran Nath.)Read more at location 9363
takes off where Trio for Strings left off, with the sound of an open fifth. The score consists of the notes B and F-sharp, below which is the instruction “To be held for a long time.”Read more at location 9365
This led to a tetralogy called The Four Dreams of China, each part of which was based on different arrangements of the pitches C, F-natural, F-sharp, and G. The performers were Young, who played sopranino saxophone; Young’s companion Marian Zazeela, who sang or intoned; the musician-poet Angus MacLise, who beat African rhythms on bongos; and, particularly critical in the evolution of the sound, the violinist-composer Tony Conrad, who had studied up on the just-intonation music of Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, and Ben Johnston. Later in 1963 the group took in the young Welsh composer John Cale, who strung a viola with electric-guitar strings and let loose drones of incomparable roaring power.Read more at location 9369
Terry Riley’s contribution was to add the sweet sound of triads to the long-tone process. This move completed the minimalist metamorphosis. An easygoing character of the rural-hippie type, Riley grew up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. He met Young in 1958 while studying at Berkeley.Read more at location 9379
improvised an accompaniment to Ken Dewey’s play The Gift. The tune they jammed on was, naturally, Miles Davis’s “So What.”Read more at location 9392
He then set to work on an instrumental piece that would unite static drones and busy loops, that would somehow move quickly and slowly at the same time. The score took the form of a chart of fifty-three “modules,” or brief motivic figures. Each player in the ensemble is instructed to proceed from one module to the next at his or her own pace, tailoring the music to the needs of the instrument and the desires of the moment. The modules derive from the seven notes of the C-major scale, with a few F-sharps and B-flats thrown in for good measure. No matter what choices are made in performance, the harmony tends to move into E minor in the middle and into G major (the dominant of C) toward the end, with the B-flats supplying a touch of blues at the close. Tying the whole thing together is a pair of high Cs on the piano, pulsing without variation from beginning to end.Read more at location 9394
Alfred Frankenstein, the broad-minded critic of the San Francisco Chronicle,Read more at location 9401
“Climaxes of great sonority and high complexity appear and are dissolved in the endlessness. At times you feel you have never done anything all your life long but listen to this music and as if that is all there is or ever will be.”Read more at location 9402
Playing electric piano that night was the twenty-eight-year-old Steve Reich.Read more at location 9404
It was Reich’s idea to introduce the chiming Cs and thus to organize the piece aroundRead more at location 9406
“the Pentagon was turned on its side and painted purple, yellow & green … The concept of work was forgotten.”Read more at location 9410
the hidden melodies of overheard conversations and the rhythms of pile drivers melt together into a smoothly flowing five-movement composition, a digital symphony of the street.Read more at location 9419
Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and bebop records featuring Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Kenny Clarke played nonstop on his turntable.Read more at location 9427
Although Darius Milhaud was then the dominant presence on the Mills faculty, the principal attraction for a jumpy young composer such as Reich was Luciano Berio, who was a visiting professor in the early sixties. Impressed by the intellectual force in the twelve-tone method, Reich spent his days analyzing Webern scores under Berio’s tutelage.Read more at location 9430
prompting the undogmatic Berio to say to him, “If you want to write tonal music, why don’t you write tonal music?”Read more at location 9433
With two other Berio students, Phil Lesh and Tom Constanten, Reich formed an improvisation groupRead more at location 9438
God] began to warn the people. He said, ‘After a while, it’s gonna rain, after a while, for forty days and for forty nights.’ And the people didn’t believe him, and they began to laugh at him, and they began to mock him, and they began to say, ‘It ain’t gonna rain!’”Read more at location 9444
One tape was playing slightly faster than the other, so that the unison began to break up into a phasing pattern: “It’s-s gonna-a rain-n! It’s-’s gonn-nna rai-in! It’s-t’s gonna-onna rai-ain! It’s-it’s gonna-gonna rain-rain!”Read more at location 9453
“It’s an acoustical reality that if you hear one sound a fraction of a second after another it appears to be directional,”Read more at location 9456
Bill Graham, the business manager of the Mime Troupe, saw the commercial possibilities of new bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Warlocks, and the Mothers of Invention.Read more at location 9464
Lesh, his mind forever altered by a night during which he had tripped on LSD while listening to Mahler’s Sixth Symphony at high volume, abandoned composition to play bass for the Warlocks, who later became the Grateful Dead.Read more at location 9466
American works of the sixties and seventies were created this way, with the composer setting up a musical situation and sitting back to observe the outcome; it was an attitude that originated with Cage, the master of coordinated accidents. The English composer Michael Nyman, in his book Experimental Music, dubbed minimalism a sub-species of “process” music, classifying it alongside the chance processes of Cage, the “people processes” of Frederic Rzewski (players going through their parts at their own speeds), and the electronic processes of Lucier and Ashley.Read more at location 9472
Come Out, Reich made use of another angry African-American voice, that of Daniel Hamm,Read more at location 9479
“I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them,” Hamm said on tape. Reich isolated the phrase “come out to show them.” Again, the loops go out of phase, splitting onto four channels and then onto eight. After a while the words become unintelligible, although the pitches inherent in them—E-flat, C, D, C—persist. You are essentially listening to an electronic canon for eight seething voices in the key of C minor.Read more at location 9480
he decided to transpose the going-out-of-phase effect to instrumental music.Read more at location 9486
Reich spelled out his new aesthetic in a terse essay titled “Music as a Gradual Process.”Read more at location 9495
“I am interested in perceptible processes,” he wrote. “I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music.”Read more at location 9495
philosophy differs starkly from the thinking inherent in Boulez’s total serialism and Cage’s I Ching pieces, where process works behind the scenes, like a spy network employing front organizations.Read more at location 9497
modal jazz, psychedelic trance, the lyrical rage of African-American protest, the sexy bounce of rock ’n’ roll.Read more at location 9499
The piece is rooted in a set of six notes that sound like a big dominant-eleventh chord on E, one that longs for resolution to the key of A. As maracas provide a steady pulse in 11/8 meter, the notes of the chord are prolonged by degrees and the harmony rotates this way and that. After many changes, it comes to rest on E and A.Read more at location 9511
The group acted more like a jazz combo than a purebred classical ensemble.Read more at location 9525
Like his hero Coltrane, Reich could rent a space, perform, pack up, and walk into the night.Read more at location 9526
artist Sol LeWitt and the sculptors Richard Serra and Donald Judd—respondedRead more at location 9530
Minimalist painting and sculpture remained arts of abstraction. Minimalist music, with its restoration of tonality, rejected abstraction and often came closer to the spirit of the Pop Art of Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol. That resemblance was especially strong in the music of Philip Glass, which gives off a kind of Times Square neon glow.Read more at location 9534
neoclassical technique at Juilliard, taken Darius Milhaud’s summer class in AspenRead more at location 9538
“a wasteland, dominated by these maniacs, these creeps, who were trying to make everyone write this crazy creepy music.”Read more at location 9540
he began to think, as Indian improvisers do, in terms of recurring cycles of tones,Read more at location 9542
Only when Glass encountered Reich’s music, however, did his new style come into focus.Read more at location 9544
in place of patterns shifting in and out of phase, Glass introduced constant rhythmic change, adding or subtracting notes in the style of Indian music. Segments of a phrase would also repeat themselves by rising multiples—three times, four times, five times, six times—before contracting toward a more manageable size.Read more at location 9547
worked as a plumber, and one day installed a dishwasher in the apartment of the art critic Robert Hughes,Read more at location 9551
a level of popular recognition that no modern composer since Stravinsky had enjoyed.Read more at location 9556
The end point of Glass’s early phase was the theater event Einstein on the Beach, created in 1975 and 1976 in collaboration with the director Robert Wilson. It is opera without plot, a conceptual piece held together by recurring visual motifs and found-object texts. Singers chant numbers and “do re mi”; a Civil War–era locomotive inches across the stage; a cryptic courtroom scene features an elderly judge speaking poor French; an Einstein figure saws on a violin; a dancer soliloquizes about the “prematurely air-conditioned supermarket”; the lineup of the New York station WABC is recited; three of the four Beatles are named (no Ringo); a beam of light described as a bed tilts upward for twenty minutes; and some sort of spaceship arrives at the end. There are echoes of past musical styles, but from a cosmic distance: quasi-Bachian organ solos, nondenominational church choirs, Alberti bass accompaniments swirling around like lost pages of Mozart.Read more at location 9572
but the composer emerged from the experience ninety thousand dollars in debt, and for a while he went back to driving his cab.Read more at location 9582
Large-scale structures and modulatory schemes ascended toward moments of transcendence. Perhaps Beethoven wasn’t so wrong after all.Read more at location 9584
Knowing that the phasing processes would not sustain a piece of such length, Reich added other devices to his armory, including a technique of setting up repeating patterns with alternating beats and rests and then slowly filling in the rests with beats. He also enriched his palette of timbres, supplementing an array of percussion with female voices and a piccolo. The drama of Drumming is the transfer of molten material from one group to another: the pummeling tones of bongo drums give way to the mesmerizing patter of marimbas, and then to the higher-pitched chiming of glockenspiels.Read more at location 9589
Here the fascination of rhythm is joined to a comparably sophisticated drama of harmony: at the core of the piece is a cycle of eleven chords, each of which underpins a section from two to seven minutes in length. Early on, bass instruments touch repeatedly on a low D, giving the feeling that this is the work’s fundamental level. But in Section V, the midpoint of the structure, the bass clarinets and cello lower the floor from D to C-sharp—a crucial alteration in the physical space of the music. The harmony sinks toward F-sharp or C-sharp minor, and rugged six-note figures burrow in. A similar change in the weather darkens Section IX, which is almost expressionistic in its stabbing intensity. Only at the very end do bright D-and A-major-ish chords clear the air.Read more at location 9595
The singer-composer-dancer Meredith Monk manipulated the extremes of her voice to produce the illusion of an Ur–folkRead more at location 9606
Frederic Rzewski wrote The People United Will Never Be Defeated!—a massive, hour-long sequence of variations on a Chilean revolutionary song, in heaven-storming, semi-Romantic, virtuoso style.Read more at location 9607
Schoenberg invented the twelve-tone row; Webern found a secret stillness in its patterns; Cage and Feldman abandoned the row and accentuated the stillness; Young slowed down the row and rendered it hypnotic; Riley pulled the long tones toward tonality; Reich systematized the process and gave it depth of field; Glass gave it motorized momentum.Read more at location 9617
popular artists, headed by the Velvet Underground, carried the minimalist ideaRead more at location 9620
The Velvet Underground essentially took the form of a musical conversation between Lou Reed, a poet turned songwriter with an achingly decadent voice, and John Cale, the droning violist of La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music.Read more at location 9629
he studied at Goldsmiths College in London with Humphrey Searle, a pupil of Webern’s;Read more at location 9631
At the time he was writing kitsch songs for a company called Pickwick Records. For reasons that remain obscure, Pickwick hired three Eternal Music performers—Cale, Tony Conrad, and the drummer-sculptor Walter De Maria—to assist Reed in performing a would-be novelty hit called “The Ostrich.” It went nowhere, but the Eternal musicians got along with Reed, who was independently experimenting with novel tunings and modes. The first Reed-Cale band was called the Primitives. A little later, with Sterling Morrison on guitar and the Eternal Music percussionist Angus MacLise on drums, they became the Velvet Underground.Read more at location 9637
plugged the band into a multimedia event called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.Read more at location 9644
La Monte’s everlasting fifth (“To be held for a long time”) is all over The Velvet Underground & Nico. It hums in back of “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” stamps beneath the bluesy “I’m Waiting for the Man,” flickers in the stream of consciousness of “The Black Angel’s Death Song.” Other songs gravitate to blues, rock ’n’ roll, and Tin Pan Alley forms, but with a flat, unsentimental affect.Read more at location 9647
In the seven-minute onslaught of “Heroin,” at the end of side A of the LP, a held note sets a deceptively calming tone. Maureen Tucker lays down a purring pattern of tom-tom and bass-drum beats. Cale’s viola kicks in with an open fifth. Reed’s lyrics evoke the eerie peacefulness of a junkie absorbed in the task of sending himself into oblivion. Later, the drone splinters apart into a storm of micro-tonal, electric-Xenakis noise, as Reed looks around with contemptuous sorrow at a world of “politicians making crazy sounds” and “dead bodies piled up in mounds.”Read more at location 9652
Reichian phasing effects appear on the second Roxy Music album, For Your Plea sure,Read more at location 9664
Eno broke away to become a solo artist, superstar record producer, record-label entrepreneur, sound theorist, and freelance composer. Under the influence of the minimalists, he propagated the genre of “ambient” music—music that floats at the edge of the listener’s consciousness, weightless and pristine.Read more at location 9665
On his mid-seventies albums Station to Station, Low, and Heroes, Bowie abandoned A-B-A pop-song structure in favor of semi-minimalist forms characterized by dry attacks and rapid pulses.Read more at location 9669
Terry Riley got a nod from the Who, who learned tricks from his solo electronic improvisations and worked his name into the title of their teenage-wasteland anthem “Baba O’Riley.”Read more at location 9671
The great New York post-punk band Sonic Youth has a distinguished minimalist ancestry; its two lead guitarists, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, first met while playing in an electric-guitar orchestra organized by the downtown composer Glenn Branca, a committed Reich and Glass fan.Read more at location 9673
Lacking instruments of their own, rappers from America’s ruined inner cities built up tracks by playing fragments on turntables, placing themselves in a circuitous line of descent that goes back, by way of Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 1, to Wolpe and Hindemith’s phonograph concerts in pre-Nazi Berlin.Read more at location 9676
Public Enemy’s “Welcome to the Terrordome” is the Rite of Spring of black America.Read more at location 9679
Hip-hop relies on the speaking voice, but, as Janáček, Partch, and Reich demonstrated at different times, the speaking voice has music in it.Read more at location 9680
minimalism often mimics the sped-up, numbed-out repetitions of consumer culture, the incessant iteration of commercial jingles on TV. But he argues that the minimalists deliver a kind of silent critique of the world as it is. They locate depths in surfaces, slowness in rapid motion. Borrowing a neologism from the musicologist Christopher Small, Fink writes: “Repetitive musicking rarely expresses a longing for authentic relationships that don’t exist, and in this way has at least the virtue of honesty that more traditionally avant-garde musicking often lacks. More often repetitive music provides an acknowledgment, a warning, a defense—or even just an aesthetic thrill—in the face of the myriad repetitive relationships that, in late-capitalist consumer society, we all must face over and over (and over and over … ). We repeated ourselves into this culture. We might be able to repeat ourselves out.”Read more at location 9688
